startup-operator
(15)
Stephanie Majors
Stephanie Majors is a startup operator and self-described multi-time Chief of Staff who turns organizational chaos into working systems. She has served as Executive Business Partner to the CEO at Coactive AI, an AI-driven visual content platform in San Jose, and as Chief of Staff at companies including TIDAL and The Sales Collective. With more than two decades in operations across entertainment, finance, and technology, she is known on LinkedIn for a candid, no-filter take on what the Chief of Staff role actually demands and for championing quiet, results-focused leadership over the loud kind.
Tiffany Teng
Tiffany Teng is a product and marketing executive turned strategic operator who works on Strategic Projects for the CEO (fractional) at Jump, an AI assistant for financial advisors. A Stanford-trained student of how people make decisions, she pairs go-to-market and product marketing chops with a deep interest in behavioral psychology. She was named to the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist 2020 and chairs the board of SaverLife, a nonprofit helping working families build savings.
Chris Mahl
Chris Mahl is President and CEO of Pryon, a Raleigh-based enterprise AI company building a retrieval-augmented generation platform that turns unstructured enterprise data into accurate, source-attributed answers. With more than two decades in enterprise software, he was part of the early leadership teams at Salesforce and Informatica, later ran revenue and operations as CRO at Botkeeper and Opentron Labworks, and held an executive role at Right Media Exchange before it was acquired by Yahoo. He focuses on scaling go-to-market and operations for technology companies and positions Pryon at what he calls the 'knowledge layer' of the AI stack.
David Rubinstein
David Rubinstein is the CEO of OptiRTC (Opti), a Boston-area company that builds cloud software to monitor and adaptively control stormwater infrastructure in real time. A technology operator with roughly four decades of experience scaling high-tech startups, he joined Opti as President and COO in 2018 and became CEO in 2019, steering the company from an engineering-services consultancy into a digital water product business. His background spans SaaS and data companies including DataXu, Resolve Technology, Invoke Solutions, and Convergent Group, which he helped take public before its sale to Schlumberger.
Khari Austin-Rawls
Khari Austin-Rawls is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Goldcast, a Boston-based B2B video and events software company backed by roughly $40M in venture funding. He built his early career in streaming media at Disney, where he rose to Senior Manager on ESPN+ acquisition and engagement, then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2025 before moving into a startup leadership seat. A University of Pennsylvania graduate who studied East Asian Languages and International Relations, he is known for candid reflections on being the only Black person in the room and for a personal creed about not squandering time.
Madeleine Ormond
Madeleine Ormond is a New York based business strategist and co-founder of The Backflip Group, a boutique consulting firm built to move companies from strategy to reality. She spent more than a decade working inside tech startups and larger technology companies before co-founding the firm, where she leads on product strategy, financial modeling, go-to-market planning, and the kind of hands-on execution that turns a plan into a working operation. Her work centers on helping growing companies test ideas at low risk, sharpen their thinking, and build foundations that scale.
Samantha Malone
Samantha Malone is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Farther, the New York-based wealthtech that turned unicorn in early 2026 on the back of a $150M Series D led by General Atlantic. She joined roughly five months before the round closed - her first startup - after an MBA at Chicago Booth and stints at McKinsey, Skydio, GoDaddy, and Apple's global finance projects. A Bay Area kid who commuted through Santa Clara's business school a year early, she is the person building the deck, running the room, and stitching the operating rhythm as Farther scales past $23B in recruited assets.
Eugénie Fontugne
Eugénie Fontugne is a Swiss-French operator who runs Strategy & Operations inside the Office of the CEO at Inkitt, the reader-powered, AI-driven publishing startup behind the Galatea app. She built a career that jumped from selling chocolate and flavor at Firmenich to leading community at Global Shapers Geneva, writing about French food and culture for MerciSF in the Bay Area, advising the AI firm VCG.AI, and pulling together a 90-person Lovable x Project Europe hackathon in Stockholm on little more than a walk-around-London hunch. She works where storytelling, product, and operations overlap.
