Mathew Dostal

About Mathew Dostal

Most CTOs are good at one thing. Strategy or execution. Vision or code. I\'ve spent 15 years refusing to pick.As a fractional CTO and technical advisor, I work with founders and growth-stage companies that have outgrown their current technical leadership — or never had it. They\'re building something real, the complexity has outrun what they can manage, and they need someone who can step in and make the right calls without a six-month ramp. That\'s the engagement.The proof: I built Hertz\'s rates engine — every transaction, every rebate, every finalization, throughput improvement (that number came from ops). I was Performance Czar at DaVita for 100+ microservices tied to dialysis machines keeping people alive. I built supply chain tooling at Wayfair used daily by thousands of operators and drivers. I founded Firefly Events, which now processes thousands of events daily across Austin\'s venues, vendors, and planners. Right now I\'m deploying computer vision models on edge hardware at Frontiers Market — on-device inference, local-first architecture, sync when connectivity allows.I take on two to three fractional CTO and technical leadership engagements at a time, retainer-based. Typically 3-6 months. Engineering leadership, technology strategy, distributed systems, AI implementation — whatever your stack actually needs.I won\'t bullshit you about what\'s hard.If you\'re building something real and need someone who\'s done it before:→ cal.com/mdostal/meetNo pitch. No pressure. Just a conversation.

Experience

1. Founder & CEO CTO

   Firefly Events Inc

   Sep 2023 — Present · Austin, TX, US

   Founded and built a multi-platform event tech ecosystem from zero to production. Bootstrapped. Every architectural decision has a dollar amount on it.Three products in production: Shindig (native iOS/Android event discovery via Kotlin Multiplatform), Reserved (Next.js/MongoDB venue SaaS with a rules engine for complex booking compliance), and Tabletop Archive (P2P rental marketplace on Convex DB with state machine-driven inventory and Stripe escrow). Collectively processing thousands of events daily in Austin alone.Adopted KMP for native mobile over React Native, Convex DB for real-time reactive state, owned data over third-party lock-in. All held up. Infrastructure runs on Fly.io and Vercel — managed platforms by design. Don\'t waste engineering time on DevOps when the providers do it better.Deployed agent swarms for cross-repo automation: deep linking, Stripe/Shippo/Maps integrations, sales tracking. Handles the coordination overhead that would otherwise require two more engineers.Built the team, own the roadmap, handle business operations and sales strategy, still write production code.Stack: Kotlin, KMP, Jetpack Compose, Swift, TypeScript, Next.js, MongoDB, Convex DB, Stripe Connect, Fly.io, Vercel

Education

• Tyler Junior College

  General Studies

  2004 — 2007

• Neumont University

  Bachelors, Computer Science

  2007 — 2009

Skills

• Html
• Normalization
• Software Development
• Nosql
• Design Patterns
• Scrum
• Javaserver Pages (Jsp)
• Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
• Architecture
• Xml
• Wcf
• Jsp
• Android
• Dojo
• Wpf
• Java
• Internet of Things
• Ionic Framework
• Eclipse
• Visual Studio
• .net Framework
• C#
• .net
• Oop
• Databases
• Jquery
• Web Applications
• Soa
• Node.js
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Mysql
• Web Development
• C++
• Mobile Applications
• Ajax
• Ibm Websphere Commerce
• Web Services
• Xslt
• Angularjs
• Struts