Profile / Builder
David
David
Fano
He was trained to design buildings. He decided people were the more interesting structure.
He was trained to design buildings. He decided people were the more interesting structure.
Most of the software you use to find a job belongs to someone else. The job board wants the posting. The network wants your attention. The recruiter wants a fee. David Fano built Teal on a stubborn idea that the job seeker deserves a tool of their own.
Teal is an AI-powered career platform - a place to track applications, tailor resumes to the language of each posting, generate cover letters, and treat the job hunt like the project it actually is. Fano founded it in 2019 and has run it as CEO ever since, today from South Miami rather than the usual coastal tech corridors.
His pitch is blunt. The tools that companies have used for decades to filter, rank, and sort candidates are now cheap and everywhere. So put the same firepower in the hands of the person sending the application. Level the field by arming the side that has always been outgunned.
It is a strange second act for a man with a Master of Architecture and a teaching post at Columbia. But Fano has always been less interested in the building than in how the thing gets built.
Teal reframes the job search as something you manage with data and a system, not something you survive with a spreadsheet and a prayer. Track, tailor, apply, repeat.
“The days of passively managing your career are over.”David Fano
Fano studied architectural design at Florida International University, then earned a Master of Architecture with honors from Columbia, picking up the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize and a Computer Aided Design Honor Award on the way out. By 2006 he was back at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, teaching the next set of students how technology was rewiring the design process.
He worked the studios you are supposed to want - SHoP Architects, where he was Director of Technology Research, and stints around the field at firms like Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Somewhere in there he noticed the work that excited him was not the finished facade. It was the model, the data, the systems that decided how a thing came together.
So in 2008 he co-founded CASE Design, a consultancy that dragged the architecture industry toward building-information modeling and smarter technology. It was a business about how buildings get made, run by someone who would rather build the tools than pour the concrete.
In 2015 CASE was acquired by a fast-growing company that happened to lease a lot of office space. That company was WeWork.
Master of Architecture. Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize. Computer Aided Design Honor Award. Adjunct professor since 2006.
His architecture-tech firm was absorbed into WeWork in 2015, pulling Fano into the orbit of one of the decade's loudest growth stories.
At WeWork, Fano rose into the senior ranks - Chief Product & Experience Officer and, later, Chief Growth Officer. He led product, design, and technology while the company multiplied across cities and continents. He helped scale the part that worked: the product, the data, the machine for opening locations fast.
Owned product, design and technology during WeWork's expansion from a single space into a worldwide network.
Helped drive the relentless expansion that defined WeWork's most ambitious years.
Growing that fast meant hiring at volume - and watching, up close, how broken the path from resume to job really is.
When Fano started Teal in 2019, he did the unusual thing for a founder with engineering chops: he waited. Instead of shipping code, he used no-code tools to test ideas, watched how real job seekers struggled, and optimized for understanding the problem before solving it. Delay the build, learn the problem, then build.
The early concept was a job-search service. The market pushed him toward AI-powered resume tools. When generative AI arrived, it slotted neatly into the mission of leveling the playing field, and Teal leaned in - resume tailoring, keyword matching against job descriptions, cover-letter generation, application tracking.
Underneath the features sits an argument Fano makes often in press and on podcasts: the companies have always had the data advantage. The point of Teal is to hand that advantage to you. Treat the search as a project you run, with a dashboard and a system, instead of a thing that happens to you.
He brings receipts. Over two decades he has hired more than 4,000 people and read hundreds of thousands of resumes. He has been on the other side of the desk more than almost anyone telling you how to get past it.
“I build things that help people work better.”David Fano
Begins leading seminars on how technology reshapes the design process - a post he still holds.
A consultancy pushing building-information modeling and technology into the architecture world.
Fano joins WeWork as a senior product, design and technology leader.
Serves as Chief Product & Experience Officer and Chief Growth Officer through the company's global run.
Launches the AI-powered career platform and takes the CEO seat, where he remains.