Nina Eiböck
Nina Eiböck is the Finance & Strategic Ops Lead in the Office of the CEO at Ello, the San Francisco edtech building the world's first AI reading coach for young children. An Austrian-raised, Oxford- and Stanford-trained financier, she left investment banking at J.P. Morgan and energy-sector finance to help run the numbers and the strategy behind a Series A startup teaching kids to read. She is the kind of operator who names her pet rabbits after Napoleon and Warren Buffett.
Alexandra Frankel
Alexandra Frankel is the CEO of Getwizer, a New York-based hybrid consumer insights platform that fuses AI automation with human research expertise to run fast, custom, modular studies for brands like Mars, Coca-Cola, Paramount and Puma. A McGill-trained psychologist with a master's in quantitative methods from Columbia, she rose through roles at Nielsen, Ipsos, NBCUniversal, Simulmedia and Hotspex before spending five years at Getwizer as head of insights and strategy, then taking the top job in February 2025. She has two prior research-startup exits (to Nielsen and Ipsos), two industry innovation awards, a notable streak of NFT consumer studies, and a nonprofit children's book venture, Rainbow Zebra Co., built around teaching kids kindness.
Michael Greene
Michael Greene is the CEO and President of Skylark, a New York based luxury travel agency that blends human travel advisors with high-tech booking tools. A Cornell Hotel School graduate, he spent a decade building hospitality marketplaces - leading the Amex Global Dining Network and global growth at Resy, co-founding the members-only restaurant platform Dorsia, and serving as Chief of Staff at Avero. He now leads Skylark and its members-only last-minute luxury hotel platform, Wanderluxe.
Shiri Gil
Shiri Gil works in the Office of the CEO at Vega, the New York and Israel-based cybersecurity company building a federated Security Analytics Mesh that raised a $120M Series B in February 2026. A former Israeli military intelligence team leader turned operator, she pairs a Columbia cognitive science degree with hands-on marketing-technology and operations experience from Deloitte and earlier roles. She sits at the operational center of one of the fastest-funded security startups of the moment.
Brian Brown
Brian Brown is the Chief Business Officer of Brave Software, the privacy-first browser company founded by JavaScript creator Brendan Eich. Since 2016 he has led the business side of Brave's bet to rewire online advertising around consent and the Basic Attention Token (BAT), pitching publishers, brands, and platforms on a model where users get paid for their attention. A veteran startup operator, he co-founded and helped run cloud-computing pioneer Joyent (later acquired by Samsung), founded enterprise and software startups before that, and began his career in journalism and human rights work. He is a Vassar graduate and a marathon runner who likes to quote Aristotle when people ask him about success.
Chris Risley
Chris Risley is the CEO of Bastille Networks, the wireless threat intelligence company that uses software-defined radio to spot the cell phones, Bluetooth gadgets, and rogue radios that traditional cybersecurity tools never see. A serial chief executive with more than 25 years in software, he has run nine venture-backed startups, taken one public, and sold four to companies like Symantec, F5, and LivePerson. Before Bastille he ran DNS pioneer Nominum and DDoS-defense firm Defense.Net. He works out of Santa Cruz, California, and frames wireless airspace as the security perimeter most enterprises forgot to defend.
Michael Beaudoin
Michael Beaudoin is the CEO of Housecall Pro, the Denver-based vertical SaaS platform that helps plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, cleaners and other home-service pros run their businesses from a phone. He joined the company as a board member in 2015 and stepped into the chief executive role in 2020, bringing two decades of experience leading and investing in consumer and home-services companies including HomeAdvisor, Einstein Bros. Bagels, and Waldo Photos, which he co-founded. Under his leadership Housecall Pro has scaled to serve tens of thousands of service businesses and roughly 1,400 employees, raising a $116.5M total war chest including a $65M Series D.