Vetted Founders in California

“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%+.”

“Entrepreneur building an AI-driven small molecule biotech startup who has already raised $5M from major venture capital investors. Brings 3 years of fundraising experience and a thoughtful approach to aligning investors with different risk profiles across financing stages, paired with strong conviction around founding high-risk, high-upside companies.”

Britney Russ

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive product leader specializing in consumer technology and EdTech

Los Angeles, CA13y exp

“Senior product leader from Codecademy who has spent roughly a decade building and mentoring cross-functional organizations while leading major strategic pivots in education. Most notably, they repositioned Codecademy toward a new learner segment and launched an AI-native learning platform that tripled signup rates, while also creating new revenue streams like live learning and accessible AI workshops.”

“Engineering leader who built and scaled a distributed team (Serbia + US) to deliver an internal multi-tenant Kubernetes-based PaaS, moving a large org from manual ops-driven deployments to automated CI/CD with >99.97% uptime and 100% service adoption. Known for culture change (blameless post-mortems, clear intake via ticketing) and security-first platform practices (tenant isolation, Falco) supporting SOC2 compliance; also operates at exec level with stakeholder communication and fundraising.”

“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.”

william chen

Screened

Executive game technology leader specializing in product innovation and live-service platforms

Los Angeles, CA27y exp

“Serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits who has previously raised several rounds and worked with accelerators. Currently building an AI-powered life simulation universe with prompt-based creation and a self-evolving persistent world, backed by completed market research and an MVP in development.”

Paul Baker

Screened

Director-level Video & Creative Producer specializing in branded storytelling and studio operations

Remote, CA15y exp

“Senior video editor/motion-focused post-production leader with 18+ years in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, including Creative Cloud 2025 AI tools and Dynamic Link workflows. Managed the Google Analytics YouTube channel for hundreds of videos over 6 years at Google, and has delivered brand-critical work for major enterprises (Google, Visa, Capital One, ServiceNow), including tight-turn executive-facing motion pieces.”

“Engineering leader with deep hands-on experience across eCommerce, retail commerce, regulatory tech, and IP PBX systems, including building a no-code web application platform. Has managed organizations of up to 65 people while staying involved in architecture and production debugging, and cites measurable impact such as 50% efficiency gains, 100% productivity improvement, and 90% error reduction through partner/API remediation.”

Shailaja Domala

Screened

Executive product and AI leader specializing in data platforms and analytics

California, USA24y exp

“Engineering leader with deep experience at Visa building and modernizing large-scale analytics platforms, including refactoring legacy systems into globally available microservices on AWS. Combines hands-on technical judgment in architecture, search platform evaluation, and service reliability with management of distributed international engineering and data teams.”

Ananda Kanagaraj Sankar

Screened

Engineering Leader specializing in marketplace monetization, pricing, payments, and trust & safety

San Jose, CA14y exp

“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.”

“Former VC and angel investor with board experience (Sand Hill Angels) who has raised money for their own companies and helped over two dozen companies prepare for fundraising and M&A. Strong fit for CEO roles in venture-backed environments given extensive capital markets and deal-prep exposure.”

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.”

“Entrepreneurial candidate building an AI startup focused on helping companies find product-market fit. They are already at MVP stage with 3 beta customers and are using A/B testing for validation, showing early traction and a hands-on approach to customer-driven product development.”