What decides the outcome is three things: how your team works, how fast you take on new technology, and whether the thing you shipped answers a need someone actually has. That is where I come in.
His input has genuinely shaped how we work. He doesn't just advise from a distance — he engages with the real problems, asks the questions that reframe how you see a challenge, and consistently pushes us toward higher standards. As we've moved into our fundraising phase, his experience and network have been invaluable, and his ability to translate a vision into a compelling, investor-ready narrative is second to none.
Cosmin-Alin Botoroga · Founder, DATA SWEEP · PhD, HarvardAlmost every engagement is one of these three, and the first call is usually about working out which one it really is.
Teams rarely slow down because the people got worse. They slow down because every decision starts routing through one person, verification quietly replaces trust, and nobody wants to be the one who breaks something. Verifying every step is latency. Fearing mistakes is packet loss. I work on what sits underneath: how decisions get made, who owns what, and what happens the first time somebody is wrong in public.
This is the one with no client logo attached, because it is the day job rather than a project. The people who have actually worked for me put it better than I can: 21 of them, on the about page.
Most AI programs stall in the same spot: a pilot that impressed everyone and changed nothing. The gap is almost never the model. It is that nobody re-cut the workflow around it and nobody decided what the team stops doing. We pick the few places it pays, score the proposals against something you can argue with, and ship it into the way people already work.
The hard question in product is not what to build next. It is whether the thing you are about to add is the thing anyone is actually missing. I have watched a company change what it sells because the data it was already sitting on was worth more than the app collecting it. Getting to that usually takes someone outside the building asking the uncomfortable question.
Recurring time inside the org. The standing version, for when the problem is how the team works rather than one project.
A bounded engagement on something specific: an AI adoption program, a product repositioning, a market you have to get into, or the narrative for a raise.
The same judgment pointed at your pipeline: can this team build it, what breaks first, and what does fixing it cost.
Three companies. One changed how an entire sector buys, one changed how a profession works, and one changed what it sells.
A research-data startup that had to sell into Romanian higher education. Long cycles, committee decisions, no obvious way in. So instead of working campuses one at a time, we convened the whole market: all 30 top universities' rectors and pro-rectors, plus the Ministry of Digitalization and the Ministry of Education, in one room at the Palace of the Parliament.
Alongside it: sharpening strategy, tightening product thinking, and building the narrative for the raise. The event drew enough demand that it's becoming a fixture in the university year. It stopped being a campaign. It became a channel the company owns.
A legaltech product that had to be adopted by notaries. That's a conservative, regulated profession which buys on peer trust and precedent, not on demos. Two months to learn a completely foreign domain, its legal language, and who actually holds sway in it.
Then we ran the room: a six-hour conference for 200+ notaries, built to explain how AI would change their workflow and to ask them to buy at the end of it. 70% signed up within 48 hours.
He didn't deliver, he blew it out of the park, locking down a 70% sign up from the audience in the next 48 hours. After seeing him work, I wouldn't pick anyone else for my critical showcases.
Vlad Bolovan · Founder, Notary.aiA consumer cognitive-health app for seniors, B2C only. I joined Eldie's Board of Advisors as the company was taking shape. Seniors are an audience where the standard design patterns simply fail, and where accessibility, clarity and trust matter more than polish. So we redesigned the workflows end to end. Then I mentored the team into building product primitives they could defend: engagement and progress metrics meant to be for brain health what steps are for physical health.
Those metrics generate something more valuable than retention: consented, longitudinal data on cognitive decline. That opened a second business in structured research datasets, and moved the company from B2C-only to B2B. Today the product has national TV coverage and partnerships with Romania's largest pharmacy chains.
Aleodor helped us see the product through our users' eyes: he pushed us to strip flows down to their essentials, rethink what “intuitive” means for someone in their 70s, and prioritize the changes that actually moved usability. No vague opinions — concrete, prioritized recommendations you can act on the same week.
Teofil Sturzoiu · Founder, EldieBecause I am doing this work, not remembering it. By day I lead Stripe's engineering site in Bucharest and own the platform 8,500 operators use to run risk, compliance, KYC and financial crime. That included an AML tooling migration across six jurisdictions, which cut handling time by about 40% and held SLA at 95–100% throughout, on a team that grew almost 200% while it happened. Before Stripe: Snyk, Adobe and Bitdefender.
So I have built the culture, shipped the adoption and argued about the roadmap, in that order and more than once. That is mostly what you are buying: someone who can tell you which of the three is actually your problem, including when the answer is that you do not need me.
A longer written answer, free and with no form in front of it.
Thirty minutes, no deck needed. Tell me who has to say yes and what keeps stalling. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so on the call and point you at who is.
I take a small number of engagements alongside the Stripe role, usually two at a time.