Vetted Executive & Leadership Professionals in California

David Kroes

Screened

Executive HR & People Leader specializing in culture transformation, talent, and organizational development

Los Angeles, USA20y exp

“Operations/people-ops leader focused on early-stage, growth, and turnaround environments, with hands-on experience implementing UKG (HRIS) and Lever (ATS) to scale without adding headcount. At Niagen Bioscience, drove a 25% improvement in time-to-fill and cut administrative workload by 30% in 6 months, led a company-wide optimization initiative to reduce silos, and coached a VP of Finance into a successful CFO transition that included restructuring the finance org and upgrading key talent.”

Eidin Khial

Screened

Executive Merchandising Leader specializing in fashion buying and e-commerce growth

Encino, CA10y exp

“VP-level fashion merchandising leader (Men's at Fashion Nova; also experience at "Protein One") with deep expertise in fabric-led assortment strategy, OTB/line planning, and factory cost engineering. Demonstrated outsized impact on margin, lead times, and retention (e.g., +600 bps GM, lead time 120->35 days, retention +22%) and has executed celebrity collaborations with structured royalties and co-sponsored marketing activations.”

Luke Ryan

Screened

Executive media CEO specializing in franchise strategy, entertainment, gaming, and AI

Los Angeles, CA23y exp

“Entrepreneurial entertainment executive who built a unique company combining best-in-class content strategy and data analytics, scaling it to $4.5M average annual revenue ($5.5M peak) without outside capital at launch. Has hands-on experience leading M&A and capital raises, including interactions with Sequoia, and stands out for building new business models and premium service offerings in traditionally risk-averse environments.”

“Senior engineering leader in healthcare AI who combines org scaling with deep hands-on architecture work. At DriveHealth.ai, they helped evolve isolated workflows into a production-grade intelligent platform, standardizing a shared RAG+DCE architecture while leading teams of 50+ across engineering, AI, platform, QA, and DevOps.”

Nicholas Richu

Screened

Mid-level Product Manager specializing in developer tools and cloud infrastructure

San Francisco, CA7y exp

“Product leader with a developer-to-PM background who has owned platform, infrastructure, and data products at IBM, HashiCorp, Honeycomb, and Airbyte. Particularly strong in ambiguous 0-to-1 work: at Airbyte, they identified data orchestration as a strategic expansion area, drove discovery across OSS/self-serve/enterprise users, and launched an initial version that reached about 20% activation in the target cohort.”

“Engineering leader focused on large-scale enterprise SaaS and MDM platforms, with experience modernizing monoliths into microservices, improving reliability, and scaling systems to support 15M devices across AWS and Azure. Stands out for combining deep platform architecture work with strong org-building: managed teams up to 45 globally and built a 0-to-1 platform services team to 22 people in under a year.”

“Built ZenDraft and brings an operator's lens to founder sourcing and evaluation. Demonstrated ability to run structured outbound, convert cold outreach into product-shaping conversations and pilot introductions, and manage an early-stage investment-style pipeline with clear decision frameworks.”

Nilesh Dixit

Screened

Executive AI engineering leader specializing in agentic AI and enterprise platforms

San Francisco, CA24y exp

“Bay Area engineering leader and startup co-founder with a rare mix of deep hands-on architecture experience, large-scale people leadership, and cross-functional product ownership. He helped launch GE Digital's industrial IoT efforts, holds multiple patents in the space, has scaled teams to 60-70 people, and has led both enterprise platform modernization and AI startup product development.”

Inman Breaux

Screened

Executive SaaS & AdTech CEO specializing in AI attribution and mobile growth

San Francisco, CA17y exp

“Mobile-tech entrepreneur building AppQ (mobile.appq.ai), an agentic mobile SDK that optimizes mobile UX in real time to improve Day 1/Day 7 retention by adjusting levers like ad frequency, difficulty, messaging, and artwork. Previously co-founded an SDK-led mobile ad network (invented push notification ads), scaled to 300K+ SDK integrations, and grew revenue from $7M in 10 months to $50M the following year before exiting in 2020.”

“Senior engineering leader from IBM who has built and scaled enterprise AI/GenAI platforms across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, combining executive-level org leadership with hands-on debugging of production distributed systems. Particularly compelling for Director/VP roles needing someone who can unify architecture, platform strategy, and engineering execution across multiple teams.”

“Technology leader with experience owning enterprise roadmaps and executing large-scale platform standardization during rapid M&A—most notably driving a tech roadmap across a 37-company portfolio at Regent, tackling technical debt and security gaps via unified cloud-native architecture, IAM/logging, CI/CD, and a global SRE model. Previously scaled an Adobe engineering org from 8 to 40+ across four regions, implementing clear org design, KPIs, and an extreme-ownership culture to support 24/7 operations and enterprise needs.”