Alma Growth Hacks | Making Your First Tech Hire with Alan Furley
CTO, Engineer, or Fractional?
Ask a first-time founder what their business needs technically, and most will say "a CTO." Ask what that person should actually be doing in month one, and the answer gets vague fast, because "CTO" gets used to describe four completely different jobs: a co-founding partner, a salaried executive, a senior engineer who ships code, or a contractor who bills by the day.
That confusion is expensive. Hire the title too early and you're paying for strategic oversight a pre-product company doesn't need yet. Wait too long and you're accumulating technical debt from decisions nobody senior enough was there to make. Most founders aren't choosing the wrong person, they're choosing the wrong job description for their stage.
In this session of Alma Growth Hacks, we're joined by Alan Furley for CTO, Engineer, or Fractional: Making Your First Tech Hire.
Alan Furley is Co-founder and CEO of ISL Talent, where he works with seed and venture-backed startups on strategic talent planning, helping founders build and scale their teams. He's a Founding Alma member and Alma advocate, an active mentor across Bristol's startup ecosystem, and a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses alumnus.
This session will cover:
CTO, Engineer, or Fractional first: the signals that tell you which one actually fits where you are
The mindset that beats the CV: what actually predicts whether a technical hire will thrive in the chaos of early stage
Winning over strong candidates: why the best technical people are evaluating you just as hard as you're evaluating them
The session will close with a live Q&A, so bring your hiring and team-building questions 🔥
If you're about to make your first technical hire and want to get the decision right the first time, this session is for you.
Alan is co-founder and CEO of ISL Talent, a recruitment and talent partner for VC-backed startups, a Founding Alma, and a mentor and advisor to several seed and venture accelerators.
He's helped hire teams for 100+ startups across tech, product and commercial roles, and has spent 15 years building his own business, hiring well and not so well along the way. As a founder, recruiter and angel investor, Alan sees the first tech hire from every angle, what works, what doesn't, and what founders wish they'd known sooner.
About the Alma Community
Alma Angels is Europe’s largest diverse and active investment community on a mission: Generate $1 trillion in women-led wealth by 2050. Since 2020, our non-profit organisation has brought together and trained over 600 angel investors who have invested into 250+ women (co)founders building tech or IP-rich ventures with global ambitions. These companies have gone on to raise more than $300m to date and are valued at $1.6 billion. In 2025, Alma received the “Rising Star Angel Group of the Year” award by the UK Business Angels Association.
Alma Angels is committed to training 10,000 angels and backing 10,000 women founders by 2035.
We created this series because the most valuable insights in this ecosystem don’t come from polished panels or generic playbooks - they come from people actually in the trenches, testing things, breaking things, and learning fast.
Growth Hacks is designed to be:
Practical - real tactics, not theory
Honest - what worked, what didn’t, and why
Immediately useful - things you can take away and apply this week, not someday
Each session focuses deeply on one specific growth challenge.
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