> machine61 --mode advisory-practice

Advisory.
Teaching.
Coaching.

machine61 is an advisory practice for founders, operators, product and business leaders, and business owners working on hard technology and hard business problems in an increasingly unforgiving market. We bring three decades of building, shipping, and operating to the moments that decide a company's future, from early-stage launches and new products to refocus, turnaround, and the AI question. Two entrepreneurs-in-residence, a bench of subject-matter experts, and a practice built around advisory, teaching, and coaching. We don't take over. We put you back in control.

Bring Us the Hard Call Meet the Founders
Advisory Practice · EIR ★ Veteran-Owned
01 — The Practice

A practice built by founders,
for founders

After three decades of building companies, mission-critical systems, and a few things that didn't quite work, we found ourselves wanting something different. Not another exit. The chance to give back, to hand the next group of founders, operators, product and business leaders, and business owners the hard-won counsel, the network, and the honest coaching we wish someone had handed us.

That's machine61. An advisory practice built by experienced founders and operators. We advise, teach, and coach the next generation of leaders working on the hardest things, whether you are starting from zero or driving change inside an existing business of any size or complexity. We build business, product, and service strategies. We develop teams and the leaders who run them. And we bring deep engineering capabilities across data, AI, automation, embedded systems, IoT, robotics, and quantum when the technology is the hard part.

We never stopped being builders. The practice is how we keep building new things through the founders we work with, and how we make sure the people coming up behind us build them better, faster, and with fewer scars than we collected getting here.

AI & ML Data Embedded & IoT Robotics Quantum Crypto
02 — How We Partner

What partnership
looks like

Here is the part that is easy to get wrong. We're partners, not vendors. We advise, teach, and coach. We're aligned with you, not billing against you, and we win when the company does. We don't take over. We put you back in control. The cards below aren't a service menu; they're facets of that one relationship.

01 / ADVISORY · TEACHING · COACHING · BUILD

Four modes, one relationship.

Advisory when you need experienced counsel on a hard call. Teaching when the skill needs to live inside your team, not on a retainer. Coaching when the real work is on you, on how you think, lead, and decide. Build when the technology has to ship, designed and delivered alongside you. Every partnership is a mix of all four, in the proportions the moment calls for.

02 / ASSESSMENT

An assessment that maps what to do, in what order, and why.

When the situation calls for a clear-eyed look before the work begins, we run a structured assessment across strategy, data, AI and automation, technology, organisation, and operating model. You come out with a current-state picture, prioritised opportunities ranked by impact and feasibility, and a roadmap you can act on, whether you do the work with us, internally, or with another team. The fee credits toward any follow-on engagement, so the diagnostic effectively becomes free when we work together.

03 / STRATEGY & BUSINESS MODEL

Turning a good idea into a real company.

Positioning, business model design, pricing, go-to-market, and fundraising strategy. We work with you to find the version of the company that is defensible, fundable, and worth a decade of your life, and the sequence of moves to get there.

04 / GOVERNANCE & CADENCE

The operating rhythm and delivery cadence that keep a company honest.

Boards, decision rights, metrics that matter, and a weekly and quarterly cadence that turns intentions into shipped work. We design the delivery cadence and process behind that work, the sprints, releases, and definition of done that make shipping a habit, not an event. We help leaders grow into the role their work needs, and build the governance that earns investor, board, and customer trust.

05 / TEAM & TALENT

We help you build, hire, and develop the team.

Hiring is the highest-leverage thing a leader does, and the easiest to get wrong. We help you recruit, build, and develop the team, from first engineers to senior leaders. When a role needs someone who has done it before, we open our network of seasoned operators and executives. We don't take over your hiring; we help you raise the bar on every seat.

06 / AI & AUTOMATION

AI and automation strategy, with the technical counsel behind it.

AI is the technology shift of a generation, and automation, traditional and AI-driven, is reshaping operations alongside it. Most companies are getting both wrong. We help you decide where AI and automation actually matter in your business, separate the real from the hyped, build the use cases and workflows that pay off, and integrate them into product and operations without breaking what works. Strategy on Monday, hands-on technical counsel by Friday.

07 / DEEP TECHNICAL COUNSEL

Counsel on the genuinely hard engineering.

This is where machine61 started, as veteran engineers shipping mission-critical systems for organizations that could not afford to fail. That muscle did not go anywhere. We bring deep technical counsel to extremely hard problems. Architecture review, technical due diligence, system design, and hands-on advisory across real-time embedded software, signal processing, ML and data platforms at petabyte scale, and systems that have to work the first time. Strategy you can actually trust, because we have built the real thing.

08 / THE BENCH

Subject-matter experts on call.

Direct access to specialists across robotics, embedded systems, high-performance computing, mobile, quantum, legal and compliance, insurance, and banking and fintech. Hard questions answered by people who have done the real work, not theorized about it.

09 / THE PITCH

We help you build & hone the pitch.

