Vetted Mentoring Professionals

“Enterprise partnerships/sales professional from the food tech/restaurant aggregator space with ~5 years’ industry experience, including founding-team work launching Kita in the UAE. Negotiated and closed GCC-wide strategic deals with major restaurant groups (e.g., Americana/Alamar), combining C-level relationship management with rigorous unit-economics modeling; recognized for AED 12M ads revenue and sub-0.5% fail rate performance.”

Scott Compton

Screened

Staff/Lead Game Systems Designer specializing in AAA live games and emergent narrative

30y exp

“Progression/economy designer and lead live designer with shipped AAA and live-service experience across Shadow of Mordor/War, Guardians of Middle-earth, Days Gone, and Star Trek Online. Known for building quantitative tuning models (200+ stat points calculator), leading large QA-driven balance loops, and using telemetry to uncover and fix major friction points (e.g., off-screen archer deaths) while maintaining engaging, fair progression.”

Dony Permedi

Screened

Animation Director specializing in character performance and real-time previs

20y exp

“Gameplay/cinematic animator and animation supervisor with 20+ years in CG across games, film/TV, VR/AR, commercials, and apps, including primary animation ownership on Louis Vuitton’s "Louis the Game" (Maya-to-Unreal). Strong real-time pipeline and mocap cleanup/export expertise (FBX), known for diagnosing issues like gimbal lock and coordinating with rigging/pipeline/Unreal teams; recently supervised an unreleased 8-minute Unreal-rendered cinematic trailer.”

Taylor Bloom

Screened

Executive sports technology leader and entrepreneur

Remote, USA14y exp

“Entrepreneurial media founder who built SportTechie from a side blog into an influential B2B sports-tech media company, raised capital, and sold it to Leaders Group (Advance Publications). Brings hands-on CEO experience across fundraising, monetization, hiring, and exit execution, plus strong ties to the sports-tech startup and accelerator ecosystem.”

“Design-technologist with both UX and front-end development depth, spanning high-impact brand launches and regulated pharma sales tools. Led the experience direction and technical implementation support for DuPont's Kevlar product site—featuring Three.js, AEM, and advanced motion design—which generated strong lead capture and won an Effie, and also improved Eli Lilly IVA delivery by building a grunt.js workflow that reduced update cycles from a week to just a few days.”

“Senior public sector sales leader with deep state and local government experience across a six-state region in North America. Grew a $300M territory by 10%+ YoY while maintaining 95%+ retention, and has led complex hardware-to-software expansion strategies, including public safety software and a $36M critical communications modernization deal involving county and state stakeholders.”

“Product/design leader with experience at Indeed Flex, Buildertrend, and Google, including principal design work on an LLM-powered scheduling assistant for gig workforce management. Particularly strong in human-centered AI, using user research and analytics to improve conversational workflows, and in translating messy operational processes into clearer product experiences across multiple industries.”

Aakash Khepar

Screened

Mid-level Full-Stack AI Engineer specializing in agentic AI systems

Tempe, AZ4y exp

“Full-stack engineer with strong ownership across production SaaS and AI agent systems, including a multi-tenant enterprise analytics product at Fractal Analytics and an archive intelligence platform for a real nonprofit. Stands out for combining deep backend/system design, secure AI/RAG implementation, and rapid zero-to-one execution—plus multiple hackathon wins and leadership roles.”

Jonathan Cook

Screened

Executive product leader specializing in AI-native human-in-the-loop platforms

New York, NY17y exp

“Product leader with experience driving major platform builds and even company pivots, including transforming Kinetic from a wearables-focused insurtech into an AI-enabled workers' comp claims platform. Combines deep customer discovery, low-tech MVP experimentation, and strong cross-functional judgment; also helped shape smartwatch app platform strategy at Fitbit and has a clear philosophy of AI as a human decision-support tool rather than a replacement.”

“Former AA-level GTHL player with a strong interest in the business/management side of hockey, including salary cap structures, roster building, and player evaluation. Selected for a sports mentorship program with a Toronto Maple Leafs Assistant GM (monthly sessions), and is comfortable creating educational social media content to guide hockey families through development and recruiting pathways.”

“World of Warcraft quest designer who owned end-to-end quest pipelines and shipped standout content, including the memorable escort/stealth quest “Klaskin’s Great Escape” tuned through playtests and a Dragonflight capstone framing story that drove higher side-quest engagement. Experienced in Lua scripting, reward/economy balancing, and building daily/weekly endgame loops (Beetle Ranch/Rak-Ush), with recent UE5 Avalanche node-based VFX prototyping exposure.”

“Has experience in several VC-backed companies and is motivated by early-stage company building—especially the fast pace of early engineering and cross-functional "wearing many hats" as a startup grows. Some exposure to investors through prior roles, though has not fundraised directly; familiar with VC and has read about accelerators like Y Combinator.”

