Why I'm building TrueStrive.

I've spent over a decade building technology, leading teams, and hiring people. I've sat on every side of the career table — as a candidate, as a hiring manager, as an engineering leader running performance reviews for large organizations. And I've watched the same problem play out from every angle.

As a candidate, I felt the pain firsthand. Updating a CV after years of not touching it. Trying to compress complex, meaningful work into two pages of bullet points. Sending applications into silence and wondering if anyone even looked. The process was dehumanizing — and I knew my experience was more than what any document could capture.

As a hiring manager and tech leader, I sat on the other side. I've conducted hundreds of interviews. I've seen brilliant professionals who couldn't articulate what they'd done — not because they hadn't done impressive work, but because no one had ever helped them structure and tell that story. I've watched candidates get filtered out by keyword-matching systems that couldn't distinguish between someone who's genuinely excellent and someone who's good at formatting a CV. And I've seen people who weren't the strongest candidates advance because they presented well.

The signal was broken on both sides.

As a leader running performance reviews, I saw the same pattern internally. The most impactful contributors often had the hardest time articulating their value. They'd show up to review season and scramble to reconstruct months of work from memory. Meanwhile, colleagues who were better at self-narration — not necessarily better at the work — would come in with polished stories. The system rewarded presentation over substance, and most companies don't have the time or resources to fix that for every employee.

I started my career at BCG, where performance culture isn't a buzzword — it's the operating system. I learned how to analyze complex problems, communicate impact precisely, and operate in an environment where how you present your work matters as much as the work itself. That experience gave me an early, visceral understanding of the articulation gap: the distance between doing great work and being able to show it.

From there, I spent over a decade in data science and engineering — building ML products, scaling teams, and leading engineering organizations across startups and public companies. Through all of it, the thread was the same: the way we capture, evaluate, and present professional work is fundamentally inadequate.

TrueStrive is what I wish existed at every stage. As a job seeker, I wanted something that could help me articulate my real story — not just format a document. As a hiring manager, I wanted a way to understand candidates beyond a CV. As a leader, I wanted my team members to have a system that captured their accomplishments as they happened, so review season wasn't a memory exercise.

The career system doesn't serve the people in it. Not when they're searching. Not when they're performing. Not when they're trying to grow. I'm building TrueStrive to change that.