Vetted Board Members in California

“Chief AI Strategy at startup Zenera with 30 years in technology strategy/design, experienced in building business plans across startups and large enterprises (projects, new products, and M&A). Deeply familiar with enterprise AI go-to-market challenges (slow procurement/pilot cycles) and preparing for VC expectations (e.g., targeting a16z) by emphasizing unique tech and paying customers.”

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

Sammy Datwani

Screened

Executive biotech leader specializing in microfluidics, diagnostics, and life science tools

Pleasanton, CA25y exp

“Biotech founder building a de-novo protein sequencing company, originally incubated by Versant Ventures and now focused on life science tools and clinical diagnostics. Has raised capital from institutional VCs, strategic investors, and a foundation, and brings unusual ecosystem depth through mentoring at IndieBio, Berkeley SkyDeck, and Biotools Innovator, plus board service with Life Science Angels and VC diligence advisory work.”

“Operations and GTM advisor for early-stage and scaling software companies who implements practical operating frameworks (RACI, OKRs) to translate founder vision into execution. Notable outcomes include cutting sales ramp time from 6–9 months to 3–4 months at OPSWAT through enablement programs and driving 124% of financial plan at Cradlepoint (2022) after cascading OKRs across the organization.”

JR deSouza

Screened

Executive product and marketing leader specializing in global consumer technology and media

Los Angeles, CA26y exp

“Veteran product executive, founder, and former Olympic/World Champion swimmer with leadership experience spanning TiVo, Disney, DreamWorks Animation, Samsung, and Outex. He was the original product manager for TiVo, helped drive the shift from push to pull content consumption, built a Disney product idea into a $20M line, and now applies AI broadly across product, marketing, sales, and support for his patented physical product business.”

“Serial game publishing builder who has helped raise $300M+ across multiple rounds for four publishers. Deeply embedded in the SF/LA VC ecosystem and actively advises clients through pitch rounds, emphasizing data-driven narratives, timing, and investor relationship-building in highly scrutinized markets.”

“Built and deployed a production RAG-based semantic search and summarization system for large legal/technical document sets, owning the full backend (embeddings, vector store, chunking, prompting) and driving a reported 40–60% reduction in manual review time. Experienced with LangChain/LlamaIndex plus Airflow/Temporal-style orchestration, and applies rigorous evaluation/monitoring (A/B tests, drift detection, staged rollouts) to keep agentic systems reliable. Also partnered with a supply-chain manager at TE Connectivity to deliver an AI inventory recommendation tool projected to drive millions in value.”

Lissa Miller

Screened

Director-level Product Leader specializing in 0-to-1 B2B SaaS and AI platforms

Danville, CA20y exp

“Product leader with experience spanning Apple and healthcare AI, including leading the global Apple Relay partner portal now used across 80+ countries and building LLM-powered clinician documentation tools at Xolv. Stands out for combining large-scale platform execution, measurable business impact, and a human-centered approach to AI in regulated environments.”

“Product and design leader with deep experience translating AI/ML capabilities into practical, human-centered workflows in financial services and data infrastructure. At Capital Group, they led an AI portfolio analysis concept that earned a $15M investment pre-launch, and they have also built ML-powered search, summarization, and observability experiences while managing a global design org.”

“Early-stage GTM and revenue-operations builder who helped Seculert (cybersecurity breach detection) scale beyond founder-led sales as US employee #3, standing up TAM/ICP targeting, first SDR/AE hires, Salesforce, and lead scoring/qualification systems. Experienced mentoring founders/executives with lightweight, stage-appropriate operating cadences and playbooks to create repeatable pipeline and scalable execution.”

“Operations/finance leader with experience building the operational backbone for fast-growing firms, including setting up recordkeeping, internal controls, and brokerage-specific clearing firm decisions. Helped scale an entity from ~$30M to nearly ~$300M and later modernized consulting-firm expense operations by implementing Concur integrated with ERP, with a hands-on approach to systems selection and change management.”