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John Merrells

Chief Product and Technology Officer

As an advisor, coach, and fractional CPO/CTO, I work with early-stage startups and founders, helping them to build their product development organizations.

I also work with investors and corporates, performing technical due diligence for investments and acquisitions.

I am a product and engineering leader with 30 years of experience as a software engineer, systems architect, engineering manager, product manager, technologist, founder, advisor, mentor, consultant, and investor.

My technical experience includes architecting, designing, and building massively scalable, highly reliable server systems and implementing Internet protocols and database query processors. My technical interests include semi-structured databases, distributed systems, and digital identity infrastructures.

My business experience includes raising funds, organizational design, recruiting, establishing and maintaining high-level partner relationships, due diligence for acquisitions, preparing companies for sale, internal entrepreneurship, and negotiating commercial contracts.

My industry experience includes enterprise software, internet infrastructure, manufacturing, networking, telecommunications, healthcare, education, and games.

In my career, I have been fortunate enough to participate in 16 exits with a total transaction value of $8.3 billion. And as a counterpoint, I have also been fortunate enough to learn from the 14 companies that I had a hand in helping fail.

I spend most of my time mentoring entrepreneurs, coaching founders, developing leaders, building product development teams, and advising startups.

Highlights

Dec 13 · linkedin

Leise Linnehan is #hiring. Know anyone who might be interested?

Nov 6 · linkedin

I just joined kea full-time! We're expanding our Machine Learning team with open roles for ML Ops, ML Engineers, and Data Engineers. We're particularly interested in candidates with experience with ASR, NLP, NLU...

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John Merrells
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Experience

CPO/CTO at kea
Advisor at kea

Education

Psychology, Pathwise Leadership Development
Psychology, Hoffman Institute
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire

Location

Menlo Park, California, United States