Vetted Founders in California

“Product intern at an AI startup (AdvisorGPT) who helped turn an LLM-based prototype into a production SEO blog-generation workflow that matched a firm’s tone/voice and targeted specific search phrases. Strong at bridging technical and non-technical teams, rapidly learning new AI tooling, and driving adoption through customer calls, UX improvements, and customer-facing demos/workshops.”

“Backend engineer who has built end-to-end data and platform systems across domains: a Scala/Java media data warehouse with a custom query language and Elasticsearch search, plus production security patterns (RBAC, RLS, audit trails) including a telehealth platform. Also demonstrated strong operational rigor by using feature-flagged side-by-side migrations and by catching ecommerce checkout edge cases that were dropping revenue.”

“Beauty category/program manager with experience running end-to-end brand campaigns across subscription/assortment and eCommerce, including line planning, inventory pacing, and demand generation. Has negotiated directly with a global beauty conglomerate using pricing tests and scale-based proposals, sustaining the partnership through regular reporting/insights and helping drive onboarding of additional brands.”

“Talent/Recruiting Operations leader who ran a 450–600 person multi-region org (USA/MX/Colombia) with end-to-end ownership of SLAs, capacity planning, funnel metrics, ATS/CRM, compliance, bench, and renewals. Known for high-impact operational redesigns—revamped sales comp to lift EBIT and built a CX function that improved renewals by 10% in 12 months (~$7M). Also drove a Slack-first AI workflow strategy that cut complex RFP turnaround from weeks to minutes.”

“Built a production voice-first fitness coaching/logging system ("Hey Coach") that routes headphone audio, transcribes speech, and uses LLMs to parse workouts into structured data with human-in-the-loop QA and A/B-tested improvements. Also brings a commercial background: led capital markets at a Series A fintech securing $250M+ in commitments and drove early GTM at WorkHQ.com, landing its first Fortune 500 customer.”

“Product/UX designer with experience digitizing Penske trucking operations and Ridecell fleet lifecycle/workshop orchestration systems. Designs complex, high-liability industrial workflows using a state-driven interaction model and a calm, high-clarity visual language, backed by targeted field research with drivers and ops teams and strong collaboration with engineers (React/Tailwind, Storybook, code-linked prototypes).”

“Marketing designer with hands-on experience delivering high-impact physical brand experiences, including end-to-end trade show booth/space design for Payactiv across 5+ events (booth layouts, walls, print collateral, and swag) with heavy cross-functional and vendor coordination. Also builds scalable Figma systems for frequent landing-page production and produces lightweight marketing videos in CapCut using templates, AI background removal, and platform-specific exports.”

“XR/Unity developer who built an underwater experience (Visutate) featuring reactive flocking fish that respond to user presence and hand-feeding interactions. Also implemented multiplayer using Unity Netcode, addressing sync challenges via reduced streamed data and client-side prediction; prefers impactful work in startup-style environments.”

“Cloud/distributed-systems engineer who has shipped real-time, offline-capable ledger/expense infrastructure and solved tricky cross-layer production bugs (carrier handoff retries causing duplicate writes) using packet captures and device logs. Also built modular Python ETL/catalog pipelines for e-commerce with config-toggled plugins for customer-specific pricing/SKU rules, and iterated product changes directly with on-site fulfillment operators using feature flags.”