Inside CTOx with John Fitzpatrick.m4a Wed, Dec 10, 2025 0:00 - John Fitzpatrick But basically what I've come to realize is that as we have trained our AI platforms to grow and to learn and to be able to answer stuff, we've trained it with material and how humans do things. And often humans don't want to appear wrong. And so I've noticed that AI actually follows that exact model. 0:24 - Donna It's so interesting. 0:27 - John Fitzpatrick It is. And so finding methods of working with AI to help prevent it from doing that, a lot of people call it hallucination. 0:35 - Donna Welcome to Inside CTOx Podcast. I'm Dana, Head of Membership and Partnership. And today we're stepping Inside the minds of some of the most innovative tech leaders out there. This isn't just a podcast. It's a place where CTO journeys come alive, where stories of struggles, breakthroughs, and growths unfold. We're here to unpack the experiences of real CTOs navigating through our CTOx Accelerator and membership program. So sit back, tune in, let's get into the story. Welcome to another episode of Inside CTOx. Today we have John Fitzpatrick. From founding Matang, a boutique master data management shop, and growing it to 25 developers with 6 million in revenue, in under three years to architecting the state of Indiana's COVID contact tracing app, where he ensured application success while maintaining personal privacy rights. John Fitzpatrick has made a career out of engineering clarity in chaos and backing it up with results. In CTOx, he signed his first client within four weeks. John lives in Arizona with a his wife and four kids, a former naval officer turned entrepreneur. He's now thriving in the fractional CTO lifestyle, blending freedom, leadership, and family, all on his own terms. Welcome, John. 2:09 - John Fitzpatrick Hi, Donna. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. 2:13 - Donna Thanks for joining. So you joined way back at the start of the summer. Talk us through the reasons why you wanted to go fractional and join CTOx. 2:28 - John Fitzpatrick So I've basically been doing fractional work since 2017, except for the time where I founded Matang, but most of our projects were the equivalent of doing a fractional type work role. I've been working from home. Since late 2016. 2:47 - Donna Love it, the freedom of it has been great. 2:51 - John Fitzpatrick But just over the eight years since I started doing that, a lot has changed in the market. My focus has changed, my abilities and capabilities have grown significantly. And earlier in the, I guess late spring, mid spring or so, April, There was a, there was an event that I went to and I got the idea from that event to kind of create a new, new service offering. I've been trying to find a new job for a bit. The market is pretty, pretty bad. Like this, this just sounded like such an exciting opportunity for me. It's like, yeah, that's what I want to do. And the main product I was going to offer was Fractional Chief Technology Officer. I had somebody else tell me before that I did a really good job as a CTO. I was a CEO of a company, but I was also doing a lot of the CTO work. And the more I thought about it, I was like, you know, the CTO job sounds actually better than the CEO job for me. It more aligns with all the stuff I like to do and the stuff I do for fun and stuff that I don't have. Of as much requirements of how to run the business. Anyway, I put together a business plan, really liked how it was going, but I wasn't sure how to attract my clients, how to land my clients, how to do things that way. And I saw an ad on Instagram for CTOx, and basically every single bullet point of that aligned perfectly with my business plan. And I was like, I think they're talking to me. 4:42 - Donna It's a sign. It's a sign. 4:44 - John Fitzpatrick So I took a look at it and it just sounded like a really good platform. It sounded like a great way to help me figure out the best ways to land clients. And that was really the main driver for me. It's like, I'm doing a really good job with managing lots of projects, working with different working as though I'm an internal person at my, my customers, uh, or my, my client's organizations. The hardest part for me has been the sales. Cause that's really not my, my strongest suit. Anyway, like coming in and seeing the CTOx platform, it's really helped me pull things together and kind of change my, my focus, my perceptions on how to, how to do that. It's been a good thing for me. 5:32 - Donna So for a guy who thinks he's not good at sales, closing a client in four weeks. That's, that's pretty impressive. Um, so fractional, like isn't just freelance with a fancier title. Like what's the, in your opinion, what's the invisible skill that no one tells you about that you need to survive being fractional? 