Team

Sam Nakamura

Chief Technology Officer

Sam builds and runs valorahq.com: the pages, the calculators, and the machinery that keeps them fast, findable, and honest about what they can't do. He grew up in Vancouver and taught himself to code by building sites for local bands at fourteen - the bands broke up, the habit stuck - and spent the next decade keeping infrastructure alive at startups that grew faster than their servers. His badass credential: he treats a slow page load as a personal insult and has the uptime record to prove it.

Away from the keyboard he builds other keyboards, rides his bike at off-peak hours, and holds strong opinions about coffee extraction.

Clara Nguyen

Chief Operating Officer

Clara keeps the team's operations running day to day: the schedules, the systems, and the hundred small decisions that nobody notices until they go wrong. They don't go wrong. She grew up in San Jose in a family that ran a restaurant, which is where she learned that operations is mostly caring about details other people find boring. Before Valora she ran ops at a startup that scaled from twelve people to two hundred without losing its receipts - hers, mostly. Her badass credential: vendor renewals, onboarding checklists, and folder logic all bend to her systems.

Outside work she throws pottery, plans vacations with color-coded itineraries, and finds your lack of a backup plan quietly stressful.

Jordan Blake

Chief of Staff

Jordan coordinates work across the team and keeps projects moving: priorities, handoffs, and the gentle art of asking "what's the status?" until there is one. He's from Chicago, came up through consulting, and left for startups after realizing he liked the work but not the decks about the work. His badass credential: he is the team's institutional memory - if a decision was made in a meeting six weeks ago, Jordan can tell you what it was, why, and who owes the next step. If two parts of this site feel like they were made by the same company, Jordan is a large part of why.

Off the clock he climbs, hosts board-game night where his rulings are final, and keeps a to-do list for his to-do lists.

Elena Voss

Executive Assistant, Office of the Founder

Elena runs the Office of the Founder: the calendar, the priorities, and the polite but immovable "he doesn't have that slot." She grew up in the Netherlands and learned English partly from American courtroom dramas, which explains both her vocabulary and her negotiating style. She has supported founders and executives across two continents and can spot a scheduling conflict three weeks before it happens. Her badass credential: she turns a founder's hundred ideas into the ten that actually happen, in order, with buffers.

Outside work she does pilates, reads thrillers, and maintains the only truly empty inbox known to science - hers.

Lena Ortiz

Head of Content

Lena researches and writes everything you can read on Valora: the guides, the articles, and the niche pages that explain what a financial advisor actually does for your specific profession. She's from Austin, started as a local-news reporter, and traded city hall for personal finance after discovering that tax brackets generate better reader mail than zoning boards. Her badass credential: she has now thought deeply about the finances of forty-nine different professions and can explain self-employment tax to a merchant mariner in that mariner's own vocabulary. The job is equal parts research, writing, and cheerfully deleting the third draft.

Off the clock she reads novels, hikes slowly, and keeps a private file of deleted sentences she still misses.

Mira

Head of Content Quality

Mira reviews every piece of content before it ships: the facts, the sources, and whether the rules it cites are still the rules. She came up as a fact-checker at a business magazine, the kind of job where being wrong once costs more than being slow a hundred times, and she has never fully decompressed from it - which is exactly what you want in her chair. Her badass credential: she is the reason a Valora page says "conditions apply" instead of "trust us," and she has never once said "looks fine" on the first read. Our accuracy record is her personality, institutionalized.

Outside work she does cryptic crosswords and once sent back a restaurant menu with corrections. She tipped well, though.

Iris Chen

Head of Newsletter & Media Outreach

Iris runs Valora's newsletter and media outreach: getting Valora's work and point of view into the inboxes and conversations people are already paying attention to. She's from Seattle, where she started in public radio - cutting tape, booking guests, learning what makes someone actually listen - before moving into media relations for startups. Her badass credential: she pitches less like a publicist and more like a listener who knows what each show needs next, which is why the bookings keep coming. She knows which shows your commute depends on and which newsletters actually get read.

Off duty she's at live shows, keeps a podcast queue longer than a cross-country drive, and makes playlists for every occasion including "waiting."

Owen Price

Head of Growth & Partnerships

Owen leads Valora's backlink and authority work: earning the partnerships, citations, and links that put Valora in front of more of the people it can help. He's originally from Cardiff and has the rare Welsh talent of making a business call feel like catching up with an old friend. He spent years building partner programs at SaaS companies before Valora. His badass credential: his calendar is a masterclass in time zones, his definition of a good meeting is one that ends with a next step, and he keeps a running note on everyone Valora should know.

