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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Two-decade CEO/EVP Product operator with multiple founder-level and public-company turnarounds, known for implementing an AOP-driven execution cadence and rigorous decision documentation. Delivered outsized outcomes including 5x trade show performance gains, major reliability improvements (DOA down to ~1–2%), and an 18-month transformation of a shrinking product into the company’s highest-growth/highest-margin line that remained an industry leader for a decade.”

“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.”

“Former high school/college hockey player who spent ~8 years coaching and running strength & conditioning support for NCAA Division I hockey programs (including Yale, Boston College, Harvard). Also coached Team USA Women’s hockey athletes, helping prepare them for pro league tryouts, and is comfortable creating training-tip content on Instagram and YouTube.”

“Startup builder (MagicSeven) who designed and implemented a browser-based, agentic video editor end-to-end, including an AWS event-driven multimodal LLM “indexing” pipeline and an orchestration LLM agent for searching and manipulating footage. Demonstrates deep video file/codec knowledge plus practical production hardening of LLM workflows (format validation, plan/execute, S3-based state for debuggability).”

“Cross-functional product/engineering leader with startup and enterprise experience (Whimstay, Wells Fargo, Leap AI Technologies). Has owned end-to-end delivery including UI and payment architecture—built a multi-customer reservation payment flow using pre-auth plus event/timer-driven reminders and handled tricky edge cases like date changeover. Also introduced lightweight process (Jira, sprints, team/module structuring) to increase delivery speed in an early-stage AI document-matching startup.”

“Early-stage/first sales hire profile with strong outbound motion and process-building experience. Self-sourced and closed a $2.8M Yahoo deal (8-month cycle) using a shared mutual plan to manage stakeholders and timelines, and has recent mid-market ACV wins selling Mapistry to environmental compliance managers by enabling champions to secure internal budget. Has also implemented MEDDICC and built foundational GTM assets (e.g., Quantcast’s first sales deck used in $2B+ of closed business).”

“Founder/CEO who built Hometown Heart from the ground up—creating SOPs and standing up hiring, GTM, finance, and investor/government relations—scaling from 6 employees and $100K debt to 350 employees and $40M in annual revenue in 3 years. Led expansion into San Francisco County, proactively managing compliance/licensing and municipal stakeholders to secure early approvals and drive major revenue growth.”