Vetted Founders in the DMV

“Four-time founder with hands-on experience inside angel- and venture-backed executive teams, plus accelerator mentorship experience. Brings a practical, customer-validation-driven approach to company building, with strong insight into early-stage team dynamics and investor ecosystems.”

“Lifelong entrepreneur and early Pixar employee who has spent decades in the Bay Area, New York, and Europe building companies and operating in venture ecosystems. He has raised $20M via ICO, raised £3M for a London venture studio, and brings a strong point of view on AI: product creation is commoditizing, so durable startups need a distribution edge.”

“Built and productionized an LLM-based PDF extraction pipeline for Medicaid policy documents by fine-tuning Gemini Flash 2.0 and deploying via Vertex AI, adding validation/guardrails to improve trust and reliability. Also built and scaled a SaaS platform (cnotes) for cable operators and regularly partners with customers and sales teams through interactive demos, rapid iteration, and real-time workflow debugging.”

“Backend engineer with strong payments and high-stakes transaction experience, including owning an Apple Pay/Google Pay integration via Stripe end-to-end in production for 100,000+ users. Particularly compelling for teams that need someone who can balance speed, security, and reliability in checkout or other sensitive backend workflows, and who has hands-on incident ownership in production.”

“Performance marketing leader with experience managing a national paid media program at MyEyeDr. averaging $2.2M/month across digital and offline channels for 950+ locations. Stands out for combining rigorous incrementality testing, media mix modeling, and creative experimentation to drive 81% booking growth over two years while lowering CAC by 26%.”

Sharon Harrison

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Executive CMO specializing in SaaS GTM, brand, demand, and product marketing

Baltimore, MD22y exp

“Operator with 20 years working alongside founders and 7 years in regulated SaaS, especially higher education/edtech. Currently serves as CMO across five ElevenX Capital portfolio companies and leads Campus Consortium Foundation's incubator efforts, bringing hands-on experience in AI go-to-market, venture formation, and building trust-first SaaS motions in compliance-heavy markets.”

Paul Tran

Screened

Executive Technology Leader specializing in SaaS, federal consulting, and digital transformation

Tysons Corner, VA31y exp

“Former CEO of GravyWork with hands-on experience building an org-wide strategic plan and modernization roadmap for a growing company. Uses Michael Gerber’s innovation/orchestration/quantification framework and structured as-is/gap/to-be analysis to drive cost reduction, automation/outsourcing decisions, and leadership alignment through change.”

Mohan Pushadapu

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-level Mechatronics Engineer specializing in robotics, embedded firmware, and autonomous systems

Baltimore, MD4y exp

“Robotics/embedded engineer with hands-on firmware ownership for closed-loop motor/vision systems and strong ROS1 navigation experience (move_base, gmapping, robot_localization), including EKF sensor fusion to eliminate localization drift to sub-10cm accuracy. Also brings IoT distributed pub/sub expertise (30+ devices over MQTT, 99% uptime) plus Unity AR/VR simulation and computer-vision test automation that saved 100+ hours.”