With $500K in pre-seed funding in a fictional case study, I faced the challenge of balancing two marketplace sides (cat sitters and owners) while building toward a billion-dollar business. Core issues included payment delays, last-minute cancellations, high churn rates, and inefficient booking processes. I proposed a dual payment verification system and operational improvements to boost user trust, reduce churn, and enhance platform reliability.

This project optimized revenue growth for Plantiva, a fictional company, by allocating 20 employees across acquisition, account management, and support roles over 24 months. Key takeaways include balancing acquisition and retention, leveraging compounding revenue from account management, and reducing churn through better customer satisfaction.

This project involved identifying three startups aligned with a venture capital thesis focused on visual technology and AI at the pre-seed and seed stages. After evaluating key metrics such as innovation, scalability, and market potential, Mixedbread.ai emerged as the strongest fit due to its disruptive embedding generation technology and alignment with high-growth semantic search markets.