menlo-park-startup
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Amar Amte
Amar Amte is the founder and CEO of Pegbo, a Menlo Park construction-tech company that helps general contractors and public agencies find, vet, and track small, local, and diverse trade partners. After roughly a decade at Google and five years at Yahoo in engineering and program-management roles, he left big tech in 2023 to attack one of construction's oldest headaches: the 'spray and pray' bid invitation. Pegbo runs a searchable directory of more than a million verified trade partners and automates outreach, bid coverage, and Good Faith Effort compliance reporting. The company raised $1.4 million in a 2024 pre-seed round led by Nirman Ventures and is a pre-qualified supplier to contractors including Skanska, Webcor, Swinerton, and Hathaway Dinwiddie.
Michael Lai
Michael Lai is the CEO and co-founder of Sitejabber, a consumer review platform that has served more than 100 million shoppers and collected over 10 million reviews, and of SmartCustomer, an unbiased brand discovery tool launched in 2025. A Stanford computer scientist and Harvard MBA, he started Sitejabber in 2007 after a co-founder couldn't tell whether an online medical-equipment seller was a scam. His work sits at the intersection of consumer trust, transparency, and the messy fight against fake reviews and AI-generated content.