6:00 - John Fitzpatrick I've never really looked at the work that I've been doing as I'm an external person outside the company. I come in and one of the biggest goals I have is success for the organization that I'm working for. I always act as though I'm an internal person. I meet people there. I'm looking for success for the overall organization and try to build that. That's one of the things that really attracted me to just the whole, the fractional CTO model, and the more that I've learned about it after signing up to CTOx, I was like, this is great. It's helped set the expectation for people as well. We can't necessarily afford a high end CTO at full pay for annual salary. And you don't actually need to is there for 40 plus hours a week or something like that, you can get that job done because it's the knowledge. It's not necessarily the CTO doing the work. If you're a CTO doing all the work, that's the wrong person. You want to get developers, you want to grow that and get cheaper people to do that. As much as I like doing the work, I also like doing lots of different things. That's one of the things it just has been really attractive about this lifestyle, this model of work has been, I get to come in, take ownership for a project, take ownership for an idea and pushing it through to success. I don't need to necessarily be the one who's doing the work and my customers get the best of both worlds. They have someone that can ensure project success, can do the stuff I'd but is also happy to hand that off and get cheaper people to do it. 7:55 - Donna What was exactly that? Um, thinking about through the accelerator, what was the moment that you were like, Oh, this is really hard. Like I was expecting it to be hard, but this is really, really hard. 8:10 - John Fitzpatrick I don't think anything has been like, it's really, really hard. It's been more of just, do I really want to do that? One of the biggest part there, it's kind of like cold calling. It's just reaching out to people who you don't know, who you've never talked with before. That's one of the things that I've been a little resistant for, but I have just recently launched my LinkedIn campaign and changed my, upgraded my LinkedIn profile and have started posting on a daily basis. And what has really helped me in doing that Back at Matang, I actually had about five people assigned to marketing there and it took us a month. They helped design and build an entire campaign model of how we were trying to sell things, what posts we were doing each day. It was pretty impressive. Going through a lot of the material that CTOx has, it points to a similar type of campaign structure, the thought of how to do that myself has been, and that's in the attract phase, that's really one of the hardest parts is you got to do that. You got to do it daily. You got to keep it moving. That's been one of the harder things for me. So in the way that I like to do things, it's find a way to solve a problem of make that easier. So over the last weeks, I've actually used AI to help build an app to manage that campaign for me. But it's been taking all the material that CTOx has taught me and incorporating that in building this, I think has been instrumental in making it work well for me. 9:59 - Donna Now, you've scaled companies from one to, what was it, 25? How does it feel, or what's the difference between having that big team of people and being a solo fractional CTO? What's the pros and cons of that? 10:20 - John Fitzpatrick What's the pros and cons? I enjoyed working with people a lot. I enjoyed having a team to do things. At the same time there was a there's always frustrations of having an idea and giving other people to see the same vision. And to complete that idea. There are times that I didn't do the best of job at sharing the vision, I guess, or others didn't necessarily do the best job of seeing the vision or implement. I have a way of working that works well for some doesn't doesn't work well for others, but I like speed. I like going fast and trying to get things done, but I also am very cognizant of technical debt, and I try very hard to avoid doing things that would be lining up or causing problems in the future with either data structures. And that's one of the things that I find so many applications have is that they did not take the time at the beginning to design their data scheme correctly to handle what they actually want to do in the future. And for quite a while, I was actually doing kind of database, not DBA type work, but more of come in and solve the problems in the database so that like there was one client one time that had, they were running their application on Azure SQL Server, so the SQL database on the Microsoft Azure platform. They were at the top tier, and they were having problems where every time, about 40 50 people using their app and searching for things would tend to cause a bottleneck that just slowed They were spending close to $20,000 month on just having this database running. It was crazy. I went in and looked at it. It took me five lines to write a script that basically just created a full-text FedEx on a couple things but found the right place. It had over $7 million percent reduction in the cost of just how it would run. The entire app, the performance on it went way better. I was able to drop them to the fourth tier level. So before they were like the 16th tier level or whatever it is at the top at that time. But they were basically just a couple steps above the free tier. And they were able to And so that's the type of stuff that I like to do. 13:21 - Donna That's good. When people ask, oh, why should I have a CTO? Why do I need somebody with all this experience and knowledge? That's the story. That's exactly the story. 