Scott Waddell

About

I build products that ship. AI is moving onto the org chart. The product problem is no longer making an assistant sound intelligent. It is designing how people and agents work together, with shared memory, clear authority and governance strong enough for real work.

At Lua AI (YC F25) I joined to lead enterprise implementation and was promoted to CPO within months. I own product across the agent platform, organisational memory, governance and Workspaces, supporting 5,000+ agents across roughly 160 businesses.

I authored Lua’s digital workforce vision and conceived Workspaces, one environment where people and agents operate from shared organisational memory and autonomy expands as agents earn trust. I created Honeycomb, Lua’s permission-aware organisational memory engine, HiveBench, its 10,000-artifact synthetic benchmark, and governance-sdk, an MIT-licensed runtime policy layer for agent actions.

On the side I am the founder of contactme.co, a contact page and triaged inbox at one short URL, built to be easy to reach without being easy to spam.

Before Lua I founded DriftOS, conversational memory infrastructure with two US provisional patents, took Antler’s Launch Academy from zero to 10,000+ users in nine months and led Antler’s core platform across 20+ markets. Earlier roles spanned IBM consulting, early ETHLend (now Aave) and government digital transformation.

Experience

• Chief Product Officer, Lua AI (YC F25)

  Apr 2026 to present. London, UK.

  • Promoted from Head of Implementation to CPO. Leading product strategy for Lua’s AI agent platform, with 5,000+ agents deployed across roughly 160 businesses.
  • Authored Lua’s digital workforce vision: land through organisational memory, expand into governed digital workforces, convert implementation learning into reusable agent products.
  • Conceived and launched the Workspaces beta, one environment where people and agents operate from shared organisational memory and consequential actions stay reviewable and auditable.
  • Created Honeycomb, Lua’s permission-aware, time-aware organisational memory engine, and HiveBench, its 10,000-artifact synthetic benchmark (91.3% answer accuracy, 83% retrieval recall on the 208-question baseline).
  • Created governance-sdk, an MIT-licensed, zero-dependency runtime policy layer that intercepts agent actions to allow, block, require approval or redact, with tamper-evident audit records and EU AI Act mapping.
  • Built Lua’s internal agentic CRM and Luna Mode, a generative work surface assembling live deal boards, risk signals and approval flows from organisational context.

• Head of Implementation, Lua AI (YC F25)

  Jan 2026 to Apr 2026. London, UK.

  • Led customer implementations and technical enablement, moving conversational agents from demos into sales, support and operational workflows for mid-market businesses.
  • Owned the lifecycle from discovery and scoping through go-live, adoption and feedback into the roadmap.

• Founder, contactme.co

  Current. London, UK.

  • One link for everything people need to reach you: links, contact form, real address, vCard and Apple Wallet pass at contactme.co/<handle>.
  • Every message is screened and triaged before you read it. Replies go out from your own address.
  • An answer box replies to visitors using only notes you wrote or approved, and declines rather than invents.
  • Server-rendered pages with schema.org ProfilePage/Person JSON-LD, so every profile is citable by search and AI agents.

• Founder, DriftOS

  Oct 2025 to present. London, UK.

  • Conversational memory engine for AI agents. Graph-based architecture with dual-axis drift detection to track topic and intent shifts.
  • Two US provisional patents covering branching, merging and semantic-compression mechanisms.
  • Open source v0.1 shipped December 2025. TypeScript, MCP server architecture.

• Technical Product Manager, Department of Justice, Queensland

  Aug 2024 to Feb 2026. Brisbane, Australia.

  • Led product for judge-facing technology platforms across Queensland’s court system, working directly with Supreme, District and Appeal Court judges.
  • Shipped iterative improvements to judicial workflows under strict compliance and legacy-system constraints.

• Contract Consultant, Self-employed

  Apr 2016 to Jul 2024. Melbourne, Australia.

  • Technical consulting, organisational change and project management across financial services, energy and government.
  • Clients: AustralianSuper, Accenture/NBN, Service NSW, Suncorp, APS, TransGrid, Origin Energy, Customer Science.

• Technical Product Manager (Acting Head of Product), Antler

  Jul 2021 to Aug 2022. Singapore.

  • Promoted to the global technology team. Acting Head of Product for six months, building the product team from scratch to 10 FTEs.
  • Owned the roadmap for Antler’s core platform serving 3,000+ founders across 20+ markets.

• Product Lead, Launch Academy, Antler

  Nov 2020 to Jul 2021. Sydney, Australia.

  • Built Launch Academy from zero to 10,000+ users in nine months. Became Antler’s primary funnel for identifying entrepreneurial talent globally.

• Community Manager & Tech Support, ETHLend (now Aave)

  Jan 2017 to Mar 2018. Switzerland (remote).

  • Early team member of ETHLend, the decentralised lending protocol that became Aave. Community management, technical documentation and content.

• Business Transformation Consultant, IBM Global Business Services

  Jan 2014 to Apr 2016. Australia.

  • Business transformation consulting across banking, insurance and healthcare. Process redesign, change management and C-suite stakeholder engagement.

Projects

• contactme.co

  Be easy to reach, not easy to spam. Claim your name at one short URL: your links, a contact form, a real address, a downloadable contact card and an Apple Wallet pass, with an inbox that triages which messages are worth your time and an answer box that replies only from notes you wrote.

• Honeycomb

  Permission-aware, time-aware organisational memory engine for Lua AI’s agent platform.

• governance-sdk

  MIT-licensed, zero-dependency TypeScript runtime policy layer for AI agents: allow, block, require approval or redact actions, with tamper-evident audit and EU AI Act / OWASP / NIST / ISO 42001 mapping.

• DriftOS

  Open-source conversational memory engine for AI agents. Graph-based routing, drift detection and semantic compression. Two US provisional patents.

• Hunter

  AI-powered social media strategist. Personalised engagement strategy and auto-drafted responses in your voice.

Writing

All posts. Also available as RSS.

• Embeddings Can't See Drift. Cosine similarity tells you two things are related. It can't tell you the conversation just changed direction.
• RAG is Dead. Long Live PAR.. RAG is a search engine asked to be a memory system. That's a category error.
• Conversations Are Graphs. Every AI conversation is stuck in a flat list. Here's why that's broken.
• Infrastructure Before Product. Most founders build their MVP first, then figure out production later. I'm doing it backwards.

Education and certifications

• Bachelor of Business Studies, Finance, Massey University
• Graduate Diploma in Applied Statistics (incomplete), 2018–2019, Massey University
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Operational Excellence, 2017, AGSM @ UNSW Business School
• Diploma in Business, Auckland University of Technology
• Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM), 2010, Project Management Institute

Honours

• Prime Minister’s Scholarship for Asia
• Dean’s List
• DaoMing Chinese Studies Scholarship
• Exchange Student Travel Grant Scholarship

Contact

• Email: scott@waddells.co.nz
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shipsfast
• GitHub: https://github.com/scotty595
• Contact card (contactme.co, my own product): https://contactme.co/scott

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