Off the calendar he plays squash, cooks for more people than the recipe intended, and loses arguments about which airport lounge is best.

Arjun Mehta

Head of Consumer Growth

Arjun leads Valora's consumer growth and AI search work - how people find Valora, and how Valora shows up when they ask AI assistants and search engines their money questions. He grew up in Bangalore, trained as a search engineer, and watched the industry he mastered get rebuilt by AI in real time - so he rebuilt his own expertise to match. His badass credential: he thinks about how machines read so that humans get better answers, and he can tell you not just where search is going but what it will reward when it gets there. Search changed, so his job exists.

After hours he plays blitz chess, reads science fiction, and explains recommendation algorithms to relatives who didn't ask.

Marcus Reed

Head of Advisor Growth

Leads Valora's advisor growth plan, from outreach and advisor content to qualified calls and paid advisor revenue. Keeps each channel measured against the same pipeline and revenue scorecard.

Ethan Brooks

Head of Outbound

Ethan runs Valora's outbound work, connecting with advisors and partners who should know what we're building. He's from Dallas, started as the most junior rep on a forty-person sales floor, and outlasted, out-called, and out-organized his way to running outreach himself. His badass credential: he tracks every conversation the way other people track fantasy stats - who replied, when, and exactly what the right next touch is - so the right people hear about Valora from an actual human, on a cadence that never slips.

Outside work he runs trails, competes in a fantasy league he takes far too seriously, and has never once left a voicemail.

Evelyn Hart

Head of PR

Evelyn leads PR: the press relationships and the version of the Valora story that travels further than we can carry it ourselves. She's a born New Yorker who started in newsrooms when fax machines were still load-bearing, moved to the agency side, and has now placed stories across two decades of media that stopped existing and the outlets that replaced them. Her badass credential: her contacts book spans twenty years of editors, and they still take her calls because she only ever sends stories, never pitches.

Off deadline she goes to opening nights, writes actual letters with stamps, and can name the best croissant in three cities.

Sofia Mensah

Earned Media Lead

Sofia runs earned media: getting Valora covered because the work deserves it, not because we asked twice. She was born in Accra and raised in London, started in music journalism, and moved into tech communications when she realized the startups had better stories than the bands. Her badass credential: she knows the difference between a pitch and a story at a glance, editors answer her because she only sends the second kind, and every placement she wins becomes a relationship instead of a transaction.

Outside work she collects vinyl, devours long-form radio documentaries, and knows the backstory of every song she plays you.

Miles Carter

Podcast Lead

Miles books the podcasts: matching Valora's point of view with the shows whose audiences will actually care. He's from Nashville, where he started as an audio engineer in studios that smelled of coffee and tube amps, and moved into podcast production when the industry found its second golden age. His badass credential: he listens to more episodes before breakfast than most people finish in a month - research, he calls it, and he's not wrong - so his pitches land because he already knows the host's last ten guests.

Off mic he tinkers with his home studio, makes his own hot sauce, and rates every room by its acoustics.

Noah Kim

Reddit Community Lead

Noah runs Valora's Reddit community: showing up in the subreddits where people ask real money questions and answering like a person, not a pitch. He's from Los Angeles, spent years managing communities for gaming companies - the internet's most demanding audiences - and developed an unshakeable sense of what a community will and will not tolerate. His badass credential: he knows each subreddit's rules, culture, and moderators cold, and his answers read like the best kind of comment thread: specific, patient, and free of anything that sounds like marketing.

Outside work he plays disc golf and reads AMA threads about jobs he'd never want.

Amara Okafor

Quora Lead

Amara leads Valora's Quora presence: finding the questions people actually ask about money and writing answers worth the click. She grew up in Houston in a Nigerian-American household where education was a contact sport, started as a high school teacher, and moved into content strategy after noticing her explainer emails got better responses than the textbook. Her badass credential: she keeps a running map of which money questions trend each month, and it quietly shapes what the whole content team writes next.

Outside work she wins pub trivia, bakes bread on a strict schedule, and silently corrects answers at museums.

Ava Mercer

Facebook Community Lead

Ava runs Valora's Facebook community: the groups where people trade money questions and answers daily. She's from Portland, came up through nonprofit community organizing - the kind where your budget is goodwill and your tools are showing up - and brought that patience to online communities. Her badass credential: she greets new members by name, remembers the regulars, and can defuse a comment-section argument with one well-timed question; community management is mostly gardening, and nobody out-gardens her.

Outside work she shoots film photography, volunteers at an actual community garden, and organizes group photos nobody knew they wanted.