# Adam Baitch [Email](mailto:hello@adambaitch.com) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambaitch/) · [Twitter/X](https://x.com/adambaitch) --- ## About > I craft, develop and grow products with cutting-edge AI. I'm an AI-first full-stack product builder, designer, and business leader. I build in code, and apply AI across the full product lifecycle to ship faster. Currently leading EPD operations and driving applied AI adoption at a venture studio building blockchain infrastructure. Previously, first hire at a fintech startup where I built both consumer and B2B products from seed through Series B and acquisition, leading multiple teams of PMs and engineers. Outside work: travel, music, photography, snowboarding, and stock/crypto markets. ### Philosophy - Live in the future - 1% better every day - Strong opinions, loosely held - Trust = consistency × time - Health is wealth - Great design is infallible - The truth is often a weighted average of extremes - Occam's razor - Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Sleep, strength, cardio, flexibility, diet ### Expertise - **Applied AI & Automation** — Using AI to build software, automate workflows & processes, augment team capabilities, and ship faster. - **Design & Prototyping** — Building and maintaining design systems and interactive prototypes using AI, both in Figma and in code. - **Product Management** — Developing product strategies, and translating them into functional goals, OKRs, tasks, and KPIs. - **Leadership & Operations** — Building and leading high-performing teams, including the right amount of process to do more with less. - **FinTech & Investing** — Building AI-powered investing products that inspire confidence and empower informed decisions. - **Blockchain & DeFi** — Experience building with blockchain technologies and Decentralized Finance protocols. ## Portfolio ### Headlamp AI *Solo project* Headlamp is an AI-powered code analysis platform that helps developers explore, understand, and navigate complex repositories in minutes instead of hours. It provides instant AI-powered explanations of files, folders, and functions, along with a natural language chat interface trained on your entire codebase. Features include git history visualization, dependency detection, and visual dependency graphs showing how code connects. Built to accelerate developer onboarding, code reviews, and legacy system maintenance. I solo-built this product in my free time over the course of a few weeks. Tags: ai, strategy, design, product-management, software-development, zero-to-one [View Project](https://headlamp-ai.vercel.app) --- ### Kintsu *Water Cooler Studios* Kintsu is a liquid staking protocol built on the Monad blockchain. It lets users access the network's native staking yield while maintaining liquidity across DeFi. It solves the fundamental staking tradeoff where users traditionally must choose between earning staking yield or accessing their capital. Kintsu issues sMON tokens that represent staked positions and act as a proxy for the underlying staked MON tokens and are therefore usable as a collateral asset in DeFi. The protocol has been successfully audited by Spearbit and Nethermind with integrations across 50+ DeFi partners. Tags: web3, design, strategy, product-management, frontend-development, zero-to-one [View Project](https://kintsu.xyz) --- ### Financial Terminal *Atom Finance* Atom Finance's first product, the Financial Terminal, provides real-time financial data, content, portfolio analytics and more to investors. It offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to help users make informed investment decisions. Tags: design, product-management, strategy, zero-to-one, consumer, ai **Problem:** Retail investors lacked access to high-quality, ad-free investment research tools. Instead, they were generally ended up choosing between a number of click-baity, ad-ridden financial news sites with limited data and content optimized for click-through ad revenue, not useful insights. **Solution:** The Atom Finance Terminal offers retail investors a professional-grade alternative to ad-ridden financial news sites. It was designed to be easy to use, personalized to a users' portfolio, and complete with data offerings unavailable elsewhere at the same price point. The app enables users to easily discover new assets and derive clear insights from complex financial data, documents and aggregate industry benchmarks. **Impact:** The platform grew to 400,000+ users from 100+ countries, and has been consistently rated by users as a critical tool for their investment needs. --- ### Atom API & SDK *Atom Finance* The Atom API & SDK suite is enables developers to build custom financial applications and integrations in record time, without the need for extensive financial data expertise. Tags: product-management, strategy, zero-to-one, b2b **Problem:** Investment app developers spend a lot of time solving the same data sourcing, cleaning and integration problems over and over again, and often lack the financial data expertise