MARK CATALANO

AVAILABLE: MA, NYC, REMOTEEMAIL: me@markcatalano.comNET: linkedin.com/in/markcatalano, github.com/mcatWEB: markcatalano.comCV: Download PDF ↓

Professional Summary

Two-time founder and technical product leader who finds what customers actually need and ships it end-to-end. 15+ years building software. Founded TakeShape, an enterprise platform for secure AI agents grounded in a company's own data, reaching ~$1M ARR on $3M in seed funding and multi-tenant AWS serving billions of requests. Ran product as a founder throughout: discovery, roadmaps, prioritization, and shipped outcomes for customers including Valvoline, GE, and Comcast. As comfortable arguing architecture with engineers as aligning a room of executives; works empirically, by experiment and evidence.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Co-Founder & CEO, Head of Product, TakeShape · Full-timeOct 2018 – Present

Brooklyn, NY · Remote

Founded and built the platform enterprises use to run secure AI agents, grounded in their data and governed by their business rules.

  • Raised $3M in seed funding from well-known dev-tool founders in Silicon Valley, and completed the highly selective Techstars accelerator
  • Steered the company through two product-direction pivots (headless CMS to composable API mesh to a data-grounded AI agent framework and runtime), reading each market shift early and repositioning the product to meet it
  • Established and managed the product roadmap on a weekly delivery cadence, prioritizing scope and resources by user impact, engineering capacity, and market opportunity
  • Grew the platform to ~$1M ARR across enterprise and mid-market customers
  • Directed a cross-functional remote team of engineers and designers, grew it to eight at its peak, and shaped team composition and workload to project needs
  • Led comprehensive discovery research (interviews, surveys, usage analytics) to identify market opportunities and user pain points and shape the product direction
Founder & Managing Director, Ronik Design · Full-timeOct 2011 – Sep 2018

Brooklyn, NY · On-site

  • Led delivery of 100+ projects, managing resource allocation and project scoping while securing $8M in contracts and achieving $1.5M annual revenue
  • Directed the design and build of Before the Flood, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation's award-winning climate-campaign site
  • Directed a cross-functional team of 15 designers and developers, and built an internship program whose graduates went on to Google, Shopify, GitHub, and Slack
  • Partnered with complex enterprise organizations including ESPN, Reuters, Bloomberg, GE, Fidelity, McGraw Hill, Kaplan, Benjamin Moore, New York Public Radio, UNHCR, Fuse Media, Outbrain, and Xamarin, engaging and presenting to senior leadership to align on strategy, scope, and delivery

EARLIER EXPERIENCE

Developer · Full-time

Fast Company · New York, NYFeb 2011 – Oct 2011
Newsweek · New York, NYMay 2009 – Feb 2011
Publicis Sapient · Boston, MAJun 2008 – Feb 2009

Internships · Full-time

Usability Researcher · Fidelity Investments · Boston, MAJul 2007 – Jun 2008
Senior Application Analyst · Harvard Center for Genetics and Genomics · Cambridge, MAJul 2006 – Jan 2007
Application Analyst · Harvard Center for Genetics and Genomics · Cambridge, MAJun 2005 – Dec 2005

SELECTED CAPABILITIES

PRODUCT & BUSINESS Leadership

  • Product Strategy & Roadmapping
  • Cross-Functional Team Leadership
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Executive & Senior-Leadership Engagement
  • Activation & Onboarding Optimization
  • Business Case Design
  • Data Science

AI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) & Prompt Engineering
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems
  • SQL & Analytical Querying
  • Agent interop protocols (MCP, A2A, NANDA)
  • Multi-Agent Orchestration
  • AI Product Strategy & Roadmapping
  • AI Interface Design

ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP

  • Technical Architecture & Decision Making
  • Engineering Team Leadership
  • System Design & Scalability
  • Developer Experience (APIs, SDKs, CLIs)
  • DevOps & CI/CD Practices
  • Production Reliability & Incident Response

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

Harvard Online2024

Certificate in Data Science Principles

Harvard Business School Online2017

Credential of Readiness (CORe), Pass with Honors

Northeastern University2008

BS, Information Science, Magna Cum Laude

  • Focus: Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design
  • Activities: Association for Computing Machinery, Usability Professionals Association, Theater Arts