Mark Schmidt

I helped deliver the company's flagship product "Luumen", an AI-powered SSH client to launch, working on Frontend, backend, and a variety of protocols like SSH and WinRM.

Built a trustworthy media platform improving confidence and removing the fatigue in staying well-informed in the age of AI and misinformation. Reef Media could analyze content from Youtube, Substack, Truth Social, Substack, Tik Tok, and mainstream articles for misinformation. We focused on identifying patterns of reliance on logical fallacies, weak argumentation, and disproportionate use of incendiary rhetoric. We accumulated 300+ users and partnered with 16 political discord communities possessing collectively 25K+ users. We also collaborated with the Wikimedia Foundations on a case study for how their corpus could benefit automated content verification. As a student founder, I accumulated accolades and recognition from pitch competitions: - TCU Values & Ventures National Pitch Competition Semi-Finalist (2025) - NJ GSEA Pitch Competition Finalist & Recognized as a top student entrepreneur in NJ (January 2024) - NJIT New Business Competition Finalist (December 2023)

Selected among over 100 candidates to participate in both phases of their bootcamp. The second phase was whittled down to 20 founders where I received personally tailored mentorship and guidance to complete and debut @Reef Media's MVP.

- Conducted 45 customer discovery interviews with political campaign managers and strategists to explore how @Reef Media's tech could service political campaigns to ensure they are not duped by misinformation, and they do not disseminate misinformation with their materials. - Developed a GTM strategy to distribute Reef Media's tools to campaigns to empower them to stay on top of information threats both internal and external.

- Actively participating in the Batchery's AI Incubator program to build a robust informative media analysis system. - Designing robust automated testing for argumentative and rhetorical analysis models regardless of media format.

- Actively designed Go-To-Market strategies for an informative media hub designed to curate trustworthy and factual content and provide tools for informative media analysis to minimize time spent searching and evaluating digital media. - Implemented A/B branding testing and conducted 20+ customer interviews.

- Participating in the Launch Track of the Pre-Seed Accelerator. - Transformed my tech startup "Reef" from the blueprint stage to launching a bootstrapped MVP and developing a platform prototype.

I worked with Ansible Automation Platform to run YAML-written playbooks to automate specific tasks that were originally manually done in APIs and other web-services. The end result were scans that would deliver results to data drives located on specific servers.

- Learned product development and management lifecycle through hands-on design projects. - Presented product propositions to cohort explaining product-market fit and KPIs. - Explored the PM job market and experiences of entry-level work.

I made remarkably popular game mods on the source engine that were used by thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of users which led me to generate ~$25K in revenue from privately commissioned game mods for server networks to differentiate themselves from competitors.