Product Innovation Advisor

Michele is a product-innovation advisor and operating leader whose 20+ years in Silicon Valley span nearly every function that turns an idea into a scaled business: product and service operations, strategic sales and deal structuring, technical alliances, and chief of staff to a company president. Drawing on 11 years in strategy and operations consulting, she moves fluidly from framing the right questions to standing up the operation that answers them, taking ambiguous, early-stage ideas to validated, fundable products.

As an Operating Partner and Venture Builder at Mach49 for 7+ years, she partnered with global corporations to build and launch new products, marrying startup ingenuity with enterprise capability. Her clients spanned energy, industrials, and financial services, including Shell, Schneider Electric, Eaton, Stanley Black & Decker, and Prudential. Most notably, she led customer discovery and market validation for pear.ai, a virtual energy expert acquired by Exelon Corporation in 2020.

Earlier, she led at scale across enterprise software leaders: VP and chief of staff to Symantec’s President of Products and Services, a Senior Director shaping strategic sales and deal structuring at Oracle, and technical alliances at Commvault. She brought data-storage startup Data Domain its first customers (later acquired by EMC for $2.1B) and, as VP of Quality and Programs at Yipes Communications, helped scale service operations to 1,000+ enterprise customers ahead of its acquisition.

Known for pairing executive judgment with a get-it-done bias for action, Michele turns rigorous customer and stakeholder research into clear direction teams can act on. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.