Until you have a product, the story is the product. We work with you to build the narrative, the deck, and the demo, then we sit across the table and pull it apart until it holds. Storyline, framing, objection-handling, and the unglamorous reps that turn a rough pitch into one that lands the room, whether it is investors, the board, or your own team.

> first draft welcome

When it's genuinely the right fit, we'll also embed directly as hands-on operators or advisors. But partnership is the default, and the point.

> ready when you are

Facing something hard? Bring it to the practice.

A launch, a new product, a strategy reset, a turnaround, or the AI question. Bring us the situation. No deck required, no warm intro needed. If it's hard and it matters, we want to hear it.

Tell Us What You're Facing
03 — When We Help

Where we add
the most value

We work with founders, operators, product and business leaders, and business owners at moments where the right counsel, taught into the team, changes the outcome. The four most common situations.

01

Early-Stage

Founders, or operators with a green-field charter, going from idea to first revenue, and figuring out the people, structure, and discipline that come with it.

02

New Products & Services

Bringing a genuinely new offer to market. Framing it, finding the first customers, and knowing what to do once you have them.

03

Refocus

Companies, products, or services that need to reset, often because AI has changed what is possible, sometimes because the original plan stopped working. Narrowing the strategy, retiring what isn't working, and rebuilding a cadence that ships the version that does.

04

Turnaround

Stabilising operations, restoring confidence, and rebuilding a credible path back to growth.

04 — In Residence

Entrepreneurs
in residence

The people you'll actually build with, and learn from. Both have founded companies, both have shipped systems where failure was not an option, and both still build. The residency is as much about coaching and teaching as it is about building.

// they also run obstacle courses, for reasons that remain unclear

Salvatore Magnone

Sal Magnone

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Sal's LinkedIn reads: "Co-Founder, Engineer, Veteran. I build multinational technology companies and run obstacle courses." That about covers it. He has co-founded two successful technology companies (one around machine learning in insurance, one around embedded, real-time software in defense), and, by his own admission, one or two that weren't so successful. He's the EIR for founders building things that have to work the first time. When he isn't running obstacle courses, he teaches business and military strategy at the university level, speaks at DARPA events, and keeps the rest of us from playing with matches near the solid fuel rockets.

x-PwC x-Sia Partners x-Gigaspaces x-US Army
Meiling Zhang

Meiling Zhang

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Mei is the kind of engineer that senior engineers ask for advice. Her workspace is perpetually covered in small parts, some burnt, and smells of solder. She once tried to move us to a hangar because our office lease precluded welding. She co-founded her last two companies with Sal, and is currently the founder of a stealthy but ridiculously well-funded quantum computing company focused on signal processing in defense. She's the EIR for founders building things that touch the physical world. Outside the workshop, she's an elite CrossFitter and obstacle course runner.

x-IBM x-Angry Robot Labs x-lab347
05 — The Bench

Operators you
can call

Every founder we work with gets access to subject-matter experts who have built and shipped at the highest level. Not advisors who lend a name. Operators who pick up the phone.

Nicole Tedesco

Nicole Tedesco

Robotics & Devices

Few people know more about designing, building, and deploying robotic and device technology than Nicole. At ARCA she defined and implemented a "robotics as a service" business model. At CalvIO she eliminated 50% of software-related costs and cut time-to-delivery by 80%. At the legendary Boeing Phantom Works she built things she can't tell us about outside "the cone of silence."

x-ARCA x-Microsoft x-Boeing Phantom Works
Alex Cone

Alex Cone

Mobile & Product

Alex is a rocket scientist. No, really. He worked on the Space Shuttle program. That was before he joined Steve Jobs at NeXT (he's very proud of still having two working units) and then followed Steve back to Apple, where he helped build the iTunes Store. Alex speaks at international conferences on enterprise mobile development and security, and considers himself an alpha-geek.

x-NASA x-NeXT x-Apple
Matt Weinstein

Matt Weinstein

High-Performance Computing

Despite any 8-bit resemblance, Pitfall Harry was not based on Matt. He was, however, Director of Technology at Activision back in their MechWarrior, Warcraft, and Hexen days. After Activision he moved to [x+1] (now Rocket Fuel), where he built a media-buying platform at big-data scale. More recently he's been at Ab Initio, dealing with very high-performance, low-latency, distributed systems.

x-Ab Initio x-Activision x-[x+1]
Michael Vila

Michael Vila

Legal & Compliance

Michael is the person you want in the room when the regulators call. For over a decade he has worked inside banks and broker-dealers on the unglamorous-but-existential work of compliance programs, regulatory response, and remediation across the Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering, Know Your Customer, and sanctions. He started at Deutsche Bank and went on to advise global financial institutions out of PwC Advisory. Michael has worked every seat where a control can quietly fail, which is exactly why his rarely do.

