Rhys Lindmark

Work Experience

IndependentSan Francisco, CAJul 2026 – Present

Fractional Chief of Staff & Ecosystem Lead

• Run 10+ events & dinners, coach dozens of founders and fellows, and make intros for orgs like Renaissance Philanthropy & Topology Ventures; built AI automations with Claude Code & Codex that save the teams tens of hours a week.
• Shipping 10+ open-source AI projects to GitHub using LLM SDKs & APIs, including: GiveBetter, an agentic database rating hundreds of nonprofits on cost-effectiveness; AI 2026, a 100-page report on AI's trajectory; and RhysBot, a model trained on a 10 MB personal corpus (nanochat from scratch + Qwen fine-tune).

RooteSan Francisco, CAJan 2022 – May 2026

Founder & Executive Director

• Founded a 501(c)(3) and raised $1M from five funders; managed a $250K/yr budget and ran board meetings & funder updates; built and hired a 10-person startup studio, then narrowed strategy to education.
• Launched the Roote Fellowship & scaled to 250+ ambitious young fellows across 9 cohorts. Early fellow successes: Daylight Computer, The Residency accelerator, White House OSTP, The Curve Conference, 3 YC, 10+ full-rides to T20 colleges.
• Launched the How Everything Evolved YouTube channel & grew it to 89 videos, 17k subs, and 700k views.

MIT Media Lab, Digital Currency InitiativeCambridge, MASep 2018 – Dec 2019

Head of Community & Societal Impact

• Served as de facto chief of staff to the Executive Director: ran leadership meetings, OKRs and offsites, drafted executive communication to funders, and co-led $2M/yr in fundraising partnerships (+25%).
• Founded the Cryptoeconomic Systems journal (MIT Press) and its conference, a bitcoin security initiative, and MIT’s first Blockchain Ethics class (co-taught to 20 MIT and Harvard grad students).
• Grew the developer, research and student community: four 500-person events, weekly research meetings, and a newsletter and X account (0 → 3,000+ subscribers); helped run the MIT Bitcoin Club and student blockchain and Effective Altruism clubs.

ETHDenverDenver, COJun 2017 – Aug 2018

Co-Founder & Ecosystem Lead

• Built my Ethereum network from scratch (founders, protocol teams and VCs) to launch the flagship hackathon in a few months: 1,500 hackers, 100+ speakers & workshops, and $600K in sponsors & partnerships.
• Ran the hackathon end to end with a team of 20 organizers and volunteers, owning the budget & run of show.
• Helped drive Ethereum developer adoption from 1k to 5k engineers through various community programs: MC'ing & speaking for ETHGlobal, empowering university ambassador programs, hosting a podcast, running Telegram & Discord channels, and leading the Systems & Society track at Devcon.

Edify TechnologiesDenver, COMay 2012 – Apr 2017

Co-Founder & CTO

• Grew a college summer project into a startup—hired and led a cross-functional engineering, marketing & GTM team, which shipped four music apps with 300,000+ downloads, 2 million+ songs created, and features by Google & Apple.
• Synthesized 500+ customer conversations, user feedback and Mixpanel data to ship dozens of product roadmap updates.
• Earned $900,000 in NSF grants, raised $550,000 from VCs, and selected for the 2015 Techstars Boulder accelerator class.

Education

Carleton CollegeNorthfield, MNClass of 2013

B.A. in Computer Science, Magna Cum Laude

Other

250+ books read · 20k+ Anki cards · 200+ blog posts ·
1,000+ miles backpacked · 1,000+ days of meditation ·
5 group houses · 3x frisbee champion · 15k+ albums

Skills: Developer relations · Hackathons & workshops ·
Fellowships · Partnerships · AI agents · Founder coaching ·
Content · Hiring · Budgets & fundraising · OKRs & offsites

"Rhys is entrepreneurial and creative, with P99 general intelligence, P99 people-person-ness, and P99 low ego.
His potential is off the charts for a place that values what he has to offer."
– Michael, a fellow friendly ambitious nerd

"The frontier is closer than you think."