Vetted Mentoring Professionals

“Founder/CEO of a consumer products startup since 2020 who has raised angel funding and reinvested it into R&D, product development, production, and expert legal/industry support (has not taken a salary). Former financial and deals consultant who applies rigorous market, buyer-landscape, and exit-path analysis (including Blue Ocean Strategy) to choose and execute opportunities, with a strong commitment to entrepreneurship.”

“AI Product Manager who also operates as a product marketer/CRM lifecycle lead, focused on behavior-driven onboarding and retention. Has delivered measurable growth through segmentation, multi-channel lifecycle programs, and experimentation (e.g., activation +23%, TTFV -30%, retention +14%), and led a cross-functional chatbot integration that improved course completion (+23%) while reducing refunds (-15%).”

“Talent leader with ~20 years reporting directly to CEOs/COOs and advising seed-to-Series C startups and venture studio portfolios on 0-to-1 hiring. Built recruiting infrastructure from scratch at FightCamp (cut time-to-hire to ~35 days with ~98% acceptance) and has proven hands-on executive search impact, including taking over and closing a Chief Product Officer search in ~45 days.”

“Frontend engineer with deep experience modernizing KYC flows at Carta, including rebuilding country-specific KYC forms into a scalable configuration + validation-schema system that cut new-jurisdiction support from 2–3 months to ~2 weeks. Strong on quality and rollout practices (E2E/backend testing, early QA engagement, staged/A-B rollouts) and performance optimization for heavy React/TypeScript dashboards using Intersection Observers for lazy loading.”

“CTO/enterprise architect who stays hands-on in code while leading strategy, stakeholder alignment, and team scaling. At Eastridge, established product and technology vision/roadmap, built product engineering/strategy functions, and helped launch products into global markets; most recently led GenAI product design including tech selection, infrastructure, scalability, and observability.”

“Recruiting leader and hands-on executive search player/coach who has managed teams at Acquire and Mastercard and partnered closely with HRBPs on sensitive, change-management hiring. Pre-Series B at Acquire, collaborated with CFO/CPO/founders on a location-based hiring strategy that reduced salary costs by 30%+. Recently at Paperless Post, implemented AI-era technical assessment and interview tooling (Coderbyte, BrightHire) to improve candidate quality and process efficiency.”

“Video editor/post-production specialist with deep Premiere Pro expertise and strong After Effects capability, currently editing for the USGA YouTube channel (features/tributes/hype content). Built the Midnight Sun Company channel from scratch starting in 2013, including a music video that surpassed 5M views, and has experience leading and mentoring a small team of editors.”

“Engineering leader (Credit Karma/fintech) who built internal developer-platform frameworks at near open-source scale, including a unified key management system migrating ~450 services from on-prem HSM to a centralized KMS. Known for driving large cross-team migrations with strong safety mechanisms (canaries, shadow reads, rollback toggles) and measurable DX/ops improvements (60% fewer provisioning requests; 40% faster time-to-first-secret).”

“Operations leader at AWI who ran multiple high-impact initiatives in parallel, including a WMS implementation, fulfillment workflow redesign, and a company-wide cost optimization effort. Known for building KPI dashboards and exception-based reporting that improved data trust and saved executives ~4–6 hours per week, while standardizing warehouse processes and coaching supervisors to reduce escalations and stabilize day-to-day ops.”

“Engineering manager with recent hands-on technical leadership in vendor-based geo augmentation, including making a key pivot from a broken vendor SDK to an internal data ingestion approach. Previously shipped impactful Python microservice refactors that reduced unnecessary data processing/storage and improved runtime payload efficiency, and has owned on-call incidents through mitigation (scaling pods) and prevention process changes.”

“QA tester with hands-on experience supporting Duolingo’s large-scale, high-stakes releases across iOS, Android, and web. Owns test planning, manual + mobile automation testing, regression, and release verification, with a strong focus on real-world edge cases (low-end devices, poor connectivity, localization/RTL) and rigorous bug triage using JIRA and external user reports.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who led a high-stakes 0→1 in-house usage-based billing/rating platform to replace a third-party system, saving millions and protecting 30M+ in revenue. Deep experience in event-driven microservices on AWS (Lambda/SQS/DynamoDB), billing correctness, migrations, and incident response, while scaling teams through hiring, coaching, and lightweight execution processes.”