to build the best products in house. This is time consuming and requires deep industry expertise. Many institutions also lacked the product expertise and design resources to craft effective user experiences. **Solution:** The Atom API & SDK provides developers with access to Atom Finance's high-quality, curated, cleaned and integrated financial data and tools, enabling them to build custom financial applications and integrations in record time without the need for extensive financial data expertise. Embedded UI components allow developers to customize Atom's proven UX design to their unique brand and product. **Impact:** The API & SDK is used by companies ranging from startup FinTechs to large financial institutions and is responsible for growing Atom Finance's revenue by 4x in the first year, with contract values up to $1M+. --- ### Mobile Investing App *Atom Finance* A nearly-feature-complete companion to the web terminal, the mobile app was designed around activities users need most on the go. These include quick research & insights, industry-leading timely market and stock notifications, portfolio tracking, and real-time market data. Tags: design, product-management, strategy, zero-to-one, consumer **Problem:** While on the go, users want to be able to check their portfolios and access information quickly and efficiently. Most users' brokerages' apps lack the real-time data and insights they need, and even when sufficient tools are available, these apps are often clunky and difficult to use. **Solution:** Atom's mobile app was designed to be a nearly-feature-complete companion to the web terminal, optimized for activities users need most on the go. These include quick research & insights, portfolio tracking, industry-leading timely market and stock notifications, and real-time market data. **Impact:** The app has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users and became the main way users interacted with Atom Finance. Intelligently timed notifications and brokerage integration increased user engagement by over 500%. --- ### Atom Intelligence *Atom Finance* Atom Intelligence produces digestible summaries of key topics, risks, and trends for individual companies and overall market events. These insights help investors cut through overwhelming supply of content and pinpoint the stories and trends that matter most right now. Tags: product-management, strategy, design, zero-to-one, ai **Problem:** Investors are often overwhelmed by the amount of content available, and struggle to find the information they need to make informed investment decisions. **Solution:** Atom Intelligence creates concise summaries of key company and market insights, helping investors identify what matters most. **Impact:** Sales interest in Atom Intelligence far eclipsed any other product in the company's history, and the product was a significant factor in Atom Finance's acquisition. --- ### Financial Insights *Atom Finance* Financial Insights highlight stock performance against industry benchmarks across multiple metrics, and analyze portfolio positioning through five analytical pillars that integrate financial insights with portfolio allocation data. Tags: product-management, strategy, design, zero-to-one, ai **Problem:** Novice investors often feel overwhelmed by the amount of data available and need a way to understand their company and portfolio performance and positioning without extensive financial expertise. **Solution:** Financial Insights provides a distilled view of company and portfolio performance across multiple factors including valuation, growth, profitability, financial health, and risk. **Impact:** Reduced churn of novice users by 30% in the first few months after launch. --- ### Helio Clock The Helio Clock is an interactive art project that visualizes time as a series of nested circles, each representing a different timescale from millennia down to seconds. Each ring shows the percentage progress and exact position within its unit, allowing users to see at a glance how far we are through the millennium, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second. This makes every moment completely unique, ensuring the clock will never look exactly the same twice. Helio offers multiple viewing modes, inviting experimentation and altering how we perceive the layers of time. The experiment aims to inspire meditative reflection on temporality, perspective, and our shared place within the unfolding story of the universe. Tags: design, software-development [View Project](https://helio-clock.vercel.app) --- ### This website I designed and built this site using Next.js, Vercel, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and some custom components. I directed the architecture and did a decent amount of the programming, with Cursor helping on execution and performance optimization. It's a place to showcase my work — portfolio pieces, projects, writing, photography, and experience — with some fun UI experiments thrown in like a custom GitHub contribution graph. The whole thing is