tl;dr
At ExaStrategy, our goal is to help more startups bring their ideas to life. We focus on reducing their feedback cycle times, one of the most important KPIs influencing a startup’s success. The faster you can iterate, the faster you can integrate market feedback and build products users love.
We are a group of experienced tech leaders who assist in both advisory and hands-on roles. Our approach consists of Discovery, Execution, and Observatory phases, tailored to identify and resolve the most mission-critical challenges efficiently. Once identified, we provide fast, high-quality solutions with a clear, predictable cost structure, alleviating any short-term blockers as well as laying the foundation for long-term success.
Schedule Meeting
Use this link to book a discovery call with us: Schedule Meeting
Our Mission
At ExaStrategy, we want to see as many high-quality startups succeed as possible, as we believe this will propel humanity forward. Startups essentially consist of two parts: an idea/hypothesis and an effective feedback loop to capture market response from many iterations on that idea. Especially before reaching product-market fit, reducing cycle times is critical for survival. The most common risks — running out of money, building a product no one needs, being outcompeted — are all directly addressed by having a tight-knit product iteration mechanism.
Product cycle time is determined by a wide variety of different challenges, ranging from fast local development and testing setups to effective deployment and project management. Inefficiencies manifest at every level of complexity and have a large aggregate impact. These often go unchanged for long periods due to a combination of invisibility and inertia. Our expertise lies in uncovering these shortcomings and providing minimalistic, incremental changes that have the highest return on investment.
Exploring different approaches to optimizing your product cycle times is a risky and time-intensive endeavor. With us as your strategic partner, you can rest assured that you are getting the most out of your limited resources and can focus all your energy on generating ideas within your domain of expertise. Essentially, you are injecting the insights gained from our decades of working on this problem directly into your organization.
What We Offer
Creating a winning technical organization has numerous challenges across two main categories: technological and human resources. We can help you identify and prioritize issues by leaning on our decades of experience in building tried and tested solutions. On top of that, we practice what we preach, continuously improving our approach. By working with a broad array of startups, you gain implicit access to a stream of new insights and best practices.
Our approach is not only to give advice but also to work hands-on alongside your teams. In short, we do whatever it takes to ensure your organization is delivering at maximum velocity.
- CI/CD automation
- Clean software architecture
- Rock-solid infrastructure
- Fast feedback loops (Dev machine loop, CI loop, Customer loop)
- Analytics pipelines for feedback and experimentation
- …
- Engineering best practices
- Effective product management, communication, and decision-making
- Organizational design to avoid dependencies, queues, and bottlenecks
- Practices to support focused work
- Remote work best practices
- …
Our Approach
Discovery phase
After speaking with your tech and product leadership to identify the most mission-critical bottlenecks, we prioritize them and provide solution designs. Based on these, we scope milestones, defining clear deliverables and objectives, and attach a fixed price tag to each.
Execution phase
Due to our unique, outcome-based pricing model, we are incentivized to deliver maximum-quality results in minimum time.
For strategic or high-level topics, we work in a series of short and efficient workshops, adapting our approach to your unique situation through rapid iterations.
For more technical workloads, we integrate directly into your tech team, acting as wildcard 10x developers who eat up backlog tickets. Our goal is to provide solutions of such high standards that they serve as blueprints for best practices going forward.
Observatory phase
We provide a long-term support structure in the form of regular check-ins and coaching to ensure previous issues do not flare up again, and to solve new minor issues before they become major blockers.
Why us?
- We have considerable experience (both positive and negative) in tech leadership, with invaluable insights gathered along our diverse journeys. We know how to lead an organization on both a technical and product level and can provide guidance on tradeoffs during decision-making as we have aware of the long-term implications.
- We have extensive theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience in all domains related to software engineering. This combination allows us to analyse problems, find the right layer of abstraction and solution design and implement them at blistering speed. Further, we have a good intuition for when an issue warrants a production grade solution and when it’s okay to hack. This versatility makes us invaluable in delivering customer value in the near and long-term.
- We have a highly transparent and predictable cost structure. Together, we define strategic milestones and you only pay for what you get. This incentivizes us to maximize our efficiency and deliver quickly and accurately.
In special cases, if both sides are on board, we would also accept payment in the form of equity, helping founders bridge financial gaps.
