Team Build Plan
2026.

Builder of the Encounter Engine — PostGIS proximity detection, jitter architecture, deduplication window, and encounter scoring formula. Owns the product vision, investor relationships, and go-to-market strategy. The technical depth here is unusual for a CEO, which is a major advantage when speaking to engineering candidates and investors alike. The proprietary encounter engine is the foundation of every hire below.

Your most important hire and the hardest. Needs to be a player-coach who can extend the encounter engine, own backend architecture, and eventually recruit and lead a team. The ideal profile has built consumer social infrastructure at scale — Tinder, Snap, Discord, or Bumble — and wants to own something from the ground up. Must be deeply comfortable in Supabase/PostgreSQL and ideally has PostGIS experience. Lead with the jitter architecture and dedup window in the interview — engineers who get excited about that technical problem are the ones you want.

The person who lives inside the encounter engine alongside you. Deep PostGIS expertise is non-negotiable — ST_DWithin indexing, GIST index tuning, spatial function performance at scale, and SECURITY DEFINER function design. Ideally has built real-time location systems before — rideshare, delivery, logistics, or defense geospatial. This is a globally rare profile: fewer than 17,000 people have demonstrated PostGIS skill at the production level Tangnt needs. Move fast when you find one who fits. Contract-to-hire is acceptable for this role.

Owns the client layer — the thing users actually touch. Tangnt is built as a PWA with Capacitor for native distribution. The ideal candidate has shipped a polished consumer social app in React Native or Capacitor, understands offline-first architecture, and has dealt with location permissions, background app state, and push notification delivery across iOS and Android. Look for someone who cares about UI quality at a pixel level — the encounter reveal animation, the Signal mechanic, the radar display are product experiences, not UI polish.

Translates the encounter engine into product decisions that drive retention and compound network effects. The best fit has worked at a consumer social company during a high-growth phase — not just a feature factory. Must understand cold start dynamics deeply, the psychology of serendipitous encounter, and be able to write a PRD that doesn't kill the magic. Ideal backgrounds: Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Clubhouse, BeReal, or any breakout consumer app. Avoid PMs who came up in enterprise SaaS — the incentive structures are incompatible with what Tangnt needs.

Owns the visual and interaction language of Tangnt. The product lives or dies on how it feels to send a Signal, see a matched profile, or watch your Orbit score build. This is an emotional product — the designer needs to understand proximity-triggered anticipation and how to make a dark premium UI feel warm rather than cold. Strong portfolio of consumer mobile apps is required. Motion design fluency is a strong plus — the encounter radar animation is a product experience, not decoration. Look for someone who has designed something that people screenshot and share.

The person who gets Tangnt from 0 to density in the first three airports. This is emphatically not a paid acquisition role — Tangnt's growth is fundamentally organic, referral, and community-driven. Paid CAC for a proximity network is a treadmill, not a strategy. The ideal candidate has engineered a viral loop in a consumer social product — not just run Facebook ads — and understands how network effects compound in physical spaces.

The person who gets Tangnt into airports as a sanctioned, welcome product. Needs relationships with airport authority BD teams, airline lounge operators (Amex Centurion, United Club, Delta Sky Club), and ideally has worked at an airline or travel tech company. The end goal is distribution agreements, co-marketing, and eventually white-label deals with airlines. One good JetBlue Ventures relationship is worth more than six months of social ads at the airport scale.

Runs the on-the-ground launch in each seed airport and builds the early adopter community that seeds density. Part community manager, part event producer, part evangelist. The ideal candidate has run a city launch for a consumer product — Airbnb, Uber, Bumble BFF, or similar — and knows how to manufacture the feeling of momentum before it exists organically. Needs to be high-energy, travel-willing, and genuinely excited about the mission of physical world connection.

Proximity apps have a specific class of safety challenge that dating apps don't fully prepare you for — the real-time nature of encounter creates scenarios (unwanted physical approach, location inference, impersonation) that require proactive policy design, not reactive moderation. Hire this person before you hit density, not after your first incident. Must be able to write policy, brief external reviewers, and build internal tooling for flagging and escalation review.

Initially a fractional or outside counsel relationship, moving in-house after Series A. Must have direct experience with location data privacy law — GDPR Article 9 special categories, CCPA sensitive data provisions, and the emerging EU AI Act requirements. Bonus if they have experience with trade secret litigation under DTSA given Tangnt's proprietary encounter engine. Start fractional at 10–15 hours/month.

Owns the science behind the encounter score, Orbit Mode resonance, and Frequency Mode matching. As the encounter graph grows post-launch, this person builds the models that turn raw encounter data into meaningful connection signals. Must be comfortable with graph-structured data, geospatial statistics, and the ethics of behavioral recommendation. This role can start part-time or as a research consultant — the data won't be meaningful until you have a few thousand users in a single airport.