Bruce Krysiak

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Bruce Krysiak

CTO · VP Engineering · Head of Product & Engineering

Venice, CA · brucek at alum dot mit dot edu · brucekrysiak.com · linkedin.com/in/brucek · github.com/brucek

Four-time founder and CTO, one acquisition. 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: constraint solvers, collaborative filtering with an expert rule layer, trust graphs, predictive pricing, intent inference, and now agentic systems.

Experience

Socialpl.us+

Founder / Principal

Venice, CA · Jun 2008 — present

Independent practice, founded 2008. Consulting through 2024; agentic systems full-time since November 2024.

  • Magpie (Mar 2026 – present). Relationship intelligence for the agentic era: a voice-first app that turns spoken notes about people into a searchable relationship graph. On-device Whisper, FastAPI, BAML extraction, pgvector, React Native. ~4,200 commits in six months. Private beta on TestFlight.
  • GovPal (Dec 2025 – present). Any news article becomes a delivered message to your actual representatives. Article extraction, jurisdiction resolution, agentic drafting, phone-verified identity. Live at govpal.app. ~950 commits across three repos, including an independent address-to-representative discovery and delivery layer and an open dataset of LA local officials.
  • Also: PolicyReviewPro (AI homeowners-insurance policy review), ASURF (supply-chain security for AI agent skills), and board seats.

MobileCoin / Sentz Global

Director of Engineering

San Francisco (remote) · Dec 2021 — May 2023

Ran the application layer of a $1B-valuation privacy-payments company, the payments network inside Signal’s messenger: roughly 22 engineers across four teams (web, mobile, core platform services, an acquired bot group).

  • Inherited a Ruby web team 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, shipped in under three months.
  • Took over the team maintaining MobileCoin’s payment integration inside Signal’s mobile apps and kept it moving upstream into Signal’s own codebase, winning roadmap slots and release windows in code we didn’t control.
  • Built the management layer that replaced me: hired one engineering manager, promoted two from within, then moved to director scope while running platform directly.

Markett / Kickback

CTO / Head of Product

Venice, CA · Jun 2019 — Jun 2021

Stabilized an enterprise referral-marketing platform and installed engineering practice in three months, then designed and soft-launched a React Native consumer shopping app in the next six. Distributed team of designers, engineers, and QA. Supported the July 2020 raise.

Venice Beach Labs

Founder / CTO

Venice, CA · Jan 2013 — Feb 2019

Built OneDegree, machine + human-learned influencer recommendation positioned against the ad-blocking wave. High-throughput Instagram and blog crawling, multi-tier caching, Twilio SMS. Shipped under Channelverse, HAVN, and fAds.

TrueCar

VP, Advanced Product Development

Santa Monica, CA · Nov 2010 — Dec 2012

Joined via the Honk acquisition with a mandate to integrate. Migrated production to EC2, shipped TrueCar’s first iPhone app, ran the security audit of the legacy Java platform, architected the platform-strategy transition.

Honk.com

Co-founder / CTO

Santa Monica / San Francisco · Nov 2008 — Nov 2010

Vehicle discovery on social signal and ML recommendation. Alpha in one month, private beta in three, 140+ production releases under TDD/Agile. Acquired by TrueCar.

Earlier

Panjea (CTO, 2006–07): repositioned a social network for artists and creatives fighting MySpace and Facebook into video aggregation and a widget platform; a 16-person distributed team shipped in six months to 1M+ monthly impressions, load-tested to 75M. DEMOgod, DEMO 2007; MIT TR35 nominee. · Mota (2005–06): predictive vehicle pricing within 5% across 600K+ records. · Accruent (2002–05): contract abstraction; led the VB→J2EE rearchitecture, 16 engineers. · Aviri (Founder / CTO, 2000–01): trust-graph expertise discovery, deployed to thousands of users; 14 founding hires, seed raised, patent filed. · Anytune (Founder / CEO, 1997–99): possibly the first hybrid collaborative-filtering and expert-system music recommender; I’ve never found an earlier one. Seven-person team, seed raised. · Trilogy (1995–97): constraint solvers for enterprise configuration; $3M+ in billings.

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, MA · 1991 — 1995

Combined BS/MEng in CS & EE, completed in four years. Concentration in AI; classes with Marvin Minsky. UROP in Bill Dally’s parallel processing group. Undergraduate coursework at Sloan. Built a drum machine 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 dev workflows (Claude Code, MCP, Linear→CI dispatch). Languages: Python, TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Java. Stack: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, React / React Native, AWS, GCP, Railway, Docker, GitHub Actions. Practice: engineering management, distributed teams, Agile/TDD, product strategy.