When Bill Boulden starts the workday at 7 a.m., they go into their home office, which has five monitors wrapping around a desk that’s half the size of the room.
Two computers are for play – video games and music. The other three are for coding, email and Slack. (Boulden is part of 37 different Slack channels.)
Boulden, who uses the pronouns they/them, starts the day with a standing appointment with an Amsterdam-based client because of the time difference. Then they’ll write code for whichever clients need it while the American-based companies are still starting their business days. Boulden will have standing meetings with five other clients throughout the day as well.
From there, every day looks different. Some time might be spent with junior developers seeking help, handling product questions about how a feature works, checking analytics or doing poll requests.
It’s a full workday, but Buffalo native Boulden loves it.
“I consider myself semi-retired … in that if I didn’t have to work, I am already doing the thing I would do every day,” they said. “I really feel like I’ve found my calling.”
Boulden graduated from the University at Buffalo in 2006 with bachelor’s degrees in both computer science and music composition. They started out as a junior developer and worked their way up to mid-level and senior positions at a variety of programming jobs.
Prior to the pandemic, Boulden worked as a chief technology officer, or CTO, at a startup that ran out of capital about five months later and then another that ran out about 75 days after Boulden started working there.
“I realized if I was going to keep being CTO at early-stage companies, I couldn’t bankrupt them,” they said. “These are people who might have $50,000 to $100,000 in the bank. They’re going to hire an engineer who costs more than that? The writing’s on the wall.”
So Boulden turned to working part time, a position known as a fractional CTO, around when the pandemic hit the region. They built up clients over time and now work with six on a daily basis and have about seven other previous clients under their belt – all from their Buffalo home office.
Current clients span from Amsterdam to Boston to New York City to Buffalo. (Boulden serves as fractional CTO at locally based Favordrop, a technology company that aims to turn gifting into an interactive, efficient and trackable experience.)
Working from Buffalo gives Boulden the bonus of cheaper cost of living compared to huge tech markets like Seattle or Silicon Valley, California.
And as the Queen City continues to focus on and grow its local startup scene, Boulden sees the needs for fractional CTOs increasing in the future.
“I think the startup scene is becoming very dynamic here,” they said.
