Consulting

I am available for consulting for early-stage startups. If you’re interested in exploring if there’s a fit, email me at cduvallet@gmail.com and we’ll talk!

Hiring support

Hiring effectively is one of the most important things an early startup needs to do.

I can help you develop hiring processes that support your hiring strategy. I’m also available to help you with the actual hiring: taking phone screens, serving on interview panels, etc. I’m skilled at evaluating data scientists, computational scientists (biologists, chemists, epidemiologists, etc), software engineers, research scientists, people managers, and higher-level leaders. You can read about my hiring approaches on my substack.

Early employee peer coach & advisor

Being one of the first few employees at a startup can be lonely and uniquely challenging.

I’m available to support your early employees however they need: strategizing, sanity-checking, problem-solving, venting, or anything that another colleague would support them on. I can aso provide coaching support, helping them develop conflict resolution skills and figuring out their path forward in their career.

And as your team grows, I’m available as a sounding board as your early leaders develop their team cultures, management styles, and workplace rituals.

I’m a trained conflict coach, and you can read about my perspectives on the early employee experience in a growing a company on my substack.

Technical advisor & tech lead

In the early days of building a startup, it can be difficult to know which technical problems are worth spending time on vs. which ones can be wisely solved with a “good enough” approach.

I can provide feedback and perspectives on setting strong technical foundations for your startup: which decisions are important to invest in right now and which can be pushed until you’ve reached a different scale, easy things you can do now that will pay huge dividends as you grow, and thinking through questions of build vs. buy.

Depending on your company’s domain, I can likely serve as an early technical lead. I can work with your scientists to review their work, help them frame their questions, and connect their results back to the bigger picture company needs. I’m also skilled at serving as a bridge between scientists and software engineers: I can provide subject matter expertise from either side to smooth communication between internal teams and/or outside vendors.

I can also provide IC support to develop schemas, process diagrams, and other critical documentation.

Computational biology & bioinformatics

I also provide computational biology / bioinformatics services. Given my limited availability (5-10 hours per week), I’m best suited for short-term projects that have a clear goal or deliverable, or longer-term projects that are not company-critical. I find myself adding the most value to projects where the internal team is leading the scientific direction and I implement some sort of (usually scrappy) pipeline to make their ideas real.