Vetted Product Strategy Professionals

Andrew Chang

Screened

Executive operator and startup investor specializing in FinTech, crypto, and regulated blockchain

New York, NY22y exp

“Former COO of Paxos who joined near inception and helped scale the company to a $2.4B valuation, owning operations across nearly all functions and implementing core operating systems like OKRs and decision frameworks. Now advises and coaches early-stage founders through Lynx Collective (NYC startup community he founded), teaches a Startup Executive Bootcamp, serves as an NYU Stern adjunct professor, and sits on a public company board.”

“Product leader with experience at ZipRecruiter, Quora, and Turing, spanning marketplace growth, AI/ML moderation, and talent-matching systems. They pair strong product intuition with operational rigor, having driven measurable wins like a rare +5% onboarding completion lift in a mature product, cutting Quora spam exposure from ~8% to <1%, and improving Turing fulfillment from ~20% to ~30%. Strong cross-functional leader and manager with a clear human-centered philosophy on AI.”

“Operations/engineering leader from Poly who optimized a professional headset portfolio by aggressively prioritizing technical debt and consolidating HW/SW platforms (down to 2 each), accelerating time-to-market by ~6 months and enabling 3–6 month variant cycles. Also drove AI-enabled quality improvements by leveraging JIRA bug data to automate test case creation and expand coverage, while aligning engineering and product management around MVO delivery.”

“CTO-focused candidate with experience at foundations evaluating startups, including reviewing technical architectures and coaching teams to refine ideas for better platform fit and synergies. Prioritizes company culture and integrity when choosing leadership roles.”

Nishant Pathak

Screened

Executive Engineering Leader specializing in cloud-native platforms and security

14y exp

“Former CTO of EzCred, a fintech embedded finance/digital lending infrastructure startup that built an API-first underwriting and servicing platform using alternative data (e.g., GST and bank statements) to cut loan decisions from days to minutes. Helped raise $1M in seed funding, built the engineering org and compliance-ready cloud architecture, and ran partner pilots before the company shut down during COVID-driven lending market contraction.”

“Chief of Staff to the COO of firmwide engineering at Goldman Sachs, serving as lead strategist for a COO/CIO-sponsored program to drive operational excellence and scalability via AI/automation. Ran discovery across divisions, built governance/OKR systems, negotiated budget commitments with divisional leaders, and coordinated firmwide CFO alignment while preparing Board-level materials for executives.”

“Serial entrepreneur who has created several companies, brought them to market, raised as much as $15M, and achieved exits before moving on to new ideas. Combines an academic and institutional background spanning Harvard, MIT, Mass General Brigham, and the Department of War with two decades of consulting experience, and is especially motivated by building impactful technology.”

Pankaj Goyal

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in FinTech, IAM, and AI/ML platforms

SF Bay Area, CA22y exp

“Player-coach backend leader at PostLo who led a major backend architecture upgrade to enable AI-driven features by separating transactional systems from AI workloads (vector embeddings/image validation) and adding async processing for heavy jobs. Also owned production reliability improvements (query/index optimization, workload isolation, monitoring and load testing) and translated an ambiguous retention goal into a shipped cashback rewards feature with auditable transactions.”

“Product leader with experience spanning global health, startup growth, and AWS enterprise systems. Most notably led a telehealth AI initiative at Orbis that launched in 4 months, validated against historical patient cases at 99.9% match to human consults, and evolved from a support feature into a standalone consult product and app. Brings a strong human-centered AI perspective, using automation to extend expert capacity rather than replace professionals.”

“Technology/engineering leader with experience at Real Messenger, Wolters Kluwer, and Accenture AI, spanning roadmap definition through execution and org scaling. Has operated at the executive level (fundraising, investor relations, SPAC merger activities, media presentations) while driving architecture decisions validated by PoC/testing/production success metrics.”