x-Sia x-Chubb x-PwC
Peter Rossow

Peter Rossow

Insurance

Peter has spent his career on the side of the insurance balance sheet that has to add up. A trained actuary, he went on to serve as CFO and Treasurer at Wolverine Mutual and CFO at Great West Casualty, building a track record of identifying and delivering world-class solutions for carriers ranging from the Middle Market to the Fortune 100. In an industry that runs on getting the numbers right, Peter is who you call.

x-Sia x-EY x-Deloitte x-KPMG
Shelley Pittman

Shelley Pittman

Banking & Fintech

Shelley works at the intersection of banking and technology, modernizing financial institutions and helping fintechs scale. As a Chief Banking Officer focused on Embedded Banking and BaaS, she grew a sponsor-bank portfolio from one institution to ten and guided a fintech through both a state banking license and a Federal Reserve Master Account. Earlier she led financial-services practices at Accenture, IBM, KPMG, and Slalom. Few have sat on both sides of the bank-fintech table as often as Shelley.

x-Goldman x-BoA x-Accenture x-KPMG
06 — Principles

How we partner

A practice lives or dies on whether founders trust it. These are the commitments that earn it.

01

You're in charge

You run the company. Always. We don't take over. We put you back in control.

02

Solutions, not slide decks

We earn our place with solutions, not slide decks. If we can't actually help, we shouldn't be in the room.

03

Skin in the Game

We invest our time, our network, and our reputation alongside yours. We win when you win, and not a moment before.

04

Operator Mindset

Everyone here has run the companies they talk about. We've made payroll, missed it, hired well, hired badly, and learned from all of it.

05

Honest Counsel

We tell you what we actually think, especially when it's not what you want to hear. Comfortable advice is worthless advice.

06

You Own It

It's your company. No control provisions that trap you, no lock-in. We're a partner in the build, not an owner of your destiny.

07 — Track Record

We've done
this before

These are credentials for the people advising you. Between us, we have co-founded venture-backed companies, shipped systems at petabyte and exabyte scale, built embedded software for austere environments, and operated inside organizations where failure was not an option.

Companies Co-Founded

Sal and Mei have co-founded multiple venture-backed companies together, including a machine-learning company in insurance and an embedded, real-time software company in defense.

Angry Robot Labs lab347

Currently Building

Mei is the founder of a well-funded quantum computing company focused on signal processing in the defense space.

quantum signal processing defense

Where We've Operated

The team's operating experience runs deep, across some of the most demanding engineering and advisory environments anywhere.

PwC IBM US Army NASA Apple NeXT Boeing Phantom Works Ab Initio Activision Fincantieri

Detailed references available to founders under consideration.

08 — Founder's Notes

We write things
down

The practice thinks in public, with a lot of opinions about building, technology, and strategy.

Sal's Brain

Salvatore Magnone

Building companies, innovation leadership, military and business strategy, and the occasional field report from somewhere muddy.

Read on LinkedIn → Mei's Typewriter

Meiling Zhang

Quantum computing, signal processing, hardware engineering, and what it actually takes to build things that touch the physical world.

Read on Substack →
Strategy

AI Readiness Assessment and Strategic Roadmapping

A practical framework for evaluating whether your organisation is ready to adopt AI, and the roadmap that turns the answer into action. The thinking behind the assessment we offer.

Read on LinkedIn
Building

The Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Dedicated R&D Labs

Why the EIR model and dedicated R&D labs matter for technology development companies that need to keep inventing while running at scale. The thinking behind our EIR practice.

Read on LinkedIn
Building

The Chief Innovation Officer Series

A four-part field guide to the Chief Innovation Officer role, covering what it is and why you might need one, what it takes to be one, the first 90 days, and how to build and manage the innovation portfolio.

Part 1: What Is a Chief Innovation Officer Part 2: So You Want to Be a Chief Innovation Officer Part 3: Your First 90 Days Part 4: Building and Managing the Portfolio
Strategy

How to Build a Data Strategy

A practical, sector-specific guide to building a data strategy that actually ships. The core piece plus deep-dives for insurance, law firms, and manufacturing.

How to Build a Data Strategy Insurance Companies Law Firms Manufacturing
Strategy

Data Strategy & Integration and Data Mesh

A four-part series on data strategy, integration, and the data mesh, applied across defense, insurance, legal, and manufacturing. Sector-specific patterns that hold up in production.

Part I: Defense Part II: Insurance Part III: Legal Firms Part IV: Manufacturing
Quantum

Quantum Primers

A starter library for technical leaders who need to get smart on quantum quickly. The qubits, the math, the circuits, and how machine learning meets quantum.

Qubits, Qudits, and More Quantum Entanglement Quantum Superposition Quicktake: Quantum Circuits What is Quantum Machine Learning
09 — Start

Facing something hard?

If you're a founder, operator, product or business leader, or business owner facing a hard moment, an early-stage launch, a new product, a refocus, a turnaround, or the AI question, tell us what you're working through. We'll tell you honestly whether we can help, and how. Many partnerships start with a structured assessment, so we can both see the whole picture before deciding what to do. No deck required. Honesty helps.

start@machine61.net
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