The Firm
A forward-deployed engineering firm.
Founder-led, end to end.
GrayBeck embeds senior engineers inside complex operations, ships the platforms those operations run on, and keeps operating them after launch. Every engagement is led by the founder. No junior associates, no layers, no handoffs.
- Firm
- GrayBeck
- Model
- Forward-deployed engineering
- Led by
- The founder, every engagement
- Base
- Dallas, Texas · clients nationwide
- Flagship
- $20B+ portfolio, operated in production
- Deliverable
- The running system
01The Founder
Jake McFadden
Founder & Managing Partner
Jake built his career at the intersection of structured finance and technology — pricing models, loan-level data systems, and portfolio analytics for institutional lenders and asset managers. He kept meeting the same problem: sophisticated organizations running multi-billion-dollar operations on fragile, undocumented spreadsheets that only one or two people understood.
GrayBeck is his answer. Instead of writing recommendations about the problem, he embeds inside the operation, rebuilds the system that actually runs it, and stays on to operate what gets shipped. The clients quoted on this site describe the pattern in their own words: an engineer who understood their systems within weeks and delivered working software, not decks.
Jake holds a degree in Economics and Finance from Princeton University. He is based in Dallas, Texas, and embeds with clients nationwide.
02How We Think
Working principles, not wall art.
These are operating rules, not values. Each one shows up in how an engagement actually runs — and you can hold us to them.
01Show the work.
Diagrams over mystique, real screenshots over promises. You should leave a page — or a meeting — understanding the mechanism, not just the claim.
02Grounded in truth.
Every claim gets a number, an artifact, or a mechanism within one sentence of it. If we can’t back it, we cut it.
03Precision reads as trust.
Numbers that reconcile, histories that audit clean, documentation that matches the system. Institutions notice the details because the details are the job.
04Direct, with a warm spine.
We name the failure mode before you do — consultants who leave decks, automation that broke — and answer it plainly. Direct is not cold.
05We operate what we ship.
Launch is the midpoint, not the exit. Staying on the system after it goes live keeps us honest about how well it was built.
In Their Words
“The fund-level reporting and waterfall models Jake built replaced a process that used to take our team days of manual reconciliation. The board now gets real-time analytics that they actually trust.”
03Where We Work
Where the model runs today.
Finance is the flagship: platforms in production supporting $20B+ in portfolio assets for institutional lenders and funds, including a lending platform we built and operate for a global institutional lender. Legal is second — MatterOS, our platform for litigation operations, is being built now with design partners. The same model runs in manufacturing and civic operations, from production floors to a county assessment office. Consumer is next: personal trading infrastructure, when it’s ready.
See the workTalk to the person who does the work.
Thirty minutes with the founder. No pitch deck, no account manager.
Book a call