Phillip Masterson

“25+ year professional exploring entrepreneurship; previously helped develop corporate venture capital at Siemens and AVEVA and ran end-to-end diligence through deal close, with heavy technical diligence on pre-seed/pre-revenue companies. Interested in building an AI-enabled hard lending/origination approach to reduce decision-to-close time and scale in a large lending market, and prefers VC studio/EIR models with paid roles rather than equity-only arrangements.”

Yongyan Cao

Screened

Principal Vehicle Dynamics & Control Systems Engineer specializing in autonomous driving and hybrid powertrains

Fremont, CA25y exp

“Robotics controls engineer with experience spanning an RV/trailer automatic hitching and towing robot (vision + EKF sensor fusion, anti-jackknife/anti-sway, multi-loop torque assistance control) and 3 years on a ROS-based RoboTaxi autonomous driving stack at Pegasus Technology. Improved MPC trajectory generation robustness by converting hard constraints to soft constraints with slack variables, and built an AI-powered PR review agent (Claude-code) integrated into CI/CD to reduce bugs.”

“Operations/strategy leader who owned a founder-level turnaround at Bolt Threads, rescuing and scaling a failing business unit through ERP + S&OP implementation, operating model redesign, and cross-functional KPI-driven execution. Achieved a 97% COGS reduction, enabled repeatable production at scale, and supported investor diligence and SPAC readiness by creating a credible operating narrative.”