Vetted Mentoring Professionals

“Founder of Build from Scratch and GreenTech Business ecosystems focused on sustainable/low-carbon innovation; raised $150K friends-and-family and built a global platform of 140 companies across 20 countries. Organized three angel funds and invested in LATAM-first recycling and waste-tracking ventures (including lithium-ion battery recycling with a patent), leveraging a corporate finance and investor relations background to mentor and support founders.”

“Senior gameplay animator with shipped AAA experience on Just Cause 4 (cinematics) and deep UE5 implementation experience—often operating as one of the only animators on a project. Led multiple combat-style animation sets, owned mocap cleanup/polish workflows across Maya/MotionBuilder and UE5, and partnered with engineering/tech animation on systems like AI-driven talking characters (viseme setup).”

David Kroes

Screened

Executive HR & People Leader specializing in culture transformation, talent, and organizational development

Los Angeles, USA20y exp

“Operations/people-ops leader focused on early-stage, growth, and turnaround environments, with hands-on experience implementing UKG (HRIS) and Lever (ATS) to scale without adding headcount. At Niagen Bioscience, drove a 25% improvement in time-to-fill and cut administrative workload by 30% in 6 months, led a company-wide optimization initiative to reduce silos, and coached a VP of Finance into a successful CFO transition that included restructuring the finance org and upgrading key talent.”

“Senior engineering leader in healthcare AI who combines org scaling with deep hands-on architecture work. At DriveHealth.ai, they helped evolve isolated workflows into a production-grade intelligent platform, standardizing a shared RAG+DCE architecture while leading teams of 50+ across engineering, AI, platform, QA, and DevOps.”

Damanick Dantes

Screened

Director-level investment strategist specializing in multi-asset and global macro portfolios

New York, NY12y exp

“Investor-operator with 10 years spanning asset management, financial media, product strategy, and advisory work. Unusually combines portfolio management and institutional client skills with content/revenue growth experience, plus hands-on governance leadership that helped a financially stressed organization restructure, pass bylaw changes, complete an audit, and return to profitability. At Bloomberg, also drove an AI-aligned product pivot that helped retain clients and generate about $6M in revenue.”

“Data/analytics engineer who built and operated a DocuSign-based real-time analytics platform end-to-end, processing 20–50k webhook events/day with ~99.5% reliability. Strong in idempotent event processing, schema-evolution-safe ingestion (raw JSON + dynamic parsing), and serving data via versioned, low-latency REST APIs with solid CI/CD and observability.”

Peter Greer

Screened

Senior Gameplay/AI Engineer specializing in Unreal Engine game AI systems

San Ramon, CA6y exp

“Senior Software Engineer with deep Game AI expertise (often the primary AI specialist on the team) who shipped a player-bot system in an Unreal-based battle royale to fill matchmaking gaps, reducing off-hours queue times and improving retention. Also owned complex multiplayer match-start/drop-sequence synchronization and has experience optimizing core gameplay systems (e.g., line-of-sight calculations) on Call of Duty at Infinity Ward.”

“Engineering leader focused on large-scale enterprise SaaS and MDM platforms, with experience modernizing monoliths into microservices, improving reliability, and scaling systems to support 15M devices across AWS and Azure. Stands out for combining deep platform architecture work with strong org-building: managed teams up to 45 globally and built a 0-to-1 platform services team to 22 people in under a year.”

“Product/UX design leader with experience in both banking and energy, including redesigning complex enterprise platforms at Zafin and designing AI-assisted workflows for engineers at Exxon. Stands out for combining deep user research, cross-functional product direction, and a strong human-centered philosophy for AI in high-stakes expert environments.”

“Brand and growth marketer from True Religion who helped refresh the brand during a comeback period, driving 30%+ YoY DTC growth and positioning DTC as the top growth engine. Experienced leading seasonal multi-channel launches and scaling acquisition through creator-led social, email, and paid digital, with strong creator/talent deal negotiation and culture-driven storytelling.”

“Senior Engineering Manager with a player-coach style who stays technically engaged through heavy code reviews and pair programming. Led prioritization and stakeholder alignment for a scalable, resilient feature-flag evaluation service with strict sub-50ms latency goals, including a major caching-strategy redesign and incremental rollout approach. Experienced in incident response/retrospectives and in coaching engineers toward improved performance and promotions.”

“Salesforce-focused candidate with hands-on experience delivering Service Cloud automation, including entitlement/SLA escalation workflows, and building multi-component Lightning UI frameworks. Brings a mix of native-platform design, custom Apex extension, LWC architecture, and legacy Aura maintenance experience.”

“Group Product Manager / Senior Product Manager in edtech who led the first AI feature at Imagine Learning: an AI-assisted grading and feedback capability for EdgeEX that improved teacher turnaround time by 28%. Brings a strong human-in-the-loop AI philosophy, deep educator workflow insight, and experience scaling products across cross-functional teams, UX redesigns, and state-specific curriculum strategy.”

“Senior engineering leader from IBM who has built and scaled enterprise AI/GenAI platforms across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, combining executive-level org leadership with hands-on debugging of production distributed systems. Particularly compelling for Director/VP roles needing someone who can unify architecture, platform strategy, and engineering execution across multiple teams.”

“Backend/data engineer with production experience building credit/fraud enrichment services and checkout pipelines on AWS (EKS + Lambda) using FastAPI, Kafka, Postgres, and Redis, with a strong focus on reliability patterns (timeouts/retries/circuit breakers) and observability. Has also built AWS Glue/PySpark ETL into S3/Redshift with schema evolution and data quality controls, and modernized legacy credit decisioning into Java/Node microservices with parallel-run parity validation and feature-flag rollouts.”

Kyle Bashy

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in cloud security platforms and enterprise applications

Remote, USA22y exp

“Owner and service provider of an IT practice exploring a transition into startup founding. Has spent ~15 years researching the VC/studio/accelerator landscape and evaluates new ideas through forecasting and stakeholder conversations, with a current focus on improving prospecting and qualified lead generation.”

“Lifecycle/CRM marketer with nearly 7 years at ABC Television, owning end-to-end email execution at high volume while also supporting Braze-based multi-channel programs across email, in-app, and push. Brings strong entertainment/streaming domain experience, using behavioral personalization and A/B testing to improve CTR, watch time, and ultimately ad revenue per user.”

“Product leader with a rare cross-industry track record spanning fire departments, supply chain analytics, renewable energy, and staffing. They have led complex zero-to-one and migration-heavy product launches, including shipping 3 new public-safety products during COVID, driving 7x faster customer migrations and major revenue uplift, while also commercializing ML-powered analytics products that increased ARR.”