Vetted Founders in California

Elliot Huscher

Screened

Director-level FinTech and Product Leader specializing in AI recruiting and iOS voice apps

Sacramento, CA8y exp

“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.”

“Early-stage sales hire who joined a startup just 2-3 months after launch and built their own outbound motion in a low-process environment. They describe strong self-sourced selling, including persistent multi-channel outreach that led to a large account win, and later partnered with a teammate and CEO to create a playbook that lifted office performance by 60%+.”

“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).”

“Two-time founder and former CTO/CPO who has shipped and operated full-stack products solo, including a real-time community platform (Twitter/Slack-like) with Next.js/TypeScript, WebSockets, Redis, and strong post-launch analytics (PostHog/Sentry). Also built durable multi-step AI-agent workflows using Inngest with state machines, checkpointing, and validation gates, and has hands-on Postgres performance tuning experience validated via EXPLAIN ANALYZE.”

“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.”

Berkan Özgür

Screened

Senior XR Engineer specializing in spatial computing and cross-platform Unity systems

San Jose, CA9y exp

“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.”

Matthew Affinito

Screened

Entry-Level Entrepreneurship & Product Strategy Candidate in EdTech and Innovation

San Luis Obispo, CA

“Founder who spent a year building an EdTech startup (Hopscotch) and developed high-volume outbound sourcing skills from zero-intro outreach across LinkedIn, cold email, and communities. Demonstrates strong EdTech GTM understanding (school district purchasing) and uses transparent, research-driven relationship building to turn cold outreach into high-quality founder/investor conversations that influence product direction.”