Vetted Founders in California

“Hands-on IT/engineering executive who has led high-impact architecture changes and compliance-driven data systems. Notably built an internally developed columnar database at Troparé (with dual-support UI for legacy/new DBs) and shipped an MVP in 3–4 months with dramatic performance improvements, and previously delivered PCI/opt-out compliant deletion workflows while addressing DB performance and migrations.”

“Cloud engineer and cloud OS SME (Chevron) who productionized large-scale security remediation—using Tanium and Ansible to address CIS benchmark noncompliance across 5,000+ servers with robust logging and RCA handoffs. Also drives adoption of a geospatial AI refinery inspection product by consolidating siloed imagery into an enterprise geospatial database, and presents internally on agentic/LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, LangSmith observability).”

“Startup builder (MagicSeven) who designed and implemented a browser-based, agentic video editor end-to-end, including an AWS event-driven multimodal LLM “indexing” pipeline and an orchestration LLM agent for searching and manipulating footage. Demonstrates deep video file/codec knowledge plus practical production hardening of LLM workflows (format validation, plan/execute, S3-based state for debuggability).”

“Brand and growth marketer with experience spanning global CPG and corporate brands through to healthcare/pharma and financial services. Known for consumer-insight-led repositioning and measurable, digital-first acquisition (notably CTV), plus executing U.S. market entry and scaling distribution into major retailers and pharmacies within months.”

“Customer Success leader with deep ad tech expertise who owned enterprise accounts end-to-end, including Bank of America, driving ad fraud down from ~8–10% to <1% in ~3 months and resolving spikes through data-driven investigations. Experienced partnering cross-functionally as a PM to build analytics dashboards and using user stories to align Product/Engineering/Sales and influence roadmap priorities; also supports land-and-expand via paid benchmarking/industry data upsells.”

“FDE at Bland.ai and founder of Fi (incident-response agent) who routinely takes LLM/agentic concepts from prototype to production. Has hands-on experience reverse-engineering undocumented systems to deliver integrations, building LLM testbeds for voice-agent reliability, and rapidly shipping RAG/semantic search solutions (e.g., Confluence runbooks) after deep customer discovery with DevOps/SRE teams.”

“Merchandising and buying leader with experience at Rue Gilt, Zappos, and Fisker, owning end-to-end category strategy, OTB, and vendor negotiations across multi-channel e-commerce. Known for structuring high-impact vendor deals (tiered cost breaks, exclusivity, vendor-funded markdowns) and using SKU-level analytics to drive outsized results, including 15% sales growth/8% margin improvement on a $55M category and 80% YoY profit growth from partnership agreements.”

“LLM/agent builder who has shipped production AI systems in the wellness space, including an LLM-powered food tracking product used by 5000+ users and a voice/call-routing onboarding workflow using LangGraph/LangChain with LiveKit and Twilio. Strong focus on practical reliability work: latency reduction, retrieval/embedding tuning, and CI-driven evaluation with simulations and metrics.”

“Product designer/hardware prototyper building Saccade (VR headset attachment for Apple Vision Pro) to enable earlier, lower-cost Alzheimer's detection via eye-tracking and on-device CV/ML; designed a custom biocompatible snap-on light-shield replacement with integrated cameras/PCB after Apple camera-data restrictions. Also has biomedical manufacturing experience (major fixture-driven throughput gains) and leads a 160-member Assistive Technology Club sponsored by Apple and Google.”