This profile has not been claimed and data may not be accurate.
26th percentile
54th percentile
Exited agency co-founder turned technical advisor at Rise Capital and engineering consultant
Credibility
Traction · 37th percentile
- Past co-founder of Sideshow, a digital agency founded in 2000 that was acquired by Say Media.
- Sideshow was acquired by Say Media; no public acquisition price was disclosed, so the exit floors to the minimum award.
Relationship Matrix
Most Like You
Most Complimentary
Founder score
- 88%Probability of being accurate (88%)Past co-founder of Sideshow, a digital agency founded in 2000 that was acquired by Say Media.
- 85%Probability of being accurate (85%)Current founder and Head of Engineering at Powerup, an active boutique engineering consultancy.
- 80%Probability of being accurate (80%)Sideshow was co-founded with at least one other co-founder, confirming a co-founder relationship.
- 72%Probability of being accurate (72%)Sideshow was acquired by Say Media; no public acquisition price was disclosed, so the exit floors to the minimum award.
- 60%Probability of being accurate (60%)William Schleifer's profile appears on marketscreener.com, which ranks 3,558 in the Majestic Million.
Investor score
- 75%Probability of being accurate (75%)Has served as Technical Advisor at Rise Capital since January 2014, representing approximately 12 years of investing-adjacent experience.
- 55%Probability of being accurate (55%)Conducted technical due diligence on at least one portfolio company as Technical Advisor at Rise Capital.
What you likely need
You'd get the most out of Festival events that sharpen your public builder signal and convert your behind-the-scenes technical credibility into visible deal flow and consulting pipeline. Dinners and roundtables with AI-native founders, technical VCs, and open-source tooling builders would help you formalize your Rise Capital positioning and pressure-test a productized Powerup offering. Events focused on distributed hiring and AI-integrated engineering give you a stage to share your 570× and 84.8% cost-reduction results with the exact people who would hire you, fund you, or co-found with you.
Would you attend these IRL Festival events?
We will tune and customize your Founder Festival experience to make sure you get invited to the events that would be most valuable to you.
- positioningA roundtable dinner for technical advisors and Venture Partners at seed-stage funds — including Rise Capital peers — to pressure-test formalizing your title and deal-sourcing role into a named Venture Partner seat
- fundraisingA pre-seed founder dinner for AI-integrated SaaS builders in hospitality and gaming verticals to pressure-test productizing Powerup's consultancy model into a fundable, recurring-revenue offering
- positioningA build-in-public night for AI-assisted engineering tooling founders and top OSS contributors to workshop launching a public GitHub presence anchored in Powerup's real production benchmarks
- introsA dinner for technical due diligence advisors and angel syndicate scouts — think Calm Company Fund and On Deck Angels alumni — to convert your Rise Capital deal-review experience into a formal investing track record
- hiringA roundtable for founders running distributed engineering orgs across 10+ countries to co-develop and publicly release a hiring playbook modeled on your 14-country, 72% cost-reduction framework
- tacticalA tactical workshop with Substack's top technical writers and AI-dev-tools essayists to turn your distributed org design and AI-assisted engineering case studies into a publishing cadence that drives Powerup inbound
- introsA dinner for founders with prior media and content-tech exits — Say Media and Sideshow alumni circles — to trade warm intros into AI-native seed funds actively sourcing technical operators with exit pedigree
- tacticalA tactical half-day sprint with conversion-focused founders and B2B SaaS marketers to build and launch the Powerup website around your 570× processing speed and 84.8% cost-reduction case studies before the next fundraising cycle