Cris Valerio.
Entrepreneur & Builder in California.
Building AI tools for the real economy.
Outcomes over workflows.
Entrepreneur & Builder in California.
Building AI tools for the real economy.
Outcomes over workflows.
AI lives on screens. The businesses I've spent my career in don't: drivers, crews, job sites, inventory, IRL customers. I work where the two meet, making technology pay off in ways you can measure.
Main Street Operator is my lab: an incubator for AI in the real economy. We work hands-on with owner-operators of hella complicated businesses with field crews (home services, subcontractors) and solve real problems, fast. When a pattern keeps proving out, it becomes a product.
Before this I was a product and UXR leader at IDEO, Instacart, and Uber, a VP of Product at a Series C startup, and a financial journalist at Bloomberg TV and NPR. I grew up in Mexico and work in two languages. Two toddlers, climbing, trail running, and all things people.
LinkedInThe incubator. Outcomes-oriented AI inside real-economy businesses, and the research engine everything else here comes from.
Takes the early-morning dispatch scramble out of running a field crew. Assignments, changes, and confirmations move over plain SMS, in each worker's own language. First product out of the incubator.
Live rooms where operators build working AI tools on their own business, from single working sessions to a 6-week cohort. Also where I do my best exploring: a room full of operators is the best idea source I have.
Weekly field notes from inside $3M+ home service and subcontracting businesses: where AI pays for itself, where it doesn't, and what to protect. Join 1,000+ owner-operators upgrading how their business runs without breaking what built it.
My personal newsletter, three years running, on identity, work, and play as a woman in mostly male spaces.
Wanna chat? Email me here.