13:32 - John Fitzpatrick Major cost savings like that day. 13:38 - Donna It always amazes me when people are like, oh, I don't think I need that. Or I don't think and I'm like, you just it's hard to put a price. On having that, being able to make that decision, have that knowledge in that exact moment in time. And I think that's the great thing that fractional CTOs can do with a number of clients. So tell me this, you come out of the Navy and your first thought was not to go into corporate America. What was the reason that you were like, no, I'm not doing this corporate, utter nonsense. I'm good. I'm going starting my own company. 14:18 - John Fitzpatrick I guess I've always had that that dream of being self sufficient, not having a boss of being able to make my own decisions and not necessarily have to do what other people are are directing me to do. And the first company that I started was I wasn't really in a tech space. It was more in graphic arts and design, but it was a surf clothing company that my brother had this great idea. It's like, okay, that's a cool idea. You be the artist, you do sales, I'll take care of all the technical stuff. So set up a production process, had a warehouse, and bought the equipment for it and stuff. And that was all self-funded. Typically, didn't really want to rely on others, didn't want to, take a loan at or anything like that. Saved up the money in the military and got out and had everything set up, but that was late 2010, early the economy was just so horrible there, we couldn't get any customers. 15:29 - Donna That's a tough time, that's a tough time to partake in something like that. 15:33 - John Fitzpatrick Yeah, so we had no sales. I have some cool equipment, so I can make some cool stuff. 15:39 - Donna If you want to restart that company, you've got everything you need, right? 15:46 - John Fitzpatrick Pretty much, yeah. I'm not going to do that again. 15:50 - John Fitzpatrick Lessons learned. 15:53 - John Fitzpatrick Lessons learned. It was a fun time, but I also learned a lot about just what it takes to run a company, how to set one up, the different business structures, how to handle finances, accounting, how to take care of your hiring, whatever. There's a lot that I learned from that, that it was, okay, maybe I wasn't ready, but okay, let's try it again. Yeah, but after that, I ended up joining a solar manufacturing company and that's what moved us down here to Arizona. And that's really where I ended up cutting my teeth in the world of beta. Before that, I'd done a bunch of stuff with MySQL and different website structures and PHP and running a LAMP server for many years and having fun with web design and stuff. That was fun, but coming down here to this company, that's really where I got started with my data journey. It made sense to me. I can see patterns very well. A very strong area for me. 17:05 - Donna So, talk me through the journey of kind of starting that own business, then leading a team. How has your leadership style changed from when you've had that first company, maybe your first employee, to where you are now? 17:22 - John Fitzpatrick I don't know if my style has changed. I think I'm pretty similar to how I've been. I've grown and stuff. Maybe I've listened more. I mean, I'm more stubborn, I don't know. But I don't think my style has changed too much. 17:47 - Donna Not sure what else to say. Well, it's kind of interesting because you kind of learn, you probably kind learned a lot of that earlier in your life more than like a lot of people don't learn to become a leader until they're they're quite far into their their career. Whether I guess being an officer in the Navy you kind of maybe learned that a little bit earlier than most. 18:12 - John Fitzpatrick I basically went to one of the biggest schools in the world for leadership. I went to the United States Naval Academy. That's it. 18:26 - Donna The CTOx community is a really big, big pillar and it's something that we take very, very seriously. What's your experience of the community here within CTOx? 18:40 - John Fitzpatrick Love it. The group of people that are here is, you learn some information, that's great. You learn some process and how to do stuff. But having this group of people to bounce ideas off of, to show things to, get answers from or say, hey, what do you think about this? Or the peer group that we have is amazing. Not sure it's helping me land new clients, but it's definitely helping to focus ideas. And it's also been fun to kind of give and help others that are part of this community, take a look at what they're doing and to provide feedback. So that's been a huge blessing and something that I wasn't expecting and the sign-up process, but it's a great part of the project, or a great part of the program. 