Hi! I'm Victoria Krauchunas. I grew up in New Jersey, went to school in upstate New York and now I live in Redwood City, CA (a bit south of San Francisco, for those not from the Bay Area).
I attended school at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I majored in Video Game Design & Development. My original plan was to get some game industry experience and then start my own game studio.
Turns out, life had other plans and I found myself at Palantir as a Technical Writer and then later a Quality Engineer, where I got my first taste of all things startup. Since then, I've had the opportunity to try my hand working in a variety of roles in a variety of industries. Some highlights include...
Workboard - The first <10 employee company I worked for. Though my title was Customer Success, I quickly learned how to fill in for any roles we didn't currently have a team member for - marketing, sales, data analysis, recruiting, chief of staff... I also had the unique opportunity to travel to customer sites and train executives, managers and individual contributors on effective goal setting.
Final - Here, I got to put everything I learned at Workboard to good use, and soon found myself as the Director of Product and Customer Operations, managing customer support, marketing, design and product. Final was acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2018.
Muttville Senior Dog Rescue - After Final, I decided to take a break from startups and try my hand working at a nonprofit. I was responsible for Foster & Volunteer recruiting and engagement. And, of course, petting lots of dogs!
Hone - I spent some time as a contractor for Hone, helping them tune their user experience. As part of this role, I had the opportunity to sit in on numerous management training courses, and learn about coaching methodology.
Dark - I was brought on to be Chief of Staff at Dark, a devtools company with an ambitious mission. I help create initial processes, fixed up their documentation, worked with customers, facilitated product planning and even wrote some code (for pretty much the first time since college!).
Y Combinator - I worked on the Admission team at Y Combinator, where we spent most of our time asking ourselves: What makes a great founder? What makes startups successful? and then trying to figure out which of the thousands of applications we were reading met that criteria.
The Scrappy Operator - Now I'm taking all of the lessons I've learned and things I've seen and teaching founders and early stage employees everything I know.
