Brittany Taylor

Running the Strategy at the Center of Every Home

The WiFi router is the quiet infrastructure of modern life - invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn't. Plume has built a platform around making it work, always, for the tens of millions of homes wired through its 270+ ISP partners. Brittany Taylor makes sure the strategy that drives that mission actually executes.

As Vice President of Strategic Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO, Taylor occupies one of the most analytically demanding positions in technology leadership. The dual title is not ceremonial. It signals something specific about how Plume works: the person closest to the CEO is also the person accountable for turning direction into operational reality. Two roles, running simultaneously, in a company that has raised $794M and is still moving fast.

Her path to this position didn't run through the standard startup-to-scaleup track. It ran through credit desks at two of the world's largest investment banks, through the venture arm of a $200B semiconductor giant, through a legal technology company redesigning how small businesses access legal services. Each stop added a layer. Wall Street gave her the analytical baseline. Intel Capital gave her the investor's lens. LegalZoom gave her the operator's toolkit. Plume gets all of it.

From Credit Desks to Cloud Platforms

Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia was a deliberately cross-functional choice of major - part computer science, part operations research, part applied mathematics. It's a degree that trains students to see the whole system, not just the component. That instinct would follow Brittany Taylor through every subsequent career chapter.

Banking came first. At Citigroup and then Goldman Sachs, Taylor worked in credit and corporate banking - the unglamorous but essential machinery of deal finance. Managing credit exposure at Goldman means understanding exactly how much risk is embedded in any given relationship, and how to structure agreements that account for the full range of outcomes. It's analytical work that moves fast and has real consequences.

The pivot to Intel Capital came with a change of scope. As Deputy Chief of Staff for one of the world's most active corporate venture arms, she was embedded in a different kind of decision-making: equity investments, mergers and acquisitions, executive communications across a portfolio of technology bets. She spent three years there, learning the investor's language - how to evaluate a company not just on its financials but on its trajectory, its team, its strategic fit.

LegalZoom followed. As Director of Business Operations, she led teams focused on attorney-assisted products - a corner of the legal tech space that requires unusual sensitivity to how people actually make decisions under stress. It was operational work in a consumer-facing environment, managing the distance between product promise and service delivery at scale.

Inside the Connected Home Machine

Plume operates at the intersection of several things most people find difficult to think about together: cloud infrastructure, consumer experience, ISP partnerships, AI-driven network optimization, and cybersecurity for connected devices. The company's platform - built on the OpenSync open-source framework - runs inside the modems and routers that internet service providers hand to their customers. What happens inside that box, and across all the devices connecting to it, is Plume's domain.

That includes adaptive WiFi that learns traffic patterns and adjusts in real time. Network security that quarantines IoT devices showing anomalous behavior. Parental controls delivered as a managed service. Customer analytics that help ISPs understand why subscribers leave - or stay. Plume calls it a subscriber experience management platform, which is a technical description of a human problem: people expect their internet to work, everywhere in their home, all the time, without asking for help.

The company runs this across more than 270 ISP partners in over 40 countries. Managing the strategy that supports that scale - the partnerships, the product decisions, the organizational priorities - is the work Taylor is in the middle of. Chief of Staff roles at companies this size are coordination-intensive at a level most titles don't capture. She's not just advising. She's running the operational infrastructure that makes executive decisions stick.

Plume raised $300M in its Series F round in 2021, bringing total funding to nearly $800M. At that level, the pressure isn't to prove the concept - it's to scale it without losing the things that made it work. That's an operational problem as much as a strategic one. And it's exactly where Taylor's cross-functional background becomes an asset that's hard to replicate.

Engineering First, Business Second

The degree choice was telling. Systems and Information Engineering at UVA sits between disciplines by design - it's concerned with how complex systems behave, how to model them, and how to make them more efficient. Students work across operations research, applied mathematics, computer science, and systems analysis. It's one of the better undergraduate foundations for someone who would eventually spend their career optimizing how large organizations operate.

The Harvard MBA came after the banking years - a deliberate inflection point that reframed investment analysis skills into a broader strategic framework. It's the kind of credential that signals a transition: from executing within existing structures to designing new ones. And it did what MBAs are supposed to do at their best: it expanded the playing field.

The Unusual Combination That Makes Her Effective

Most executives have depth in one domain. Taylor has built unusual breadth across three that rarely overlap in a single career: quantitative financial analysis, corporate venture capital, and technology operations. Each discipline brings a different quality of attention.

Finance trains precision - the habit of quantifying exactly what's at stake, before and after a decision. Venture capital trains the capacity to hold multiple possible futures in mind simultaneously, to evaluate a company not on what it is today but on what it might become. Operations trains the tolerance for complexity - the recognition that the distance between a good strategy and a good outcome is filled with coordination problems, resource constraints, and timing issues that don't appear on any slide.

Running as both VP of Strategic Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO means Taylor inhabits both the long-view and the immediate-term simultaneously. The Chief of Staff function is inherently present-tense: what needs to happen this week, this quarter, to keep the executive agenda moving. Strategic Operations is inherently future-facing: what structures and capabilities does the organization need to be able to do what it's planning to do in two years?

Managing both requires a particular kind of mental switching that most organizations don't ask of a single person. That Plume has structured her role this way suggests something about how the company operates - and about what they value in her specifically.

Taylor is also affiliated with Black Women On Boards, an organization working to advance board representation for Black women in corporate America. It's a dimension of her professional life that connects her operational work to a longer arc: not just making existing systems run better, but thinking about who gets to participate in their design.