device-responsive and I tried to keep it fast, accessible, and easy to maintain. Tags: design, software-development [View Project](https://adambaitch.com) --- ## Resume ### Professional Experience #### Water Cooler Studios — COO, Product & Design *April 2024 - Present* · New York, NY Leading product, design, and operations for a venture studio, currently building a new DeFi infrastructure protocol. Owning roadmap, AI adoption, and company-wide product execution & delivery. - **AI Adoption:** Driving AI agent and workflow adoption across the business for engineering, design, marketing automation, organization and communication, accelerating product development cycles by over 10x. - **Product & Engineering Leadership:** Leading product, design, and operations for a venture studio, developing DeFi infrastructure products. Owning product planning, execution & delivery. Leading day-to-day operations across EPD (Engineering, Product, Design) as well as company-wide planning cadences. - **Product Execution & Development:** Contributing daily to production-level development with Claude Code and Cursor, and spearheading AI-driven development processes and workflows. #### Personal Practice — Consulting, Advising, & Building *Mar 2024 - Present* · New York, NY Partnering with founders and executives on product management, design, and strategy, including existing and new products. - **Consulting & Advisory:** Consulting for seed-stage founders on product strategy, process, prioritization, and design best practices. Hands-on product design and development projects, including market research, product scoping, design, and AI-driven development. - **Personal Projects:** Building full-stack applications from start to finish, with the goal of becoming an expert in building with AI. Working maniacally to keep up with the latest in AI to stay ahead of the curve. #### Atom Finance — Director of Product *Feb 2019 - March 2024* · New York, NY First hire and longest-tenured team member at a fintech startup. Instrumental in shaping the company's product, design, and team operations from pre-seed to Series B and eventual acquisition. Built consumer and B2B product lines from scratch, scaled to 400k+ consumer users and 7-figure enterprise deals, leading product, design, and team operations through multiple growth phases. - **0→1 consumer product build:** Launched a direct-to-consumer investing app in just 7 months, leading all product design and early frontend coding. Executed a viral marketing strategy that secured tens of thousands of highly targeted early users. Scaled the consumer business to 400,000+ users and crafted a freemium pricing model to drive monetization. - **B2B business evolution:** Guided Atom's transition from a fast-growing consumer app to a B2B infrastructure provider, enabling a more efficient and scalable business model. Launched enterprise APIs/SDKs that unlocked 7-figure deals and positioned the company as a leader in investment data, content and UI infrastructure. - **Team leadership & org design:** Built and led cross-functional product pods consisting of 3 PMs, CX/support, and ~20 engineers. Designed org structures to support both B2C and B2B business lines while driving execution on high-impact projects. - **Product management & strategy:** Crafted and drove process for strategic roadmapping & prioritization, sprint planning, user research, centralized documentation and data vendor evaluation. - **Product design:** Sole product designer for 4 years. Created and maintained a scalable company-wide design system in Figma. Produced high-fidelity prototypes, accelerating development and sales cycles. - **AI-powered products:** Led development of LLM-powered financial content and intelligent search tools, integrating advanced AI capabilities to deliver cutting-edge solutions for enterprise clients. #### Allvue Systems — Implementations *June 2017 - February 2019* · New York, NY Led six-figure implementations for private debt firms, translating complex financial workflows into software and managing cross-functional delivery with internal and external teams. - **Enterprise client management:** Served as the primary client contact and project manager for $300k+ implementation projects of financial software for direct lenders and CLO managers. - **Project execution & budgeting:** Scoped and managed multi-month implementation projects, balancing client requirements with internal resourcing constraints. Owned client communications and ensured alignment on goals, timelines, and deliverables. - **Team coordination & leadership:** Oversaw technical execution by project team members turning complex financial logic into customized software solutions, ensuring high-quality and timely delivery. #### Citigroup Global Markets — Sales & Trading Analyst *May 2015 - June 2017* · New York, NY Started my career on Wall Street to work on what I viewed as the future of financial markets (automation & electronic trading). - Completed a two-year S&T rotational program, contributing to quantitative hedging models, workflow