Bruce Krysiak
Venice, CA · brucek at alum dot mit dot edu · linkedin.com/in/brucek · github.com/brucek
Four-time founder and CTO. I see what’s possible before it’s obvious — then build the strategy, the team, and the product that make it real. Applied machine learning since 1995; agentic systems now.
Experience
Socialpl.us+
Founder / Principal
Independent product and engineering practice. Current focus: agentic systems.
- Magpie (2026) — Relationship intelligence for the agentic era: a voice-first app that turns spoken notes about people into a structured, searchable relationship graph. React Native/Expo with on-device Whisper, FastAPI backend, BAML-driven extraction, Postgres + pgvector semantic search, durable async pipeline. ~1,500 commits. Private beta on TestFlight at magpie.is.
- GovPal (2025) — AI civic engagement: any news article becomes a delivered message to your representatives. Article extraction, jurisdiction resolution, agentic drafting, phone-verified identity. Live at govpal.app. Three repos, ~900 commits — including an independent address→representative discovery and delivery layer, and an open dataset of LA county, city, and neighborhood-council officials in Open States format.
- PolicyReviewPro (2025) — AI analysis of homeowners insurance policies: upload, guided intake, coverage-gap identification, recommendations. Next.js/TypeScript. Visual prototype at policyreviewpro.com.
- ASURF — supply-chain security for Git-based AI agent skills; framework plus reference implementation.
- Athenium — a proposal for a digital civic commons.
- Trackster — in progress: takes a DJ playlist and finds, buys, and retrieves the highest-quality source for every track.
- Technical consulting for a regional logistics operator (2023–24). Board and advisory work below.
MobileCoin / Sentz Global
Director of Engineering
Ran the application layer of a $1B privacy-payments platform — roughly 22 engineers across four teams: web, mobile, core platform services, and an acquired Telegram bot group.
- Inherited and managed a web team of Ruby developers with no web-product track record and a departing PM, and carried it through a company-wide move to Kotlin — restarted the product, retrained the team, and shipped in under three months while developing and promoting an EM to run the day-to-day.
- Directly managed the middle-tier platform team bridging the core crypto engine to web, mobile, and API surfaces, the platform tooling team, and the mobile team until a dedicated EM was hired.
- Took over the team maintaining MobileCoin’s payment integration inside Signal’s mobile apps and kept it moving upstream into Signal’s own codebase — technical integration plus sustained negotiation for roadmap slots and release windows in a codebase we didn’t control.
- Took over an acquired bot team — a fully async, self-organized group — and kept their founder on as dev manager through the transition. When the company later cut the bot strategy, placed those engineers across other teams, several onto unfamiliar languages and toolsets.
- Built the management layer that replaced me: hired a mobile engineering manager, promoted EMs from within on the web and bot teams, then shifted to director-level scope while continuing to run platform directly.
Markett / Kickback
CTO / Head of Product
Stabilized an enterprise referral-marketing platform and installed engineering practice in the first three months; designed and soft-launched a React Native consumer shopping app over the next six. Ran a distributed team of designers, engineers, and QA. Supported the July 2020 raise.
Venice Beach Labs
Founder / CTO
Built OneDegree, a machine + human-learned influencer-recommendation product positioned against the ad-blocking wave. Multi-tier caching, high-throughput Instagram and blog crawling, Twilio SMS, modular ES6 client, JWT auth. Shipped under Channelverse, HAVN, and fAds.
TrueCar
VP, Advanced Product Development
Joined via the Honk.com acquisition with a mandate to integrate. Migrated production to EC2, shipped TrueCar’s first iPhone app, ran a security audit of the legacy Java platform, and architected a platform strategy transition.
Honk.com
Co-founder / CTO
Vehicle discovery built on social signal and ML recommendation. Alpha in one month, second alpha in two, private beta in three. 140+ production releases under TDD/Agile. Acquired by TrueCar.
Earlier
- PanjeaCTO, 2006–07
- Repositioned a social network for artists and creatives — then fighting MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook — to video aggregation and a widget platform; shipped in six months with a 16-person distributed team to 1M+ monthly impressions. DEMOgod, DEMO 2007; MIT Technology Review TR35 nominee.
- Mota.net2005–06
- Predictive vehicle pricing within 5% of actual across 600K+ records.
- Accruent2002–05
- Contract abstraction and automated operationalization of corporate contracts; led the platform architecture for the move beyond real estate. VB→J2EE rearchitecture, 16 engineers onshore and offshore.
- AviriFounder / CTO, 2000–01
- Trust-graph expertise discovery; recruited 14 founding employees, raised seed, filed patent.
- AnytuneFounder / CEO, 1997–99
- Possibly the first hybrid collaborative-filtering and expert-system engine for music discovery: I’ve never found an earlier one.
- Trilogy Development Group1995–97
- Constraint-based solvers for enterprise configuration; technical sales, prototyping bespoke client solutions.
Board & Advisory
- The Superfood CompanyBoard Member, 2023 — present
- Carlsbad, CA. Family-owned healthy beverage business. Product and channel COGS/profitability analysis; POS terminal selection and cost optimization.
- KinliaAdvisory Board, 2023 — present
- Los Angeles, CA. Startup strategy, positioning, and fundraising narrative — pitch and deck review, story refinement.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Combined BS/MEng, Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, completed in four years. Concentration in artificial intelligence. Classes with Marvin Minsky. UROP in Bill Dally’s parallel processing group. Undergraduate coursework at Sloan. Designed and built a drum machine up from the chip level. Minor in writing.
Media Lab thesis: “Networked StarLogo — A Social Exploration of Decentralized Control Systems.”
Technical
- AI / Agentic
- LLM orchestration, BAML structured extraction, RAG and vector search (pgvector), on-device speech (Whisper), agent-native development workflows (Claude Code, MCP, Linear→CI dispatch)
- Languages
- Python, TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Java
- Backend
- FastAPI, SQLModel, PostgreSQL, Redis, durable job queues, Playwright automation
- Frontend / Mobile
- React, React Native / Expo, Astro
- Infrastructure
- AWS, GCP, Railway, Docker, GitHub Actions, uv / pnpm monorepos
- Practice
- Engineering management, distributed teams, Agile/TDD, product strategy
Recognition
DEMOgod, DEMO 2007 (Panjea) · MIT Technology Review TR35 nominee, 2007 · Patent filed, trust-graph expertise discovery (Aviri, 2001)