Regulated markets don't buy from a demo. Notaries, universities, ministries, hospitals, banks — they buy on peer trust, precedent and consensus, on timelines that kill startups. I help founders get in front of them, and get investor-ready on the way there.
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, HarvardMost go-to-market advice assumes a market you can reach: run ads, book demos, work the pipeline. Institutions don't work like that. There is no single buyer, the decision sits with a committee that meets quarterly, and nobody wants to be the first one to say yes.
So I stopped working pipelines and started building rooms. Get the profession, the sector or the ministry into one place, let peer adoption do the work, and the objection stops being "is this safe?" and becomes "why aren't we already doing this?"
Get the product in front of the body that actually has to buy it — and build a channel that keeps working after I leave.
Strategy, product rigour, and the narrative that makes a round land. For teams heading into a raise with a real business and a muddled story.
The same judgment pointed at your pipeline: can this team build it, what breaks first, and what does fixing it cost.
Three companies, all selling into markets that move slowly and buy carefully.
A research-data startup that had to sell into Romanian higher education — long cycles, committee decisions, no obvious way in. Rather than working campuses one at a time, we convened the market: all 30 top universities' rectors and pro-rectors, together with the Ministry of Digitalisation and the Ministry of Education, in one event 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 is becoming a recurring fixture in the university year — which means it stopped being a campaign and became a distribution channel the company owns.
A legaltech product that had to be adopted by notaries — a conservative, regulated profession that buys on peer trust and precedent, not on demos. We ran a conference as the sales motion: get the profession into one room and let peer adoption do the selling.
A consumer cognitive-health app for seniors, B2C only. We redesigned the app's workflows end to end and I mentored the team into building defensible product primitives — engagement and progress metrics designed 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 — structured research datasets for pharmaceutical research — and moved the company from B2C-only to B2B. Today the product has national TV coverage and partnerships with Romania's largest pharmacy chains.
Founder quote pending.
Because the institution's objection is usually not commercial — it's risk. By day I lead Stripe's engineering site in Bucharest and own the platform 8,500 operators worldwide use to run risk, compliance, KYC and financial crime operations, including an AML tooling migration across six jurisdictions that cut handling time ~40% while holding SLA at 95–100%.
So when a ministry's legal team asks how consent, data residency or auditability actually work, that is not a question I have to take away. That is the day job.
Thirty minutes, no deck needed. 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. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so on the call and point you at who is.