FRACTIONAL CEO | FRACTIONAL CMO | ANALYST

Michael Zeligs, MST

• Stanford CCRMA-trained Media Communications and Image Quality Engineer, DSP Programmer, Film Director and cinematographer — Making 2,000+ ultra high definition films for founder-led brands. and inventing a new generation of 3d Interferometery Cameras.

Chief Executive

CEO of ApertureAPI and founder of Start Motion Media. Builds companies from zero through institutional fundraises — and runs the P&L, the roadmap, and the room.

Post & Finishing

Colour, sound and finish stay in-house. The director who sets the look grades the final frame, so the picture that ships is the picture that was planned.

Producer & Director

Managing producer and director/DP on 2,000+ films — flagship brand campaigns, launch films, and crowdfunding creative that has raised tens of millions.

Image, Audio & Video Specialist

Stanford CCRMA-trained in video engineering. Scoring, colour and the full media pipeline — in one pair of hands.

Image
Audio
Video

For brands & founders

Director & Campaign Lead

Directs flagship brand films and product campaigns, and shapes the launch story around them — the hero film, the cutdowns, and the narrative a founder carries into the raise.

Apple · Amazon · Google · Smithsonian · 100+ founder-led startups.

Beyond the camera

Advisory & Technical Work

Advisory work for boards and research teams, alongside the studio. Full history on request.

GDPval-style benchmarking · occupational-complexity evals · RLHF program design.

GDPval

Benchmarks frontier models against real, economically valuable knowledge work — authoring the tasks and rubrics drawn from how executives actually spend their day.

30 hrs → min

Decomposes high-complexity occupational tasks — the kind that take a CEO 30 hours by hand — into structured evaluations a model can be trained and graded against.

45 → 8 min

Built the Python evaluation harness that cut per-task review from 45 to 8 minutes and tripled cohort throughput.

$4.75B

Alphabet’s agreement to acquire Intersect Power

Michael led marketing & investor-grade content on the Apple Green Bond–backed Radian Solar build across Intersect Power and Terabase. Deal announced Dec 2025 — Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Forbes.

$130M

Terabase Energy Series C — SoftBank Vision Fund 2

Same solar program, closed March 2025, bringing Terabase past $200M raised. Source: BusinessWire, Mercom Capital.

$34M+

Raised on campaigns he produced & directed

Baubax ($20M), Tap Systems ($13M+), Foldio/Orangemonkie ($1.3M+) — among the most-funded crowdfunding launches in their categories.

Design

Brand systems, web layout, and campaign art direction — the visual layer that makes a young company look fundable.

Music & sound

Composition and signal processing from Stanford CCRMA — scoring, sound design, and the acoustics research behind two patents.

Engineering

Production Python, C++, and JavaScript daily — automation, data pipelines, and the evaluation tooling behind the AI work.

Stanford University — CCRMA. B.A. in Media, Science & Technology (MST): video engineering and digital signal processing at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. DSP, parallel and real-time systems, filter and codec design, and software synthesis in C++/Python/JS, with foundations in linear algebra, Fourier analysis, and optimization.

• ◆Diamond Fellowship · Project Horizon
• ◆Prodigy Cohort · Gather Platform
• ◆Stanford StartX · ApertureAPI
• ◆Stanford Creativity in the Arts
• ◆Rotary Youth Leadership Award