Your technology department.
Without the department.

GSD runs technology for nonprofits, B Corps, and small companies that need someone senior and can't hire a department.

Thirty minutes, no slides.

Shiraz Karmaz

Co-founder, Fractional CIO/CTO

I've spent twenty years running engineering and security, mostly in healthcare, where the rules are strict and the consequences are real. I started GSD because the organizations I most wanted to help couldn't hire a technology department and shouldn't have to.

On fractional work you get me directly. For day-to-day IT and builds, I scope, plan, and design the work, and the team carries it out. I step back as it stops needing me.

The best thing I do happens in the hard rooms. When a decision has stalled and everyone is talking past each other, I'm the one who says let's get one shoe on, then the next.

More about the fractional practice

Starting points

The usual reasons a team calls.

You don't need to know the fix. Bring the situation and GSD works out the shape of the help on the first call.

A funder or your board is asking security questions, and nobody on the team has the answers.
The person who "does IT" is really your operations manager, and it's eating their week.
You need something built and you don't have engineers.
A technical decision is coming that will be expensive to get wrong, and you'd like a second opinion from someone who has made it before.

Two offerings

Independently or together.

Same senior judgment either way, with the exit written in from day one. Nonprofits and B Corps pay less on both, on purpose.

The GSD team, on the tools

Managed IT and engineering

Onboarding, support, security, and the software and vendors you pay for, handled day to day. Software built and handed over with documentation so your team can run it.

See what GSD runs Shiraz, in the room

Fractional CIO/CTO

Shiraz as your fractional CIO or CTO, usually for about six months, renewed as the work needs. Direction, the hard calls, and a team behind the strategy when it needs hands.

See the fractional practice

Our work

Client testimonials.

When there is a hard call about where our information lives, we get real options and a straight recommendation. We get senior technology leadership without carrying a full-time CIO.

Jhumpa Bhattacharya · Co-President and Co-Founder, The Maven Collaborative

The platform has been reliably up and serving residents the whole time. That is the whole recommendation. I have worked with him twice, years apart, and I would do it again.

Miki Yoshimura · Applications Director, UpHealth Inc.

Read the full quotes and the case study

Track record