Vetted Chief Executive Officers 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Anand Vallamsetla

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader & Systems Architect specializing in AI, cloud platforms, and FinTech

Los Altos, CA26y exp

“Operator with 20+ years experience and a business degree who led the build and deployment of a Medicaid fraud investigation product for Texas HHSC OIG, cutting investigation time from ~2 years to 90 days. Has government go-to-market experience and has raised a friends-and-family round for an earlier startup concept; now pivoting toward a healthcare-focused venture after a cofounder with core tech could not continue.”

“AI-native engineer who says 100% of current development is done through coding agents and reports roughly 10x productivity gains. Currently building 'AI TV,' a production video-generation system with multi-agent orchestration, including a motion-graphics pipeline where agents handle high-level design, low-level implementation, and iterative review. Particularly strong in designing codebases and workflows so AI systems can effectively use architectural and product context.”