19:29 - Donna Yeah, everybody loves the peer progress. Not so much doing the push-ups or doing the singing, but it gives everybody a kind of a... So, 12 months from now, if you had to measure success, not in revenue, not in number of LinkedIn followers or connections, How would you know you're winning? 19:58 - John Fitzpatrick I know I'd be winning because my wife would quit her job and we could go back to enjoying a little more freedom from the thought of needing more. That's really where, for me, it's that. Now that's just, I'm winning if I get there, that's great. Where I'd like to be would be those things, but also feeling like I'm doing something worthwhile. One of the things that was very important to us at Matang as we built that company was kind of the culture and the values that we had. And one of our core values there was leave a good legacy. And that's how I, like, I try to embody that value so that whenever I'm called home, whatever is left behind, it leaves a good legacy. My kids, people that I've worked with, people that have known me or stuff can actually see that, hey, the world is better for having had me in it. I think that if everyone has that view, this would be a better place. So that's how I try to live. If I get the opportunity from that, if this helps me have that opportunity, then wonderful. And when you're doing, when you're successful in your projects, when you get to work with a lot of different people, it's much easier to do that. 21:38 - Donna Yeah, that's so lovely. That's so great. And in the future, if one of your four kids was to say, Hey daddy, I want to be the next great fractional CTO. What would you say to them? Would you say, would you, would you air them on the side of caution or would you fully be enthusiastic about that? 22:00 - John Fitzpatrick I'd be fully enthusiastic about it. I've been trying to get them into doing data for a long time. Um, one thing that I, for me, data is a foundational, aspect of pretty much everything. And there's just so many aspects that go into it. I started talking a little bit about, I found that analytics worked very, very well for me. But the reason I was good at analytics is because I started just foundationally understanding how to structure data, right. And that it, you know, just that project there really brought me to understanding, you know, how to build a data foundation the right way in order to just minimize the errors, minimize the confusion, maximize the use and the value of it. And that was one of the whole reasons I built Matang in the first place was to focus on solving the problem of master data for everybody. For those who aren't familiar with the term of master data, it's basically, if you have more than one system in your organization, say that you have, your sales team is working in Salesforce, and you have your logistics team is working in SAP, or some other ERP solution, or some other type of organization, large platform, when you have those, programs, whenever there is an update to a client's record or a personnel record or a product or something like that, if the address changes, phone number changes, how do you ensure that that goes across your system? How do you ensure that Bob Smith in one system might be in Florida and you might have a Bobby Smith in New York and you might have a Robert Smith in Washington? 24:02 - Donna Yeah, absolutely. 24:03 - John Fitzpatrick A person or not? What if they have the same phone number, the same email address? Is it the same person? What if they're across different systems? That type of discrepancy causes all kinds of problems in operations for an organization. It causes problems in your analysis of how things go. I remember when I was working at the Power One than ABB, on-time delivery was a huge thing. It's like, which customers are you doing good at? Well, we had so many different data systems there, answering that question was impossible in just one system. And one of the things I realized there in walking around was, and talking to people in different departments, it's like, okay, where does our data exist? And the sales guys would say Salesforce, the manufacturing guys would say we had actually three or four different platforms that were being used on the manufacturing floor. We had SAP, we had Oracle, we had some home-built things, and all of them had important data. We could not measure on-time delivery or we could not measure the success, like the question of who's our best customer, who's our best sales guy, you can't answer that from just one system. Building ways and understanding that our data structure encompasses all of this. Like our company data is not just a single data source. It's all of the data sources, including data sources that are not even ours to manage in the first place. There's external data that is extremely useful. So starting to understand building data foundations. And basically, I created a bunch of methods and ways of doing this stuff before I even understood or heard the term master data, or what records data is, or what metadata management is, or data lineage. 