Vetted Co-Founders

Shant Mardigian

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in scalable streaming, media supply chain, and AI operations

19y exp

“Tech executive with Disney experience who has repeatedly scaled and restructured engineering organizations (from 4 to 30 and up to 100+), using OKRs/KPIs to drive business-aligned roadmaps. Hands-on with architecture and platform strategy, including adopting MongoDB Atlas to centralize transactional data and building shared core services (security/permissions, auditing, compliance) to increase product velocity across distributed teams.”

“Engineering/product leader with repeated experience defining roadmaps and delivering platform migrations across SaaS and enterprise contexts. Scaled an education system from two districts to 2M+ students statewide, and led an Elasticsearch-based architecture for an internal Disney product serving ~100K employees. Known for rigorous execution (RAID/OKRs/sprints), strong stakeholder communication (weekly AI summaries), and empowering teams via end-to-end ownership and customer-connected development.”

Eric Holden

Screened

Senior technology and operations leader specializing in digital transformation

Manhattan, NY14y exp

“Strategy and operations leader with cross-sector experience in tech, finance, government, and logistics, known for building and scaling transformation and automation programs from the ground up. Their track record includes $4M in annual automation savings/revenue, $5M+ in first-year savings for financial institutions through KYC/AML workflow automation, and a new logistics service launch that expanded to multiple cities and generated $15M in revenue.”

“Repeat founder/operator with hands-on experience taking startups from zero to MVP, traction, and fundraising. Built a venture-backed company to roughly a $5M valuation and later served as Interim COO for a prop-tech startup, helping launch operations and support a 4-5M SAR raise. Also brings direct exposure to top startup ecosystems through Techstars, Antler, and close work with founders and investors in SF.”

“Freelance CTO with a track record of founding and building early web products, including an award-winning baby website creation platform that was acquired by eStyle after gaining traction via retail/mail-order distribution and PR. Also built a sports event text-alert product, engineering around missing data APIs via a replaceable scraping layer.”

“MBA-trained operator-investor who interned in venture capital at Marquee Ventures while also founding GoodBites Brisket Jerky. Brings a rare combination of startup evaluation experience and true zero-to-one execution, having built outbound sales, sourced manufacturers, created a website with Claude Code, and run day-to-day operations for a specialty food brand.”

Mustafa Shabib

Screened

Executive technology leader and software engineer specializing in healthcare technology

Austin, TX23y exp

“Entrepreneurial operator with venture-backed startup experience since 2015, including serving as CTO-in-Residence at a healthcare venture studio in NYC and participating in a NYC incubator. Currently exploring new company ideas through active network-driven discovery and is strongly motivated by ambiguous, high-impact, team-building opportunities.”

“Founder-turned-investor with a rare blend of startup building, technology investment banking, and growth-stage climate tech investing. Built and pivoted Bizi through direct customer discovery, then advised tech companies at Citi and led 30+ diligences at Carbon Direct Capital, including helping drive a $20M investment in optical AI chip company Neurophos.”

Omri Galor

Screened

Mid-level quantitative analyst and startup founder specializing in predictive analytics and FinTech

New York City, NY7y exp

“Analytical operator with an unusual mix of public-sector strategy, startup investing, Deutsche Bank quantitative risk work, and hands-on startup cofounding. He has operated from institutional finance to zero-to-one execution, including driving a model improvement that reduced unnecessary loss impact by tens of millions and helping convert startup partnership outreach into a formal acquisition review.”

“Co-founded academic-index (10,000+ users) and built a full-stack Next.js 14 document upload + client-side OCR + Gemini-powered analysis pipeline with strong production reliability (custom monitoring, retries, quality gates) and measurable gains (accuracy ~94%→98.5%, failures down ~60%). Also owns end-to-end biometric data visualization and a data-driven brand/UX overhaul at pre-seed health/performance startup Absolute Rest, with a background running a multi-client dev studio (Zen Digital).”

Steve Palley

Screened

Executive product leader specializing in marketplaces, consumer products, and health-tech

Los Angeles, CA21y exp

“Product leader with a rare mix of zero-to-one marketplace building, AI product development, and mission-driven consumer experience work. Led the creation of StoryLoom at Pixelberry/Nexon as a 'Roblox for writers,' is currently building a privacy-conscious AI concierge for a first responder coaching marketplace, and previously co-founded ApplyMap to deliver free AI-powered college guidance for underserved students.”

Jared Wiener

Screened

Senior Solutions Architect & Full-Stack Developer specializing in Media & Entertainment on AWS

Santa Monica, CA20y exp

“Engineering/product leader with experience at ABC News and AWS who built newsroom collaboration and internal tooling initiatives into a full department, aligning roadmaps to business outcomes and navigating Disney-scale bureaucracy. Demonstrates hands-on architectural depth in serverless systems (Lambda/SQS/Parquet) and strong distributed-team operating cadence (Kanban/Asana, Jira/GitHub, Zoom/Slack), including leading while frequently traveling to evangelize and test products across bureaus.”

“Embodied AI/robotics ML engineer with hands-on experience deploying POMDP-based reinforcement learning controllers on real mobile robots and vehicle fleets. Strong in sim-to-real robustness (domain randomization) and production rollout practices (HIL, shadow-mode, canaries, safety instrumentation), and has published related work (mentions a NeurIPS paper).”