Vetted Chief Executive Officers in California

“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.”

“Operations/finance leader who built the internal infrastructure for a personal care company to sell into 35,000 retail stores, spanning contract manufacturing, warehousing/3PL, banking credit facilities, HR policies, marketing ops, and accounting systems (Great Plains, QuickBooks Online). Currently supports a music/entertainment organization, mentoring non-business creatives on business and finance while driving profitability and growth.”

“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.”

“CEO/operator with strong private-equity-facing transformation experience who led post-acquisition integration and cross-functional execution to deliver $4M in annual savings. Built a KPI-driven strategic planning and operating cadence that helped scale CCW from $14M to $50M over 5 years, with external recognition including Inc 5000 (2023) and a 2023 Stevie Award for innovation.”