26:03 - Donna You were just doing it out of necessity. 26:04 - John Fitzpatrick All these things, I didn't know what they were. I didn't know data governance at the time. Then it's like after starting Matang, I stumbled upon this data governance world. I started looking and I'm like, wait, there's already a whole group of people that understand this stuff. So I went to a conference one time called the Data Governance Information Quality Conference in San Diego. They were offering the Certified Data Management Professional exam, the CDMP. I was like, yeah, might as well take it. It doesn't hurt to take a test. So went and took it. Didn't have the book, never Read it, didn't anything like that. Got a pretty good score. 26:47 - Donna There you go. 26:49 - John Fitzpatrick I was pretty happy with that. And since that time, I've taken other specialist exams and stuff. And so what I found is that just the basically without knowing anything in the fund, like without getting external educational material in, I naturally grasped and actually designed and built a lot of the full data governance program myself. It's been kind of nice to review a lot of the other materials and I'm currently a practitioner level certified data management professional. I think that having that skill is going to really help me in this CTO world. It's something that CTOs need to understand. What goes into the data foundation for your organization? How do you ensure consistency between systems? Something that's extremely important. And so your question, and kind of a long-winded answer, but your question about how to, what would I feel about my kids doing that, that's great, but I want them to focus on the data first. And I say this for everybody. You cannot be successful with your technology platforms or your organization if you do not understand the data that your company has in the first place. And if you get in and don't understand that, it's, you're not gonna, you won't achieve the successes that you could. 28:14 - Donna And it goes across every industry. This isn't like just people sort of think about these things for like just SaaS platforms and stuff like that. This goes, you know, whether you're, you know, leading a franchise of hairdressers or running a, you know, a restaurant or hospitality or, you know, any of the things that are traditionally non-tech, data is such an important part of our lives now. So, you know, if you have those questions, that's That's why everybody needs a fractional CTO. Because that's the question that you should be asking your fractional CTO. 28:50 - John Fitzpatrick And I personally think that the single biggest risk that any business owner has or any company has is doing something wrong with their data. The penalties these days if you do something stupid with somebody's private information. What happens if you hire a sales guy and he sell your customer's information into an Excel sheet and loads it into some platform where it's not protected. Oh, he was stupid enough to put in credit card information in that. You were stupid enough to give him access to that in the first place. If you hadn't put in controls in place to prevent that, have fun in prison. It's not just fines. This is prison sentence type stuff because of lack of treating data the way that it should be tracked. And so it seems like most people have no idea what to do with data and aren't pushing it. And you have platforms like Microsoft or Salesforce or wherever that are like, hey, just use our stuff. You'll be good. Microsoft has built in a lot of things that do a pretty good job. But if you have not thought and have not put the processes in place in your organization on how to protect yourself, your risk is enormous. And so many people just stick their heads in the sand and don't understand that. 30:17 - Donna So it's a game of trust organizations. And do you think that people have too much or put too much trust into, well, it's Google, well, it's Microsoft, I'm sure everything's fine. 30:35 - John Fitzpatrick Just trusting them to a system like that, it gives a false sense of security. 30:43 - Donna So don't trust everybody, hire a fractional CTO. That's our message. And it's so much more affordable, I think, than people think, because you can't afford not to. To your point, the risk is gonna be too high. You need to have a technology professional and somebody with the likes of your expertise and knowledge to guide you to where it needs to be. All right, thank you, John. Now for my favorite part. Okay, don't be scared. No, don't be scared, don't be scared. Our final segment, we like to do something a bit special. I'm gonna ask Chat GPT live, right here, right now, for a thought-provoking, timely question to ask John, our fractional CTO, and you gotta answer it. Are you game? Okay, I'm gonna bring up my Chat GPT, bear with me a second. 