Paul English

PARTNER

Paul cofounded Kayak, Lola, GetHuman, Moonbeam, Xiangqi.com, Intermute, Boston Light and Speed Games.

Paul also cofounded the nonprofits Institute for Applied AI, Embrace Boston, Summits Education, the Winter Walk for Homelessness, and the Bipolar Social Club.

Paul Schwenk

PARTNER

Paul is developing new consumer software products, getting back to his engineering roots.

Previously Paul worked in various management positions at Lola.com, KAYAK, and Intuit.

Eliza Bladon

OPERATIONS

Eliza is a jack of all trades, covering operations, finance, legal, IT, and people ops.

She has previously worked at Boston based companies such as Lola, Wayfair, and care.com.

Kate Brigham

OPERATIONS

Kate loves wrangling details, community, and world-building. She is thrilled to be working with the BVS team again

Ahmed Faraz

ARCHITECT

Ahmed is a software architect with comprehensive full-stack development expertise.

At BVS, he is responsible for architecting clean, resilient, scalable solutions, advising on research and implementation of complex technical issues, and building quick MVPs.

Ashley Hocking

MARKETING

Ashley is an accomplished marketing leader with a strong background driving consumer start-ups through periods of dynamic growth and innovation.

She most recently co-founded the family communication app Kinsome, and previously led marketing teams at Boston-based brands like Purple Carrot, Openbay, and Goji.

Brian Kalma

EIR

Brian is a marketer, builder, founder and designer. Previously he was on the early high-growth teams at Zappos and Gilt Groupe, while pioneering ecommerce design patterns still in use today. He's most proud of the people he's hired and mentored, many are now Chief Design Officers, Chief Brand Officers, and founders in their own right. See also kalma.io

Brian Michon

TECH / PRODUCT

Brian is a fractional CTO and product-focused builder with deep experience in rewards, e-commerce, affiliate commerce, SaaS, privacy, and AI-enabled products.

Previously Brian was CTO/CISO at Rakuten/Cartera and held senior engineering roles at Intuit, Abine, Linden Lab, and Apps.com. He now helps early-stage teams turn ideas into scalable products.

John Bullock

PARTNERSHIPS

John was a co-founder and Managing Partner of Windspeed Ventures, where he was the main interface and board member for numerous start-up investments. His other responsibilities included managing multiple portfolios.

Before this, he was an early (pre-revenue) Wellfleet Communications/Bay Networks member and a senior development engineer at Motorola Corp.

Julie Melbin

ARCHITECT

Julie is a veteran of Interleaf, KAYAK, Apple and others.

She now mixes some community volunteering time into her week when not keeping herself busy working on software.

Kate Morgan

TALENT

Kate is a talent acquisition leader who understands that building high-performing teams requires more than just technical skills.

Through her efforts, she has supported numerous companies within the startup community, helping them recruit for the multifaceted qualities essential to team excellence.

Interested in working at BVS? talent@bvs.net

Matt Suarez

SOFTWARE ARCHITECT

Matt is a software architect experienced in building reliable, high-availability distributed systems on AWS. At Rocket Mortgage, he owned CMS platform reliability and built a production-grade AI agent framework to automate engineering workflows. He's since applied AI to rapid prototyping and agentic engineering, and previously worked as a backend engineer at Velir Studios and Fidelity Investments.

Stella Falkner

STRATEGY/PRODUCT

Stella cofounded Mixlab and Dowa Health. Her background is in product, design, and strategy, and she has worked with companies of all sizes, from small startups to Fortune 500s, helping them build products and experiences that people love.

A big believer in paying it forward, she also mentors female founders and young professionals exploring careers in tech.