About us
Till Bauer
Till brings a wealth of academic achievements and professional experiences to the table. He holds a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics (Cum Laude) from the University of Stellenbosch, and an M.Sc. in Mathematics from the Technical University of Munich, with Computer Science as a minor subject in both degrees.
In the realm of professional experience, Till served as the Head of AI at e-bot7, where he led a cross-functional team of 12. In this role, he adeptly balanced the intricacies of machine learning research while ensuring the delivery of functional and performant solutions at scale. Till took ownership of the entire product lifecycle, from conceptualizing the roadmap to orchestrating successful releases. He redesigned bottlenecks in the architecture, making use of approximate nearest neighbor approaches to reduce roundtrip inference time from ~2s to <100ms. His openness, charisma, and hunger for knowledge led him to start an internal tech roundtable, engaging with over 30 developers to share insights and drive innovation.
In the capacity of CTO at VENN, Till contributed to the architecture and development of a social search engine app. Grounded in a user-centric philosophy, he worked closely with user feedback, incorporating valuable insights into the continuous evolution of the product roadmap.
Prior to co-founding ExaStrategy, Till served as an Engineering Lead at DQC, where he led a team of 6 engineers specializing in the domain of data quality tooling. In this role, he not only helped his teammates develop personal growth plans and aligned business aspirations with technical feasibility, but also defined coding and architecture standards, ensuring a cohesive and high-quality approach to engineering practices.
Max Gerer
Max is a successful tech founder, leader, and highly effective software engineer. After finishing a B.Sc. degree in Physics, his passion for solving computer science and engineering problems drove him to a career of building software products.
In 2016, he co-founded the AI startup e-bot7 and took it from zero to exit by acquisition 4.5 years later. In his role as CTO, he both wrote software and built up a team of highly talented engineers as the startup's headcount grew to 120. He established e-bot7 as the leading Conversational AI platform in the DACH region, with many well-known brands relying on their tech to create their own AI assistants. Max and his team found ways to train and deploy large language models at scale, at a time when tooling was scarce and unreliable. This required innovative solutions on multiple levels of the tech stack, from infrastructure to application code.
Post acquisition, Max advised several startups, helping them to quickly resolve blocking issues. This included setting up effective product and project management, assessing technical abilities during hiring, and building a high performing technology organization. He also took part in due diligence processes for VC investors, analyzing startups and assessing the viability of their technology. These experiences gave him both the motivation and confidence to found ExaStrategy and offer his knowledge to companies on a larger scale.
Max combines broad knowledge in a diversity of fields with a thorough understanding of deep technical details. He is able to communicate and empathize with both technical and non-technical people, thereby seeing practical solutions where they are often missed by developers and even product managers. This, paired with exceptional personal productivity and drive, enables him to deliver effective solutions on timelines that are typically deemed unrealistic.
Rusty Miller
Rusty is a seasoned software engineering leader with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has a proven track record of building and operating global-scale services that are used by millions of customers. He has diverse experience in startup, scaleup, turnaround and big tech environments, and has been involved in both sides of M&A integrations. Rusty has worked as a Director at Microsoft, leading teams of up to 100 engineers with $10M budget responsibility. As Head of Verification and Engineering Systems at autonomous driving startup AID, he scaled the team from 15 to 65 and established an engineering and validation pipeline to efficiently build, test and release its autonomous driving stack.
Rusty has worked in many developer models and has learned to use a pragmatic and results oriented approach to lead teams through transformations that reduce waste, increase velocity and simultaneously improve product quality. As an example, one initiative increased code velocity 10X, reduced build times from 3 hours to 15min and reduced customer impacting bugs.
Having worked on consumer, enterprise, government and automotive software, Rusty understands the fast iterations and experimentation needed to find product-market fit for a B2B SaaS product as well as the compliance standards required by a highly regulated government cloud. He has helped teams stabilize their product, get out of firefighting mode and back to innovating.
Over his career, Rusty has hired more than 250 engineers and managers, honing his skills at identifying and recruiting top talent. He has experience restructuring and streamlining organizations to unlock their full potential and enable them to continue to adapt and scale.
With his extensive experience, Rusty has seen a wide array of problems that arises in tech organizations and knows benefits and drawbacks of different solutions. His knowledge helps companies reduce trial-and-error periods, allowing them to make the right decisions at the right time.
What's Next?
Use this link to book a discovery call with us: Schedule Meeting