Vetted Executive & Leadership Professionals in the Bay Area

“COO/CFO and startup co-founder (Gratia, Inc.) who has built operational infrastructure end-to-end across finance, contracts, resourcing, and talent management. Has scaled multiple early-stage businesses (<$20M revenue) and supported outcomes including a sale to a private equity-backed strategic buyer, with a pragmatic approach centered on clear processes, stakeholder alignment, and leveraging tools like QuickBooks, Bill.com, HubSpot, and Salesforce.”

“Hands-on engineering leader currently at Vianai (GenAI enterprise applications) building AI-assisted data exploration/insights products with Python and React. Previously Corporate VP of Digital Health at Samsung Electronics, where they helped close key partner deals by demonstrating API-driven openness and led a major Samsung Health modernization from monolith to microservices for horizontal scalability and faster, safer iteration.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and validated a preference-based recommendation engine using clustering, including generating test data to evaluate how clusters evolve over time. Has SRE/DevOps experience and has owned production incidents end-to-end (logging-driven RCA and refactoring patterns that failed at large data scale). Emphasizes quality and platform stability via unit, integration, and load testing, and has managed performance via regular 1:1s and PIPs.”

Bill Eichen

Screened

Executive product and business leader specializing in AI, semiconductors, and growth strategy

Palo Alto, CA23y exp

“Candidate indicated they have a business plan or startup and referenced Gimmelfund.com, a VC fund in Palo Alto. They also stated they are very familiar with the venture capital, studio, and accelerator landscape, but provided limited detail during the screen.”

“Senior engineering leader with deep hands-on architecture experience across fintech and enterprise software. At DriveWealth, he led a major backend replatform for a brokerage platform handling 10M+ trades per day, combining event-driven design, Kinesis/Kafka, and regulatory-grade accuracy; at TIBCO, he built a Kubernetes-based API management product from near scratch into a successful revenue-generating offering.”

SHIVA SANDY

Screened

Executive CTO/CIO specializing in FinTech, cloud transformation, and cybersecurity

Walnut Creek, CA27y exp

“Banking/credit-union technology executive (CTO/CTIO) who has led modernization and product delivery through major change, including a post-merger roadmap that helped grow a credit union from $600M to $1.5B in 3 years. Hands-on leader who drove cloud microservices/API architecture, introduced CI/CD, and accelerated releases from quarterly to weekly while scaling teams and operating effectively with distributed/remote orgs.”

“Co-founded Aethernet Inc., a B2B IoT connectivity platform with a usage-based revenue model and direct sales motion to device manufacturers. Bootstrapped with founder capital and strict cost control, with angel interest pending technical validation; developed the product through multi-year architecture experiments to deliver measurable latency/reliability/scalability/cost advantages versus DevOps-heavy incumbents like AWS IoT Core.”

“Candidate brings experience across both startups and big tech, along with direct exposure to pitching ideas to several VCs. They show a practical founder mindset centered on rapid prototyping, customer feedback, retention, and building AI/agent-driven products with strong product-market fit potential.”

Jim Woodroffe

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader (CTO/VP) specializing in scaling platforms, AI, and cloud infrastructure

San Francisco, CA24y exp

“Entrepreneurial operator who previously built an AI context layer for personal communication/relationships and has worked with a New York-based venture group to evaluate early-stage ideas from both technical and business angles. Currently exploring broad startup opportunities and collaborating with 2–3 early-stage companies, with a structured approach to assessing market outcomes, competition, and team fit.”

Padmaja Tyada

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive engineering leader specializing in cloud, AI, and FinTech platforms

San Jose, CA25y exp

“Engineering leader with experience scaling teams from 25 to 60+ and delivering both enterprise platform modernization and AI-native product innovation. At Experian, he led an AWS transformation of a high-volume credit platform serving 250M+ consumers, achieving 10x performance gains and 30% cost reduction; at Channel Core, he built AI-powered creator tools using OpenAI and RAG that improved adoption and personalized outreach outcomes.”

michael avrahamov

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI-first SaaS and cloud platforms

San Francisco Bay Area, CA22y exp

“Senior engineering executive who operated as an org-level CTO at both ServiceNow and Oracle, leading global teams up to 150 engineers and driving cloud-native, multi-tenant platform architecture. Particularly strong in observability, streaming systems, and security, with experience delivering large-scale systems ingesting data from millions of agents while building high-performing, high-DORA engineering organizations.”

“Senior public sector sales executive with a strong track record selling SaaS licensing and permitting solutions to state and local governments. Most notably grew Accela from $25M to $100M in four years with 90%+ retention and personally led a complex $10M statewide Oregon deal featuring a custom multi-jurisdiction pricing model. Brings deep expertise in government procurement, RFP influence, forecasting discipline, and building high-performing regional sales teams.”

“Founder building an enterprise agentic AI startup who has already raised about $100K (friends & family plus self-funding). Has prior and current experience engaging VCs (including outreach to both large and small firms) and emphasizes demo-driven pitching, enterprise customer validation, and targeting billion-dollar market opportunities.”