A small consulting practice for founders and operators shipping product in the post-AI era. Strategy, design judgment, and engineering that holds up after the demo — in fintech, real estate, consumer software, and B2B.
In 2023, “AI-powered” was a pitch. By 2026, it's a baseline expectation — yet most AI features in production are still demoware: confident in a screenshot, confused in real use.
The teams pulling ahead aren't the ones with access to the newest model. They're the ones with the taste to know which use cases are real, the discipline to test rigorously before launch, and the patience to design around the failure modes their users will actually hit.
That's where we work: in the gap between an impressive demo and a product people open every day.
Small, senior engagements. We work with a handful of teams at a time — usually founders or operators inside a larger company who need a thinking partner who's done it before.
From the messy whiteboard stage through public launch. We've shipped consumer apps with millions of users and B2B products with single-digit pilot customers — the playbook is different, the discipline is the same.
The parts of an LLM product that don't exist in a demo: evals, retrieval, agent loops, the small-model handoff, the prompt that survives a model deprecation. The boring scaffolding that decides whether a feature ships.
Where to invest, what to kill, how to talk about it. Particularly useful when a foundation-model release rewrites your roadmap every six weeks — which it does now.
For founders who've raised, hired, and started building — and want a senior operator in the room who has actually launched something and lived with the consequences. Ongoing or per-engagement.
Companies the principal has founded, led product at, or advised. The full track record lives on the about page.
Flat-fee, AI-driven realtor service. Buy a home in the US or Canada without paying a 3.0% buyer's-agent commission — the savings stay with the buyer.
Pioneered the “debit-style credit card” — a debit card that paid up to 3% cashback while keeping the overspending guardrails of debit. Acquired by Avant in 2021.
Decision-platform infrastructure for fintech credit and fraud teams. Operator-side advisory on credit-risk and fraud-risk product — what actually ships, what governance looks like in production, and where the platform should bend toward the user.
Consumer-credit fintech that acquired Zero in 2021. Continuing advisory across credit and fraud-risk product — the same problem space, larger scale, with the operator lens an exited founder brings to a roadmap.
Led competitive leaderboards, community matchmaking, and the launch of “New Words With Friends” — the franchise refresh that pushed the title back to the top of the App Store charts.
NYC-based mobile trivia game. Built, scaled, and exited — the diversity-of-portfolio exercise that taught the live-ops lessons every consumer founder eventually learns.
A 30-minute call. If we can help, we'll tell you how. If we can't, we'll tell you who can.
hello@talktoone.com →