Mark Krawczuk

Screened

Senior Program & Project Leader specializing in digital transformation and cross-functional delivery

New York, NY30y exp

“Cross-functional operator with experience at Rippling and Twitter, known for building lightweight but rigorous communication and reporting systems (shared notes, weekly updates, exec decks, issue-tracker velocity) to keep teams and executives aligned. Emphasizes psychological safety and early conflict resolution, and has supported senior leaders managing high-volume creative/media output through concise, proactive executive briefings.”

Shruti Krishnagiri

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader & Technical Founder specializing in AI automation platforms

San Francisco Bay Area, California20y exp

“Founder/CTO who built and shipped a consumer subscription-bundling platform end-to-end (architecture, implementation, testing) and scaled it to thousands of customers and major partners. Previously led a major reliability overhaul at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for a Google-Docs-like ed-tech product—boosted observability, introduced incident management, and migrated to a Docker-based scalable architecture. Heavy user of AI tools (Cursor/Claude) for development, testing, and code review, with a strong bias toward lightweight, fast-moving execution.”

“ML/AI engineer with Goldman Sachs experience building production fraud detection and RAG-based trading insights systems end-to-end. Stands out for combining real-time ML infrastructure, GenAI retrieval systems, and compliance-aware design, with measurable impact including nearly 25% false-positive reduction and improved analyst productivity.”

Maria Martinek

Screened

Senior medical sales leader specializing in clinical diagnostics, devices, and pharmaceuticals

Mansfield, TX24y exp

“Medtech sales specialist with 13 years at Haemonetics and deep experience in TEG/coagulation and cardiovascular accounts. She has taken hospital opportunities from cold call through evaluation, value analysis, contracting, and first PO, including an 11-month win at Pomona Valley Hospital, and has also provided high-stakes in-room support during cardiac cases, including resolving a frozen MPS machine with no case delay.”

Prakash Bhanu

Screened

Director of Software Engineering specializing in cloud, platform, and FinTech systems

Sunnyvale, CA22y exp

“Senior software engineering leader with broad 0-to-1 product experience spanning web apps, microservices, monoliths, messaging platforms, ML/AI products, and large-scale distributed systems. Notable examples include building a payroll/finance product for cast and crew, a distributed messaging platform, and a Walmart application deployed across multiple CDNs and clouds handling hundreds of TPS, with personal ownership across architecture, design, coding, and support.”

Yaritsa Hernandez

Screened

Senior Technical Product Manager specializing in merchandising and supply chain systems

Remote, OR9y exp

“Product/operations-focused leader with hands-on experience driving automation and internal AI solutions in complex enterprise environments at Nike. They stood out by identifying critical SAP S/4HANA gaps after go-live, designing cross-functional solutions that removed manual work and protected order flow, and by building a Databricks-based chatbot to make technical and merchandising knowledge more accessible.”

“Senior GTM and marketing executive with 20+ years leading growth strategy across Fortune 500 brands and startups in sectors including automotive, telecom, retail, finance, and logistics. Notable highlights include leading an automotive GTM initiative tied to $200M+ opportunity capitalization, serving as CMO for a $550M organization, and creating a novel embedded insurance product for a marketplace that later became an industry standard.”

“Backend engineer focused on scalable, security-first platform architecture—recently built an end-to-end centralized access-control system that launched successfully with ~50k early adopters and was designed to support ~10x traffic growth. Experienced in production authn/authz (token verification, handoff/session migration), and in de-risking migrations via feature flags, phased rollouts, A/B testing, and Splunk-based monitoring.”

“Lifelong basketball player with extensive exposure to elite Southern California high school basketball (Servite/Trinity League) and familiarity with college recruiting through close connections, who applies a structured PFF-style evaluation lens to scouting. Comfortable identifying talent via film and in-person viewing and proactively engaging prospects through social media outreach; also brings experience working demanding overnight/on-call schedules from Amazon last-mile logistics.”

“Operations and GTM leader with HP experience managing acquisitions of industrial printing companies (e.g., Nur, Scitex, Colorspan) and driving expansion strategy across EMEA. Strong in route-to-market/channel design, post-merger role clarity (RACI), and using Salesforce for KPI-driven performance management; also brings ICF-style coaching for mentoring leadership teams.”

“QA professional with ~7 years of experience working in Scrum teams, involved from requirements and user story creation through test strategy/planning, execution, defect triage in Jira, and verification. Highlighted catching multiple issues early on an AI-driven project to avoid production regressions and escalating a blocker where a frequently used UI was broken to get it fixed quickly. Has not shipped an AAA game title.”

“Founder of an algorithmic trading startup who reports raising $25M+ over roughly the last three years. Has spent several years working closely with VC funds, focusing on fundraising and lead generation with VC/PE firms, and is strongly committed to entrepreneurship and scaling new technologies.”