# Mike Willems > Studying overlooked details to solve conspicuous human and engineering problems. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/mikewillems I'm a multidisciplinary engineer and team leader specializing in business model formulation & refinement, system design, and prototyping for young ventures. I'm most interested in "conspicuous problems" - problems that many think about yet remain without a good solution. Why is it actually hard? How can it be easy? What incentives preserve the present state? ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Jan 2026 – Present Full stack development of the Frankly deliberation platform with Flutter on Firebase. Some achievements: - accelerated net team development speed >3x - built actual and subjective momentum to maintain continuity through major team changes - owned and rapidly delivered most critical blocking features: video and transcription - identified and fixed many core platform bugs to increase app stability - improved developer experience and consistency across build environments ### Venture Partner @ Unknown Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Turning hard tech into easy tech. I steer and accelerate startups by identifying and clarifying their most important concerns across the scope of their operations. I help them form, execute, and update plans, deploying my network along with my experience. My work is informed by a decade of experience spanning nearly all core functions within tech startups. Current client industries include neurology research, mental health tech, internal medicine tech, aerospace, AI B2B SaaS, and AI safety. Based on need, I have recently made vital contributions to my clients in: - customer development / product management - technical strategy & roadmapping - branding & positioning - market-entry strategy - risk analysis - fundraising strategy, pitch decks, demos, negotiations, investor intros - flexible operational systems that will grow with the company - recruiting & hire intros ### Electronics, Embedded & DFM Consultant @ Unknown Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area I take electronics ideas from napkin to product. DFM, hardware design, assembly, failure analysis / reliability engineering. UI design, software data backends, and web interfaces. ### Product Lead @ Caltana Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 ### Software Engineer @ Caltana Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | remote Caltana makes buying and selling Commercial Real Estate (CRE) services ridiculously more efficient. Full stack software development: Django, React, Next, MUI ### Chief Technology Officer @ Longshot Space Technologies Corporation Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | United States At Longshot, I invented the core enabling technologies and manufacturing approaches behind our pneumatic hypersonic accelerator. After performing foundational research and creating our technical plan, I led its execution through a successful seed round. I located, designed, and outfitted our first engineering facility, established engineering processes, brought on 4 additional technical hires, and left the project in capable hands. ### Senior Electrical Engineer @ AirPhoton Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 Medium and high voltage circuit design, optics, KiCAD and OpenCV. ### Co-Founder, CEO @ BrainMate Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Oakland, CA Mental health care is decades behind what today's technology can do, and I co-founded BrainMate to help close that gap. Our best-in-class wearable devices provide objective bio-feedback for making ASD education and care more timely and effective. We're also working on other apps and services to improve mental and behavioral health care. We already have partnerships with some excellent care programs, and we'd love to team up with more providers. If it sounds like we could help your program, please reach out at partnerships@brainmate.io. We're also interested in meeting new collaborators, so PM me if you want to explore teaming up! (No dev houses / services.) Fall 2019 Transformative Technology Academy Fellows ### Contract Product Engineer @ University of California, Berkeley Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Oakland, CA For spider researchers at the Berkeley Elias Lab, I built a system that uses computer vision and a laser to log spider positions and temperatures and selectively heat spiders during experiments. ### Fellow (Silicon Valley 2019) @ Startup Leadership Program Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Silicon Valley, CA The Startup Leadership Program is a highly selective, world-class training program for outstanding founders, leaders, and innovators who want to become top startup CEOs. SLP Fellows have founded nearly 1900 successful startups & raised more than $700M in funding. ### Freelance Engineer and Product Designer @ Self-Employed Jan 2009 – Jan 2017 | College Park, MD Identified requirements, prototyped electrical and mechanical solutions, and produced embedded and basic front-end software. Designed product aesthetics, marketing schemes, market entry strategies, industrial production plans, and scaling plans. Projects included a robotic pontoon proof-of-concept, biosensing hardware, a mobile game with wearable controller, an ultra low-power long-term shipment monitor, and an electronic hookah product. ### Founder, CEO @ DiMER Health Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Baltimore, MD DiMER stands for Disease Management Enabling Research, and our mission was to increase data ownership and care engagement for individuals with persistent health conditions. DiMER accelerated the creation and use of open data by strengthening the mutually supportive relationship between research institutions and communities surrounding chronic disease. After identifying the business opportunity and establishing crtical partnerships, I conceived, designed, and prototyped a platform to gather novel lifestyle information from phones together with medical device data, including several devices that lacked connectivity out of the box. This position involved: - developing pilot and sales leads with a double-sided market of patients and researchers. - reverse engineering and establishing communication with 2 market-leading medical devices. - designing and implementing HIPAA-compliant web and mobile apps. - drafting the original medical device data standards now used by several leading digital health companies. - hiring and managing 5 employees. ### Software Engineer @ Visionist, Inc. Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Columbia, Maryland Implemented signal processing and data conversion tools in C++ and Java. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Minor in Technology Entrepreneurship University of Maryland ### Data Science Certification Metis ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michael-willems --- Source: https://flows.cv/mikewillems JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/mikewillems/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11