Vetted Co-Founders in New York

“Three-time co-founder with experience building both bootstrapped and funded startups, including raising $150K personally and advising companies that raised $500K+ in angel and pre-seed capital. Brings unusually broad startup operating range across customer discovery, product, GTM, hiring, legal, fundraising, and VC/studio mechanics, with entrepreneurial experience dating back to childhood and multiple business exits in college.”

“Composer/music editor using Ableton Live with a precision-focused, minimal-plugin workflow and AI-assisted loudness targeting. Recently scored a high-fashion documentary featuring a past-to-present transition, using a deliberate shift from piano/strings to synth orchestration to change emotion and pacing while preserving narrative continuity. Also has experience iterating with editor/producer notes on corporate training content to maintain retention and comedic timing.”

“Product engineer/designer with founder mindset who shipped a blockchain-enabled investor group/governance platform using Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Prisma/Postgres, and Temporal. Emphasizes auth-centric onboarding (SSO + embedded wallet) to make dApp UX feel more like SaaS, and brings strong reliability practices (idempotent retries, reconciliation) plus experience demoing to investors and operating in seed-stage teams (ex-Vouched).”

“Outbound-focused candidate coming from a Cushman & Wakefield internship where they built pipeline by prospecting potential office tenants through email, calls, and LinkedIn. They stand out for signal-based, highly personalized outreach to mid-market and enterprise stakeholders, with experience generating 2-4 qualified tours per week and thinking like a founding SDR around ICP design, account tiering, and repeatable cadence building.”

Gabriel Fagundes

Screened

Mid-level AI/ML & Backend Engineer specializing in AI platforms and computer vision

New York, New York6y exp

“Backend engineer with hands-on experience building real-time, low-latency systems: owned the Python backend for a real-time crowd-monitoring product (top 5% at HackHarvard 2025) using OpenCV, GPU YOLO inference (PyTorch), WebRTC, and OAuth. Also has production Kubernetes/GitOps experience (Helm/Kustomize, GitHub Actions, Argo CD), Kafka-based event pipelines, and executed a minimal-downtime on-prem PostgreSQL migration to AWS EC2.”

Frank Albanese

Screened

Executive CTO & Engineering Leader specializing in AI/ML and distributed systems

New York, NY10y exp

“Founder of Essence, a wisdom and memory preservation platform with early testing indicating mental health benefits and positive impact for hospice patients. Has raised $25K to date and reports prior capital-raising experience through Y Combinator and the Berkeley Angel Network, with a GTM plan starting in hospice and expanding to the general public.”

Avi Gottlieb

Screened

Mid-level Funding & Business Development professional specializing in SMB finance and SaaS sales

Brooklyn, NY6y exp

“Sales/BD professional from startup environment (Gigaspaces) who personally owned outbound motions and built multi-step, multi-channel sequences that produced record-breaking quality meetings. Uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator for targeted prospect research, prioritizes C-level decision makers, and applies A/B testing plus AI/automation to scale and improve messaging performance.”

Nobin Johnson

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, cloud, and mobile development

Buffalo, NY4y exp

“Backend engineer with open-source web3.js contributions focused on preventing costly smart-contract execution failures, plus hands-on blockchain startup experience scaling an NFT mint from a test EC2 setup to AWS Lambda/API Gateway under extreme concurrency. Built a multiplayer backend improving tick rate from 40 Hz to 105 Hz using UDP, containerization, and Kubernetes, and has healthcare production support experience across 10+ apps. Also publishes IEEE research papers and produces developer-friendly documentation that accelerates team adoption.”