All mentors

Michael Greenberg

Startup Founder | Product Manager | Product Designer | Company Strategy | Travel Agent

San Francisco, United States (-08:00 UTC) Englishfrom San Francisco, United States
Usually responds in 16 hours
$80 / hour
Price per hour
30 min
Time Blocks Available
5.00
11 reviews / 24 sessions
Wed
14
Next availability

He really made me think about how to approach UX for my prototype from first principles, in particular how I can anchor the design in what the audience finds familiar. Invaluable 30 mins.

Michael Taylor

Michael was super helpful and had some really insightful stuff to say about founders and equity distribution when a startup is just starting out. It’s clear he’s been around the block a few times with startups. I highly recommend reaching out to him!

Steve Reinhardt

Michael is amazing! Extremely knowledgable and efficient - knocked out all my questions 10/10 and great GTM strategy insights

colleen burns

Bio

Michael is Entrepreneur in Residence at a Venture Capital fund where he builds 0-1 products and consults on portfolio company strategy. He is also the cofounder of Your AI Department, an AI strategy and implementation consultancy. Prior to these roles, he cofounded and exited an Agentic AI company. He is a product leader with a decade of experience building, designing, and shipping Digital Assistant and Avatar products in Silicon Valley. Sharpening his teeth at Google, Meta and Samsung, he is a Webby Award winning designer, holds half a dozen patents, and has a successful track record leading teams building products on the cutting-edge of innovation.

Expertise

  • Advice on funding

    Having just navigated this myself, there are some critical nuggets of information you NEED to have when fundraising. My top 3 are: 1. Treat it as a full-time job. Don't half-ass your fundraise for 3 months. Rather, do NOTHING but fundraise for 3 weeks. 2. It's a numbers game. Expect to talk to 50 investors before one shows genuine interest. Talk to 100 to get an investment. 3. Do your research. Look up the investor before speaking to them. They go into every conversation wanting to say yes.

  • Career guidance

    Knowing what to do next in your career is tough. It's not just about what pays more, what is more prestigious, or what is the best growth opportunity. In my opinion, it's about where you are in your life, what you're looking to learn, what stresses you're ok taking on, then finding a path forward that satisfies all of those (and more) conditions. What do you want for your future? Is the job you have now enabling that? Are you financially stressed? What's the impact of that on your creativity?

  • Design / UX

    Every product is designed, whether it's the toggles in your browser, the chair you're sitting on, or the clothes on your back. Taking a design-first approach to product development isn't for everyone, nor is it easy, but it is important when working to build a delightful product. I spent 7 years as a Product Designer at Google, Meta, and Samsung, refining the ability to take a user-centric approach to product, which has turned me into a deadly, efficient PM.

  • Mindset coaching

    It's easy to find advice on how to manage your GTM, build your MVP, fundraise, or build a team, but it's harder to find someone to give advice on how to navigate the tradeoffs you need to make when deciding those things. In my opinion, it comes down to what you're willing to sacrifice. Everything comes with a cost, and understanding the mindset required for each of those decisions is what makes the decision durable vs painful.

Toolkit

  • Figma logo

    Figma

    Very fluent in Figma from my time as a UX and Product designer. Figma is amazing, and any new team should absolutely become comfortable using it to communicate with either internal or external designers.

Experience

  • Greenberg Consulting LLC

    Travel Agent

    I'm the owner and operator of Greenberg Consulting LLC, a boutique luxury adventure travel agency based in California. I am an IATA member and CLIA certified Travel Agent, a published photographer, and an award winning drone operator. I book cultural and adventure tours to less commonly visited places around the world like Uzbekistan, Bolivia, the Arctic, and have personally visited 90 countries! Greenberg Travel Consulting prides itself on finding the best tour operators around the world, and has travel partners on nearly continent and in over half of the world's countries.

  • Your AI Department

    Founder and CTO
    •youraidept.com

    Founder of Your AI Department, where we offer AI Strategy to enterprises afraid of falling behind the AI curve. We are FAANG‑trained engineers & exited founders, on-call to turn AI hype into clear ROI for businesses.

    Consulting

  • Press On Ventures

    Entrepreneur In Residence
    •presson.vc/

    Entrepreneur in Residence, building the Future of Travel with AI, and consulting portfolio companies on the use of AI in their workflows.

    Venture Capital

  • getitAI

    Co-Founder and CPO
    •getit.ai

    Cofounder of getitAI, an AI ecommerce platform, helping brands 10x their conversion with human-realistic AI Sales Experts

  • Samsung

    Principal Product Designer
    •sra.samsung.com/

    Led a key redesign initiative, bringing the power of LLMs and GenAI to the Samsung ecosystem.

    Consumer Electronics

  • Meta

    Staff Product and Conversation Designer
    •facebook.com

    Bringing next-generation language technology to virtual and augmented reality. In 2022, I led the design of the Voice SDK, a partnership between the Assistant and Oculus teams within Meta Reality Labs. I managed our partnerships with more than 20 3P studios, driving experience design within voice-forward and MR-tech enabled use cases. During this time, I managed contracts with external design firms to create video prototypes, vertical slice experiences, and demo videos, and worked to set our overall product direction for a team of engineers. I led a team of 6 designers and acted as a PM for most of this year while we didn't have one. In 2021, I was the Art Director and Manager for our Assistant Experience Incubator, leading a cross-functional team and supporting a team of designers and prototypers creating experiences for the Assistant. A true 0-1 space, it was some of the most fulfilling work I've done in my career, threading the needle between creative vision, user needs, and product market fit, aligning the work to org-level goals.

    Facebook

  • Google

    Conversation and VUI Designer
    •google.com

    Won a 2019 Webby Award for Technical Achievement for Interpreter Mode - Led design for Interpreter Mode on Speakers and Smart Displays - Led design for Google Assistant Alarms and Timers - Led VUI design for Smart Home actions - Designed and launched Assistant Notes and Lists - Designed and launched Assistant Stopwatch - Designed and launched Smart Display VUI Onboarding experience - Designed Pixel device-action troubleshooting dialogues - Designed original Audiobooks VUI experience for Google Assistant - Contributed to Google Assistant Accessibility Framework

  • Google via Adecco

    Speech Data Evaluator

    - Curate and prepare scripts for recording with voice actors. - Monitor voice actor performance in studio. - Maintain Google’s internal ASR and TTS corpora. - Perform quality control on recorded audio and speech synthesis outputs.

  • ICSI - International Computer Science Institute

    Metaphor and Frame Semantic Analyst

    - Contributed to Metaphor and Frame Semantic analyses of political speech in mainstream media. - Mapped cognitive and linguistic frames to metaphor corpora. - Annotated linguistic frames and identified metaphoric representations of violent speech in news media. - Hired and supervised by George Lakoff

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