automation, and modernization of data systems for multiple credit businesses. - Supported a new initiative to modernize how Citi Credit leveraged data for trading & customer insights. ### Education #### University of Pennsylvania — B.S. Computer Science *2011 - 2015* · Philadelphia, PA Studied computer science with a focus on entrepreneurship. Completed thesis on high-frequency trading, sparking interest in fintech. - Majored in Computer Science, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and design thinking. Completed senior thesis on high-frequency trading and the impact of latency on equity markets. ## Writing - [In the Age of Agents, Your Company Needs a Brain. Here's How to Give It One. ](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/your-company-needs-a-brain-heres) — March 9, 2026 - [The Model vs. the Harness: Which Actually Matters More?](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/the-model-vs-the-harness-which-actually-matters-more-59dd3116bb31) — March 4, 2026 - [March of the Lantern Flies](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/march-of-the-lantern-flies-9e39716d0f82) — February 27, 2026 - [The Logo on the Back of the Sign](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/your-competitors-acquisition-could-be-the-gift-you-needed-c26a574fa29e) — February 12, 2026 - [Your Data and Passwords Are Already for Sale. Here’s What to Do About It.](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/your-data-and-passwords-are-already-for-sale-heres-what-to-do-about-it-e8bf3a94390f) — February 8, 2026 - [The Great SaaS Reckoning: the Death of Moats in Software](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/the-great-saas-reckoning-the-death-of-moats-in-software-b7754c38c7aa) — February 5, 2026 - [The Kraken-Shaped Professional: How AI Transformed Me from PM to Full-Stack Builder](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/the-kraken-shaped-professional-how-ai-transformed-me-from-pm-to-full-stack-builder-d39f06c48de2) — January 18, 2026 - [AI for Mere Mortals: A Primer on the World’s Most Disruptive Technology](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/ai-for-mere-mortals-a-primer-on-the-worlds-most-disruptive-technology-207f4d605e1f) — November 17, 2025 - [IPOs are Broken. How can we fix them?](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/ipos-are-broken-how-can-we-fix-them-c3a0950f34c6) — August 1, 2025 - [Stablecoins: The Problems They Actually Solve](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/stablecoins-the-problems-they-actually-solve-920bede4608d) — July 17, 2025 - [Figma’s IPO: The Design Revolution is Finally Going Public](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/figmas-ipo-the-design-revolution-is-finally-going-public-ade1092d632f) — July 2, 2025 - [Stablecoins and Circle’s IPO: is it all worth the hype?](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/stablecoins-and-circles-ipo-is-it) — June 4, 2025 - [The Silicon Valley Bank Saga: Explained](https://adambaitch.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-bank-saga-explained) — March 10, 2023 ## How I Build ### AI Stack - **Claude Code** — My daily driver for building and orchestrating agentic execution. It's the main thread of execution for tasks and workflows, calling on other tools and agents as needed, often via MCP. - **Codex** — I use Codex in conjunction with Claude Code to plan and implement larger features and architectures. It excels at long-form planning and system design decisions, as well as QA code review. - **Cursor** — Used for hands-on coding, and for any task that requires a full-featured IDE. Ideal for rapid iteration on UI/UX, quick fixes, and staying in flow while building features incrementally. - **Claude & CoWork** — My primary thinking partner for reasoning through complex problems, strategic planning, long-form writing, and automating tasks and workflows. - **Notion AI** — Used as a wiki and a relational database for my life. Orchestrates non-code work including project tracking, meeting notes, and documentation. - **ChatGPT** — Daily driver for quick tasks, quick research, and rapid information gathering when I need fast answers. Great for brainstorming and generating ideas. - **Figma + MCP** — Design exploration and system maintenance. The MCP integration enables AI to read designs directly, bridging the gap between design intent and implementation. - **Gemini** — Primary tool for image generation and manipulation. Great for creating visuals and editing images with AI assistance. - **Perplexity** — Research layer for market analysis, competitive intelligence, and staying current. Deep Research synthesizes complex topics; Perplexity handles quick factual queries. - **Grok** — Best at following current breaking news events and distinguishing fact from fiction. Provides balanced perspectives on news and trending topics with real-time information. [View GitHub Profile](https://github.com/adambaitch) ## Photography [View Photography Gallery](https://picflow.com/gallery/gal_UCa9eD93SjnVXMDo)