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WORK WITH ME / ZAK EL FASSI

Turn expert judgment into a working system.

I work with founder-led teams and expert organizations on problems where code, workflow, and judgment are tangled together.

The engagement ends with one of three things: an evidence-backed decision, an operating design your team can build from, or a first loop running in your actual stack.

01 / THREE WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER

Choose the outcome.

01 / Diligence

Decide before you commit.

You are evaluating an AI product, technical partner, acquisition, or build-versus-buy decision. The pitch is clear. The architecture, operating risk, or team reality is not.

I read the code, infrastructure, workflows, and assumptions underneath the decision. I trace what is verified, what is missing, where the failure modes sit, and which claims depend on everything going right.

You leave withA concise decision memo: evidence, unknowns, risks, recommendation, and the next decision that actually matters.

02 / System design

Give the work an operating layer.

Your organization relies on expert judgment that still lives in people’s heads, scattered documents, private messages, and habits no process map captured.

I turn that work into a system without pretending the judgment is easy to automate. We define the actors, authorities, inputs, states, memory, tools, approvals, failure paths, and rollback boundaries. The design makes clear what an agent can do, what it can propose, and what a human must decide.

You leave withAn executable operating design: the workflows, contracts, measures, and build sequence needed to make the system real.

03 / First installation

Put one loop into use.

You have enough strategy. The next question is whether one important loop can work inside the real organization.

I build or direct the first bounded installation in your existing stack. It has a named user, a live input, a real output, an owner, an acceptance test, and a rollback path. The loop is used before it is called complete.

You leave withA running first slice, its operating instructions, evidence from actual use, and a clear decision about what deserves to be built next.

03 / PROOF MAPPED TO THE WORK

The claims have a history.

LONG-HORIZON PRODUCT JUDGMENT

Talk & Comment

Talk & Comment has been alive since 2013 with paying customers and no outside funding. Building through long quiet periods, a remote-school surge, and repeated product changes taught me to separate a durable user need from the story a founder wants to tell about it.

PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE

Meta

I spent five years at Meta during a period of extraordinary growth, working across developer platforms, identity, analytics, Instagram, and messaging partnerships. In the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica, part of my work moved close to the lower layers of platform cleanup: permissions, data access, partner dependencies, and the rules underneath them. I also worked on longer-horizon product and platform strategy. That span—from access controls to portfolio decisions—taught me how technical interfaces become business rules, and how decisions travel through a system larger than any one team can hold in its head.

EMBEDDED TECHNICAL STEWARDSHIP

Close enough to own the consequence.

For a small number of partners, I stay close after the initial system work as a CTO-level technical steward: architecture, product and vendor decisions, implementation quality, and the operating layer around them. That work is selective and usually grows out of diligence, system design, or a first installation. It is not a general fractional-CTO offer.

I also co-founded INK + PORCELAIN with my wife and built the commerce and supply-chain systems behind rare art and one-of-a-kind objects. Inventory, fulfillment, money, and damaged goods do not accept a persuasive demo as proof.

AGENT OPERATIONS

Systems that can fail honestly.

I build and run agent systems with scopes, memory, tests, escalation paths, approvals, and rollback. Forgeloop-kit makes part of that operating method reusable. The broader work lives in the Labs; the thinking behind it is in the essays.

Some of the most relevant work is private. When useful and permitted, I can share client references or testimonials during a serious conversation.

04 / FIT

Real stakes. A named owner. An inspectable system.

This works best when the problem has real stakes, someone owns the decision, the underlying system can be inspected, and the team is willing to test the result against an actual workflow.

Pure finance or legal advice, general project management, an open-ended operator role without a defined system mandate, or execution without access to the decision-maker belongs with someone else.

05 / START WITH THE PROBLEM

Four things are enough.

Email [email protected] with:

  1. 01the decision, system, or workflow that is stuck;
  2. 02what happens if it stays unresolved;
  3. 03who owns the decision and when it needs to be made;
  4. 04the most useful document, diagram, repository, or recording you can share.

I read everything. If the problem maps to my work, I will reply with the smallest useful next step: a short call, a scoped diligence pass, a design engagement, or a first-installation brief.

Write to Zak →