Gradient

Leading the pivot

In February 2026 we had three to four months of runway and a consignment business model losing over $2 million a year. Consignment only works with ~100% identification accuracy across 40 million SKUs, and we could not hold that without a human audit that cost more than the business earned. People were leaving.

I took the case to leadership that we had to change or we would not survive it, and then I led the change. The sorter I had built much earlier sat unused, since consignment never needed it. So I proposed repacks: bundles of cards the robots could assemble themselves, and a technology stack no one in the world possesses. Now we only had to be right about the cards we chose to sell, not all 40 million. And we had a product instead of a service, a bit easier to sell in the collectibles industry.

• 3-4 monthsrunway when I started
• 4 monthsto ship the marketplace
• +3 / -4engineers in, others out

Internally, I rebuilt how the team worked. Every project got an owner and a two-week goal, and two hard milestones: ship the marketplace in four months, $50K in revenue in month one. Where we had little to no structure before, we now operated like a hive mind with one clear goal: make and sell repacks.

I wrote a real hiring process, brought on three engineers, and pushed leadership to cut four non-engineering roles. Headcount went down, engineering capacity went up. We saved about $250K a year in burn and turned our first profit on the core offering. This extended our runway by a couple months, and our CEO later raised another 2M, providing stability once again.

“I really appreciate the thought, documentation and level of communication you’re putting into the marketplace architecture. It’s driving the right conversations in a really positive way.”

David B., Gradient