31:50 - John Fitzpatrick Maybe I should pull up Cloud and have Cloud answer it. 31:53 - Donna No, you have to answer it. All right, let's go. Hello, Chat GPT. We love a bit of spontaneity, so we thought who better to challenge us than AI? What question would you like to ask Fractional CTO John at this exact moment in time? Okay, it's syncing. All right. Oh, this is funny considering what we just said. Maybe it's listening to us. Okay, John, ChatGPT would like to know, if most startups don't need a CTO, just a decent dev lead and ChatGPT, are we all just selling over practicality? 32:52 - John Fitzpatrick So Cat GPT or other AI agents do a pretty good job on a lot of things. They've been trained on data governance. They've been trained on a lot of stuff. So it's a great tool that can be very helpful with this stuff. But as we were just talking about, you know, trusting one platform to cover your stuff. I remember when Chat GPT first came out, I was the CEO of Matan, but I said, I was testing things out. I was like, okay, who's the CEO of Matan? And it comes back with some name, not mine. It's like, hmm, that's interesting. Where did you get this information? Oh, I got it off the company's website. And I got it from LinkedIn and some articles. I said, ah, okay, please give me the references to those. 33:39 - John Fitzpatrick And so Chat GPT actually me references to, it gave me a LinkedIn profile link, it gave me the website link, it gave me a couple articles, links, it quoted these sources, it said what was on them. 33:56 - John Fitzpatrick None of them worked. 33:57 - John Fitzpatrick It made all of that up. 33:59 - John Fitzpatrick You know, it just doubled down on doing things the wrong way. 34:08 - John Fitzpatrick Like when I confronted it finally, I said, actually, I'm the CEO of Matang. 34:15 - John Fitzpatrick Why did you just make these things up? 34:17 - John Fitzpatrick It didn't give me an answer on the why. 34:22 - John Fitzpatrick Because I've been working on projects, one of the things that I've had to put into them is a method or a feature in there that is testing for accuracy. 34:32 - John Fitzpatrick So it's search the web, provide actual real references to things. 34:38 - John Fitzpatrick Look them up. 34:39 - John Fitzpatrick Validate this. 34:40 - John Fitzpatrick Don't just make up something. 34:44 - John Fitzpatrick Help me with this. 34:44 - John Fitzpatrick And it makes up some story about my past. 34:46 - John Fitzpatrick It's like, no, that's not true. 34:48 - John Fitzpatrick No, no idea where you got that from 34:53 - John Fitzpatrick It still does that a lot. 34:56 - Donna So don't replace your CTO needs with chatty BT. 35:00 - Donna That's what. 35:01 - John Fitzpatrick You can't do that. 35:03 - John Fitzpatrick going to make stuff up. 35:07 - John Fitzpatrick You could get a senior dev who will do a lot of things, but they don't necessarily have the right perspective yet on how to holistically bring together the tech stack for an entire organization. 35:18 - John Fitzpatrick It's more than just the tech stack. 35:20 - John Fitzpatrick It's more than just running the technology. 35:22 - John Fitzpatrick It's how do you actually get your company? 35:24 - John Fitzpatrick How do you train your people? 35:25 - John Fitzpatrick What processes do you put in place? 35:28 - John Fitzpatrick What policies do you put in place? 35:30 - John Fitzpatrick Understanding that a key thing and having a CTO or a senior data governance director or something like that that is responsible for those things is a key thing to getting that done. 35:48 - John Fitzpatrick And a fractional CTO that understands those things and can create that is essential really to a small business or medium-sized business and getting that that out there, but to me that's a very important part. 36:02 - Donna Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 36:04 - John Fitzpatrick You can't just use AI to go over there. 36:07 - John Fitzpatrick Not yet, not yet anyway, not yet. 36:11 - Donna John, thank you so much. 36:12 - Donna I really appreciate you sharing your journey, sharing your insights with us today. 36:17 - Donna Join us again next time on another edition of Inside CTOx. 36:22 - Donna Stories, experiences and advice you hear today are incredibly valuable, not just for CTOx, but for the broader tech community and leaders. 36:30 - Donna To our listeners, thanks for tuning in to Inside CTOx. 36:34 - Donna Don't forget to follow us on social media, tag us, and share your favorite insights from the episode. 36:39 - Donna We love hearing your feedback. 36:41 - Donna Make sure to subscribe and check in again for our next episode, where we'll continue to explore the stories behind the tech leaders shaping the future. 36:49 - Donna Until next time.