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👋 Hi!

Thanks for stopping by. I'm Chris Stanchak.

I'm a founder, operator, and AI-native problem solver based in Austin TX.

I've always had a curious mind, so entrepreneurship was made for me. Some people dream of starting something but can't figure out what to do. I've never had that problem. In fact, the hardest thing for me is focusing on just one thing and not getting bored.

You can see some of the things I've worked on below. Send me an email anytime.

Current Work:

StanForce Labs (opens in a new tab): Founder

StanForce Labs is an AI operator shop that's three things in one: hands-on AI engagements for founders, an in-house startup studio, and a YouTube channel reviewing the tools that matter.

Past Work:

Loveseat (opens in a new tab): Cofounder & CEO (2013–2024)

Loveseat was a marketplace I co-founded in 2013 that gave returned goods from Wayfair, Overstock, and other major retailers a second life at a fraction of retail. We bootstrapped initially, then raised a Series A from Bessemer Venture Partners with notable angels including Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo), Kal Vepuri, and Gokul Rajaram. The name came from an early pitch meeting with Josh Kopelman at First Round.

11-year run. Wound down in 2024.

Both sides of the marketplace worked: supply was strong, demand was strong. The lesson I took away: do things that don't scale, but don't try to scale things that don't scale. Building Amazon-style logistics from scratch was the latter. The venture downturn just sealed it.

StarkWare (opens in a new tab): Entrepreneur In Residence

StarkWare develops tech to make Ethereum transactions faster, cheaper, and more private using zero-knowledge proofs. As entrepreneur in residence, my job was to help them understand and develop opportunities in the ticketing & events space.

TicketLeap (opens in a new tab): Founder & CEO

TicketLeap was an event ticketing platform for smaller events. I started it out of college with a $50k SBA loan, scaled to profitability with about $100k in revenue, then raised $8.5M in VC from Philly-based venture funds and angel investors (including John Legend). Daymond John (Shark Tank) advised. We grossed over $100M annually in ticket sales when we sold to a PE group. TicketLeap was foundational to Venmo's existence, and many of the founding team members came out of the company.

Venmo (opens in a new tab): Founding Advisor

Venmo is the most well-known thing I was ever involved in. Iqram (my first hire and CTO of TicketLeap) one day told me he wanted to start a peer-to-peer mobile payments company with his friend Kortina. In all honesty, I thought it was a dumb idea at first. You need to remember, this was prior to apps on the iPhone. Venmo started as SMS. I was super bummed Iqram was leaving TicketLeap, but offered to help him any way I could. He took me up on it and brought me on as an advisor. It's pretty cool having witnessed something of that scale literally from the start. I genuinely wanted to help Iqram, and I think I did. In the end it helped me too.

Startup San Diego (opens in a new tab): Entrepreneur In Residence

Startup San Diego is a non-profit organization focused on growing the San Diego startup ecosystem. As an EIR, I took on numerous responsibilities programming events. My favorite contribution was creating the Startup Incubator.

DreamIt Ventures (opens in a new tab): Startup Advisor

DreamIt Ventures is a Philadelphia-based startup accelerator (similar format to Y Combinator). I was invited to advise early in the launch of DreamIt and helped numerous companies. The most notable was LevelUp. When I started working with them, they were known as SCVNGR, an early-stage mixed reality scavenger hunt. They pivoted to LevelUp, a mobile payments platform for merchants (similar to Square). LevelUp was eventually acquired by GrubHub for $390M.

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