About My Stand-In

I've spent 25 years in B2B Sales and Marketing. The best part was never the deals.

It was the people.

I've carried a bag, led teams, and worked my way into VP of Sales and Marketing roles across some of the most competitive markets in tech. And through all of it, the work that mattered most to me was building teams. Not by chasing logos. Not by sorting resumes for the right school names or the right company names. By actually getting to know people.

I'd take a call with the candidate nobody else was looking at. I'd ask questions that weren't on the script. I'd push past the polished pitch to find out how someone actually thinks, what drives them, what they've quietly figured out that nobody gave them credit for.

Those were the hires that changed everything.

The traditional job search wasn't built for those people.

Here's what I kept seeing: the candidates who impressed me most in conversation were the ones who almost never made it to me.

They didn't have the flashy resume. They hadn't come up at a brand-name company or gone to the right school. The algorithm filtered them out before a human ever read their name. And that meant most hiring managers never got the chance to be surprised by them — the way I always was.

That bothered me for years.

What if the conversation could happen before the filter? What if the person doing the hiring could actually meet you, before they decided whether to meet you?

I believe AI should do something useful.

Twenty-five years of sales and marketing taught me that the best product in the room doesn't always win. The best story does.

Not AI as a buzzword. Not AI as a shortcut that makes everyone sound the same. AI as a tool that, when you build it right, genuinely helps people show up as themselves and tell the story they've earned the right to tell.

So I built a working version. An AI-powered career profile — a personal site with an embedded AI trained on someone's career story, so that anyone who visited could just ask and get real answers. The kind of answers that come out in a good conversation, not a keyword-stuffed bullet point.

When I saw it work, I knew this was the thing.

This isn't just for the established professional.

I have three kids. Two are in college. One is a senior in high school. None of them have launched their careers yet — and that's exactly the point.

A Stand-In™ isn't just a tool for people who've already built something impressive. It's a way to start building your story before the stakes get high. To walk into your first internship interview, your first networking event, your first real professional conversation with something that sets you apart from everyone else in the room who showed up with nothing but a one-page resume and a firm handshake.

The earlier you start, the bigger the head start.

My Stand-In is for anyone who's more than their resume suggests.

The career changer with real-world skills that don't fit a job title. The senior professional who knows their industry cold but doesn't know how to package it. The executive who always impresses once someone actually talks to them. The college junior who wants to differentiate themselves before graduation.

Here's the irony nobody talks about. Every one of us is expected to present ourselves within the same tired framework — a resume, a LinkedIn profile, a two-page document that hasn't meaningfully evolved in decades. And the very same AI technology being used to evaluate your story is changing daily, getting faster and sharper at filtering people out before a human ever gets involved.

We're being asked to be more human in a process that's becoming less human by the day.

It might be time to tell your story differently.

A Stand-In breaks that framework. It's your story, told in your own voice, on your own terms — not optimized for an algorithm, but built for the person on the other side who actually has the power to say yes.

People are already standing out.

The best product in the room doesn't always win. But the person with the best story, who shows up prepared, who gives a hiring manager or recruiter something to remember? They win more than most.

My Stand-In is helping people do exactly that — professionals reclaiming their narrative, career changers finally getting the conversation they deserved, and young people entering the workforce with a head start most of their peers won't have.