Vetted Founders in the Bay Area

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“ML/NLP practitioner and technical founder who built an AUP risk-scoring model at Bill.com using TF-IDF + SVD features with XGBoost, and previously created automated data-quality guardrails for a Global Equity Risk stacked ML model at Thomson Reuters. Recently built a RAG-based chatbot for PaymentJock’s Home Affordability Probability product using embeddings and a local vector database (FAISS/Chroma), improving answer quality through chunking rather than expensive fine-tuning.”

“Early-stage founder in the ideation phase who previously took a hackathon concept in digital accessibility from prototype to a scalable SaaS platform, validating with developers, government web teams, and accessibility experts; the product was selected for deployment by the Indian Government. Strong focus on MVP validation, leveraging AI/automation, and building with limited resources; requires visa sponsorship due to immigration status.”

“Operator with consulting and startup experience who has led founder-level, zero-to-one initiatives across highly complex domains—from conceiving and launching an $80M, 80m maritime disaster-response vessel for Global Support & Development (Sergey Brin’s org) to acting as a cross-functional leader at Windfall Bio spanning regulatory, GTM, partnerships, and R&D. At Deloitte, owned the Omnia ESG software roadmap and drove >30% faster delivery through standardization/automation, and was tapped to train other managers on their operating cadence system.”

“Solutions engineer at a Voice AI startup building and deploying voice agents for self-storage customers, owning the full lifecycle from cold outreach and demos through contract negotiation, FMS/API integration, and post-sales optimization. Also has Audi/Porsche experience demoing pre-production vehicles and autonomous driving features (L3 lane changes) to internal stakeholders and VW Group leadership, with a strong track record of tailoring technical narratives to varied audiences and improving conversion by adapting agents to regional dialects.”

“Startup-focused finance/operations leader and long-time Controller (15+ years) who helps growing companies bring accounting ops in-house and implement scalable systems (ERP, AP invoice workflows, bank rec automation). Known for hands-on process optimization and change management—using demos and quick wins to convert resistant users and deliver measurable time savings. Works fully remote with a flexible schedule and also supports global offices on systems selection and implementation.”

“Founder building an agentic AI-based low-code platform for B2B enterprise applications, validated through enterprise client conversations and delivered via rapid paid MVP/POCs. Platform has seen production traction (6–7 apps, 1000+ daily users) and includes capabilities like QR scanning integrated with ERP/PLM systems. Experienced in business development and client relationships, with a pragmatic, ROI- and speed-focused approach to product and GTM under tight capital constraints.”

“Senior Engineering Manager at Roche leading two Scrum teams building internally shared (“inner-sourced”) tools and libraries for a healthcare enterprise. Has led security/compliance-first architecture decisions (e.g., Python AI modules running inside a Java container) and front-end modularization (Angular monorepo to module federation), with a strong focus on developer experience via automated Swagger/OpenAPI documentation and robust testing/versioning practices.”

“AI/ML full-stack practitioner in a small-scale manufacturing/lab operations environment who deployed a production ML system to improve blood cell order fulfillment by predicting yield/success from donor characteristics. Experienced building custom multi-agent orchestration (Python, LangChain/LangGraph, MCP) and balancing reliability, data quality constraints, and token/ROI economics while communicating tradeoffs to VP-level business stakeholders.”

“Built and deployed profitprops.io, a sports betting player-props prediction product using ML/AI. Implemented backend APIs with FastAPI/Express.js and Supabase, trained models on AWS GPU (P3) using Docker + RAPIDS, and set up CI/CD with GitHub Actions while working around cost constraints and data-collection hurdles (EC2 proxy rotation/rate limits).”