“Early-stage founder building an engineering alpha product and planning a structured path to pilot and general availability. Active mentor in TechStars and MassChallenge with a strong VC network, emphasizing PMF, MVP-in-market feedback, and early sales while maintaining a sustainable approach to entrepreneurship.”

“Modes/progression designer on EA College Football (Dynasty and Road to Glory) who has owned multiple shipped progression systems, including recruiting and Road to Glory progression (meters, in-game reward triggers, and a "coach trust" meta-progression). Focused on modular system design and tuning/balancing for player-facing challenges and rewards, with strong QA-driven iteration and Blueprint-based prototyping practices.”

“AIX/IBM Power Systems engineer with hands-on production incident leadership in a regulated banking environment, using deep OS-level tooling to diagnose CPU entitlement and memory pressure issues. Experienced with HMC/vHMC, VIOS, and zero-downtime DLPAR resizing, plus PowerHA/HACMP clustering and validated failover testing. Also drives migration readiness via Bash/Python automation (60% manual-effort reduction) and phased AIX cloud/hybrid cutovers.”

“Serial venture builder/operator across ad tech, media delivery, search engines, international content management, and ecommerce; has raised up to $150M and been involved in 8 acquisitions or IP-acquisition events. Known for refactoring/re-engineering smaller or troubled platforms into higher-value businesses, including building yield-management algorithms and a Kafka-like system to improve ad delivery profitability.”

“Programmatic media specialist who owned a $50K+/month Trade Desk DSP account for Disney movie/TV launches, leveraging PMPs and rigorous testing across audiences, deals, and creative formats. Drove 5–10% week-over-week gains in video completion rate while maintaining strict brand-safety standards, and has experience leading a team of traders and translating complex performance tradeoffs into client-ready action plans.”

“Talent Acquisition leader with WeWork experience who managed a team of 3 recruiters plus a TA Coordinator while maintaining an executive-level requisition load. Partnered closely with HRBPs on org design and workforce planning, and implemented a budget-aligned requisition approval process via a weekly hiring committee. Has hands-on C-level search experience, including supporting the CEO in hiring a CFO.”

“Growth-focused product/marketing leader with CMO experience in e-commerce marketplaces and SaaS (no gaming/F2P background). Strong in CRO, funnel analytics, and A/B testing design, with a metrics-driven approach to monitoring performance and diagnosing issues via trend analysis.”

“Video editor with 15+ years of experience across major NLEs (Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci, Sony Vegas) and a strong focus on longform YouTube retention through pacing, audio, and recurring hooks. Produced end-to-end, graphic-heavy weekly content for the Ditto Music Channel (self-filmed/edited/narrated/scripted), contributing to a library of 30–40 videos reaching ~5K–200K views each.”

“Product/technology executive who has repeatedly built and scaled engineering organizations from early-stage startups to large enterprises (including Temenos with ~2,000 developers). Led major platform modernizations (monolith-to-microservices) to enable SaaS, resilience, and faster delivery, and launched an innovation hub to build proprietary neural-network biometric algorithms for a payments product enabling "wave of the hand" transactions.”

“AI engineer with robotics perception experience at Forterra, building and deploying moving-object/obstacle detection models into real-time robot pipelines. Addressed training crashes/latency via sub-batch training and optimizer tuning, and improved debugging using ROS/ROS2 tooling with 3D voxel visualization and color-coded validation.”

“QA/automation engineer with experience at Riot Games’ player platform, owning E2E automation for mission-critical authentication/account flows using Playwright/JavaScript plus API automation. Built CI merge gates and nightly verification with Slack reporting, and repeatedly caught backend-driven session/authorization regressions before production. Known for stabilizing flaky UI tests via selector strategy and network intercepts, and for influencing design early with testability hooks and telemetry.”

“Player-coach engineering leader focused on buyer/distribution product lines, building scalable purchasing/planning frameworks and modernizing workflows. Drove performance and reliability improvements via queue-based async architectures, external API redundancy, and CI/CD automation, and has led production incident response (cache-related) with follow-up playbooks and monitoring. Experienced in high-growth/startup environments, combining hands-on delivery with mentoring, 1:1s, and performance coaching.”