Three problems,

AND WHAT

I've described the companies rather than named them, and left out anything belonging to a partner or a customer. The numbers are unchanged.

A pre-seed AI AdTech company  /  VP Operations & People, acting COO  /  2024 — present

A company that didn't exist yet.

No entity structure, no back office, no people infrastructure, and a founder who needed to be building the product instead of reading employment law.

  • Built the operational backbone from nothing: PEO, finance stack, spend policy, knowledge base, and an onboarding flow that provisions the whole tech stack automatically the moment someone is hired.
  • Took on multi-state employment compliance across four states, plus the legal and tax structure needed to operate in Japan.
  • Opened a new business line in Japan with a design and distribution partner. I spent about a third of my time in Tokyo.
  • Designed spend controls into the data infrastructure itself, negotiated cloud credits, and set up billing and permissions before the bill became a surprise.
  • Built internal tooling with Claude Code and MCP servers to generate operational documentation — with a human verification step, because nothing should ship unchecked.

Onboarding and offboarding take 60% less time. A functioning company on two continents, run by people who have never all been in the same room.

An MIT-affiliated AI research organisation  /  Head of Operations  /  2024 — 2025

Money moved, and nobody could see it move.

Two partnered research entities, a $24M budget, overlapping conflicts of interest, and no shared governance framework holding any of it together.

  • Built a multi-entity financial model tracking funding, burn, and headcount across the labs and both entities — in Smartsheet, because a six-figure ERP was the wrong answer to the question.
  • Wrote the governance and conflict-of-interest framework, and reported strategy, finance, and operations to the board.
  • Ran people operations end to end: H-1B sponsorship and transfers, domestic PEO and international EOR, and standing up a German entity to meet EU labour requirements.
  • Architected the expansion plan with board stakeholders, including the full transition plan for restructuring the entities.
  • Mentored early-stage technical founders through their own back-office buildout.

A $24M budget with a governance framework behind it, and a board that could finally see what it was funding.

A Series A consumer platform  /  Chief of Staff  /  2022 — 2023

One revenue line, and no agreement about what was working.

Revenue concentrated in a single business line, a runway that needed watching, and a leadership team without a shared definition of success.

  • Co-built a KPI framework with the Chief Product Officer, then used it to price and launch a new ad sales line across market verticals.
  • Owned the board decks and investor communication as the CEO's proxy.
  • Ran HR and compliance across three states — performance review design, layoffs, visa transfers.
  • Rebuilt hiring end to end: an ATS, a passive candidate pipeline, and an interview loop built around what the company actually valued.

600% month-over-month growth on the new line. Interview-to-hire time halved. The team grew 40%, including the CTO and Director of Product.