Buffalo, NY · Remote first

Building has become easy. Deciding what to build hasn't.

Hey there, I'm Chris. I'm the founder of 716 Ventures. I help founders make the hard calls before any code is written. I'm also a fractional CTO for a few startups.

You can sit down with an AI model on a Friday night and have something working before the weekend is over.

That's incredible, but it's also dangerous. When shipping is cheap, the expensive mistakes move upstream, into what you build, who it's for and if it should exist at all. Those decisions haven't gotten any easier. If anything, they've gotten harder.

Helping founders get those decisions right is what 716 Ventures is all about.

A builder working late at a computer, lit by the screen
Photo by Mikhail Pushkarev on Unsplash

What I do

Work with me

The Blueprint

$2,500 flat · 2–4 weeks

Most founders reach a point where having another experienced set of eyes can be worth their weight in gold.

The Blueprint is a two to four week engagement where I take a hard look at your product and business, identifying the biggest risks and where AI can genuinely add value. You leave with a written plan and a prioritized roadmap.

Learn about The Blueprint
Build with me

The Room

$99 / year · membership

The Room centers on Vector Sigma: from vibe coding to a simple, professional build loop — built-in tickets, per-issue workspaces, and Cursor-powered agent runs that stay on the work until it's done. Discord and the library keep you from inventing process alone. $99/year.

Explore The Room
Watch me build

The Factory

Free · open workshop

This is where I walk the walk and talk the talk. Review what I'm shipping this week, not by projects I finished years ago. The Factory is the open workshop, where I show what I'm building right now, what ships next month and the lessons I'm learning along the way.

Visit The Factory

Twenty-five years of building software

“Products rarely succeed because someone picked the perfect framework.”

They succeed because somebody made a handful of good decisions before the code ever existed.

I've been designing and building software for more than twenty-five years now. That's long enough to have watched this industry reinvent itself several times. Open source, mobile, cloud and now AI.

Every wave changed the tools. None of them changed the importance of making good decisions as early as possible.

Chris J. Davis, Founder of 716 Ventures
Chris J. Davis, Founder

When another set of experienced eyes helps.

If you've reached the point where another experienced builder would be useful, that's what The Blueprint is for.

I spend two to four weeks looking at your product, your business and the assumptions behind both. Sometimes the answer is to build. Sometimes it's to simplify. Sometimes it's to stop and solve a different problem entirely.

You'll leave with a written plan, but that's not really what you're paying for.

You're paying for the conversation that produced it.

Fractional CTO

When it makes sense, I stay involved after the review: product direction, technical leadership and the difficult decisions that don't happen all at once.

Pricing is scoped after The Blueprint.

Tell me what you're building.

I read every inquiry myself. Tell me what you're working on and where you think you're stuck. We'll take it from there.

Start a conversation