We’re building a community where your wisdom matters.
Our Founding Story
After selling our previous company, AI.Reverie, to Meta, our founding team found ourselves flooded with inquiries from investors and fellow founders seeking guidance on various business matters—terms sheets, go-to-market strategies, scaling, you name it. This surge of interest highlighted something profound: the wealth of wisdom and experience we’ve accumulated holds genuine value.
As we delved deeper into these conversations, we discovered a shared sentiment among countless accomplished professionals. At the peak of our careers, brimming with passion and drive, we want to continue doing meaningful and impactful work.
We saw an opportunity to connect these seasoned professionals with decades of experience and showcase their wisdom to the world. And thus, OpenWater was formed.
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Why We’re Called OpenWater
OpenWater is an invitation to start a new journey.
OpenWater is about what’s ahead, what’s next.
OpenWater extends opportunity to the horizon.
Meet the Team
Paul Walborsky
Paul has significant experience leading and scaling media and technology startups. His most recent executive role was Co-Founder of AI.Reverie, which was acquired by Meta. Paul served as SVP at The New York Times, leading its global digital expansion. Paul was also the CEO of GigaOM for over seven years, growing revenue from $300k to $18 million. He was also Founder and COO of WorldStreet, a CRM company acquired by Thomson Reuters.
Anh Dang
Anh is a creative executive turning chaos into cadence for over two decades in tech and media. She has led entrepreneurial teams to craft meaningful products with global impact for the United Nations, The New York Times, AI.Reverie (acquired by Meta) and more. She advocates for play and innovation by lecturing at design schools, advising early stage startups, and mentoring at New York University.
Chris Albrecht
Chris brings decades of experience in both tech journalism and establishing corporate content flywheels that attract and retain massive audiences. He was an editor at the seminal tech blog network GigaOM, and Editor-in-Chief of the influential food technology blog, The Spoon. He chaired the wildly popular NewTeeVee conference and The Spoon’s Food Robotics Summit.
Seth Potter
Seth has decades of experience in technology most recently as VP Partnerships at Synthesis AI and a founding team member of AI.Reverie which was acquired by Meta. Prior to this, Seth was a Managing Director at ICR advising companies in the AI, software, network security and mobile/telecom sectors. Seth also spent over two decades as a senior financial analyst covering technology and telecom.
Knowledge is identifying a tomato as a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
Active Advisors
Kristi Bowers
Kristi is co-founder of Grape.ag and manages the award-winning Kings Mountain Vineyards. She is a Trustee for Santa Clara University and sits on the boards of The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the 49er Foundation.
Marc Cantwell
Marc brings a wealth of experience building and scaling service oriented architecture, distributed systems management, and performant system design for companies including Disney, Amazon Web Services and Hulu.
Len Dorfman
Len’s impressive career spans marketing, product management, and development at startups and enterprises. Len has held senior leadership roles at Fujitsu America, Sun Microsystems and Oracle, and began his professional career at Intel.
Daeil Kim
Daeil leads the team at Meta that builds the next generation of synthetic data tools and algorithms to empower the future Metaverse. He was founder and CEO of AI.Reverie, acquired by Meta, and senior data scientist at The New York Times.
Kristin Kobey
Kristin is a seasoned product leader and coach with over 20 years of building customer-focused tech products and product teams at startups and large enterprises including Autodesk, StarMaker Interactive, and Nickelodeon/Viacom.
Sara Lomelin
Sara is the founding CEO of Philanthropy Together, a global initiative to grow the global giving circle movement, backed by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Sara was one of the 2023 Forbes 50 Over 50.
Cynthia Litchi
Cynthia is an accomplished executive who drove the rapid growth and technology transformation at Fantasías Miguel, Latin America’s leading arts crafts chain, taking the company from 15 to 40 store locations.
David Marcus
David has an extensive network of corporate clients and investors. He is currently Managing Director at Emigrant Bank, was head of Capital Markets at Etrade, co-Head of Capital Markets at WR Hambrecht & Co., and SVP at Lehman Brothers.
Erin McMahon
Erin is an event specialist for technology and financial services companies. She has successfully led event production and management for over 20 organizations including Tedx, Mozilla, HashiCorp, GigaOM and more.
David Toner
David builds brands that inspire and empower human lives. With over 20 years of experience he has lead brand and marketing teams at Shutterfly, Photobucket, CBS Interactive, Yahoo! and Dell.
Tony Verde
Tony is an executive recruiter and trusted advisor with a passion for candidate and client success. He has decades of experience connecting thousands of professionals with corporate partners and high performance teams. Tony is Managing Partner & Founder of inspHIRE Talent.
Let’s transform wisdom into value.
Join the OpenWater community to re-imagine what is possible for transformation and success.