Customer Research and Strategy for Venture Funds & Portfolio Companies

I bring the customer to the table where strategic decisions are being made.

That table is full of smart people making a call that depends on what customers will actually do. There's usually some evidence in the room, and never enough time to know what it means before the call has to be made.

I've sat at that table. I co-founded Fabric, an AI claims platform, inside American Family Insurance's startup studio, and Fixle, a homeowner intelligence platform acquired by Spectora in 2025. Before that, nearly a decade at Trek Bicycle in product management.

Everything I built that worked came from something a customer told me. Not always in words. More often it was what they did, not what they said.

What I do

I work fractionally with venture funds and the companies they support, bringing outside evidence into decisions that otherwise get made without it.

The point isn't research. It's a clearer picture of where the revenue actually is: who buys, why, what they'd pay, and which opportunities are real enough to build against. Those conversations often surface people worth knowing: the advisors, next team hires, and partners, that a company would not have found otherwise.

The harder half is what happens next. Evidence only matters if a team acts on it. I've spent my career getting people who disagree pointed in the same direction.

That work has included:

• Research with entrepreneurs, funders, and ecosystem leaders that shaped a new fund's investment thesis and the capital structure built around it

• A fund's brand launch, messaging, and go-to-market for a category of capital the market hadn't seen before

• Positioning for a fund working through a founder transition, built from interviews across its ecosystem

• Customer discovery across multiple user segments, plus in-market pilots, that validated a venture before it was funded and got it built

• Segmentation and willingness-to-pay testing that concentrated a product roadmap on the highest-value buyer

• In-market testing that killed a venture on unit economics, and surfaced the insight that became the next one

What comes of it

Clients have de-risked portfolios, hit the product milestones that unlocked their next round, grown sales 20% in a declining market, exceeded a funding goal by 300%, and stopped spending on messaging their customers didn't care about.

I take on a small number of focused engagements at a time.

If you're weighing an investment, or about to make a decision that depends on what customers will actually do, let's talk.