Vetted Founders

“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).”

“Performance marketer specializing in high-spend search and multi-platform paid media (Google Ads, Bing, Meta, TikTok), with a standout case doubling WinkBeds monthly revenue from $1M to $2M while materially improving ROAS on both Google and Bing. Strong in rigorous experimentation (Google Ads Experiments), campaign consolidation to eliminate overlap, and tracking/brand protection—successfully identifying and stopping affiliate ad hijacking that caused a conversion drop.”

“Creative director/designer spanning high-polish marketing brand work and enterprise innovation: built a full podcast brand ecosystem and a cinematic historical visualization using Google Veo 3. Also led an AR/VR-assisted remote troubleshooting initiative at TriMas (HoloLens-style workflows), delivering a 40% MTTR reduction and cutting expert travel by 50%+ while standardizing reusable interaction components for global teams.”

“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.”

“Former Head of Growth & Strategy at a digital identity company (pre-MBA in Boston) who ran multiple cross-functional initiatives across sales, product, and finance. Delivered measurable outcomes including raising sales conversion from 70% to 83% in 30 days, achieving 17% profitability via a new pricing model, and launching a new onboarding platform GTM on time.”

“Performance marketer with hands-on ownership of high-spend acquisition programs, including managing ~50K/month at Backblaze across Google Ads and paid social while optimizing for trial-to-paid conversion. Built Protective's employee benefits paid media from scratch into a full-funnel LinkedIn + Google program, scaling spend ~300% YoY and improving lead quality through tighter targeting and keyword refinement.”

“Game designer on Madden NFL (incl. Madden NFL 26) who contributed to Superstar Showdown mode rules and weekly Game Day Beats objectives, focusing on playtest-driven tuning to keep challenges fun and achievable. Also owned the Superstar storefront experience, coordinating with art/design under tight timelines and adapting live-service merchandising based on what players responded to.”

“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.”

“Senior technology leader and hands-on builder spanning enterprise architecture and product/engineering leadership across healthcare and entertainment. Has led high-impact cloud and security architecture decisions (including establishing a private cloud to address scalability/security at massive scale) and scaled orgs 300% using pod-based team structures. Currently building an AI-supported hydroponics/vertical farming IoT framework (ESP32 + Azure) and a musician collaboration platform (React + Neo4j + AWS).”

“Recruiting leader who managed a team of 4 and stays hands-on with executive search and analytics. Partnered closely with a CRO to run a quality-of-hire analysis for sales hires and used the findings to shift hiring toward consultative profiles; also implemented candidate surveys to shorten overly long interview processes and improve candidate experience.”

“Frontend engineer focused on marketing and analytics products, including a real-time multi-touch attribution dashboard. Uses Next.js (SSR/ISR) with React/TypeScript and Tailwind, and emphasizes quality at scale via automated testing, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), feature-flagged staged rollouts, and Mixpanel-driven iteration. Experienced modern state management patterns (React Query + Zustand) and performance tuning (code-splitting, dynamic imports, lazy loading).”

“Built and deployed a compliance-sensitive LLM pipeline that extracts rebate logic from hospital–supplier medical contracts, using multi-layer redaction (regex/NER/dictionary), schema-validated structured outputs, and secure placeholder reinsertion. Hosted models on Amazon Bedrock to avoid retraining on sensitive data and improved both accuracy and cost by splitting the workflow into a lightweight section classifier plus a fine-tuned extraction model, orchestrated with LangChain and evaluated via layered, test-driven agent assessments.”

“Sales/business development operator who has repeatedly built outbound motions from scratch—most recently launching a B2B recruiting GTM at Pinnacle Private Credit, generating 50+ relationships, a $50K+ pipeline in 5 weeks, and closing 7 enterprise agreements with C-suite financial services stakeholders. Also co-founded a defense tech startup (multi-sensor aerial threat detection), led investor outreach to 100+ investors, and applies AI/ML both for outreach personalization (ChatGPT/Claude) and product work (sensor fusion/threat detection).”