MT mikethoun.com

Data & platform engineering leader

Mike Thoun

I build data platforms and lead the teams behind them, and I've worked every layer underneath. I started in the data centers at CME Group, spent eight years on the databases of a high-frequency options market maker, then built the data platforms at Outcome Health, Lob, and Autograph. These days I build golf products at Greenside Ventures.

Focus
Data platforms, data engineering, database systems
Current
Founder, Greenside Ventures
Head of Technology, Merino Wealth (contract)
Based
Chicago, IL
Previously
Autograph · Lob · Outcome Health · Spot Trading · CME Group
Contact
hello@mikethoun.com
01

Experience

  1. Feb 2025 – Now

    Greenside Ventures

    Founder

    Digital product studio and holding company in golf

    Solo founder. Shipped GolfBod, the gym app for golfers, with an LLM pipeline that writes each golfer's training program and a coaching product for teaching pros. Putt Pitch Drive is in app review.

    • TypeScript
    • React Native
    • Expo
    • Supabase
    • LLMs
    • Stripe
  2. Aug 2022 – Feb 20252y 7m

    Autograph

    Tech Lead, Data

    Tom Brady's digital sports fandom startup (merged with Future, 2025)

    First data hire after the $170M Series B. Picked the stack in month one and had pipelines in production by day 60, then hired two senior engineers. About a third of the company used the self-service analytics.

    • Snowflake
    • dbt
    • Dagster
    • Fivetran
    • Hex
    • Lightdash
    • MongoDB
    • Neo4j
    • PostgreSQL
  3. Apr 2021 – Aug 20221y 5m

    Lob

    Staff Software Engineer, Data

    Y Combinator-backed mail API startup

    Data lead. Moved ingestion off Fivetran onto our own jobs in Airflow, and rebuilt the core data model as Kimball-style facts and dimensions in dbt. Every Looker dashboard in the company ran on it.

    • Airflow
    • dbt
    • Redshift
    • Looker
    • Kinesis
    • S3
  4. Feb 2017 – May 20214y 4m

    Outcome Health

    Lead Data Engineer

    Chicago unicorn health tech startup (merged with PatientPoint, 2021)

    Joined before there was a data team, then co-founded one and hired eight people into it. Turned the Redshift setup DevOps had been running on the side into the company's data platform.

    • Python
    • Redshift
    • Airflow
    • Confluent Kafka
    • Spark
    • S3
  5. Apr 2016 – Now

    Merino Wealth Management

    ContractHead of Technology

    Financial planning startup focused on equity compensation, socially responsible investing, and empowering women entrepreneurs

    Part-time head of all the firm's technology, reporting to the CEO. Moved the CRM from Redtail to Salesforce and brought in Viktor, an AI agent that handles routine operations.

    • Salesforce
    • Black Diamond
    • Viktor
  6. Jan 2009 – Feb 20178y 2m

    Spot Trading

    Lead Database Administrator

    High-frequency options market maker

    Started in operations, moved to the data team, and ended up leading it. Kept 75+ TB of market data running and carried the pager overnight so trading could start on time each morning.

    • SQL Server
    • MongoDB
    • Cassandra
    • Vertica
    • Redshift
    • RDS
  7. Jul 2005 – Dec 20083y 6m

    CME Group

    Infrastructure Engineer II

    World's largest derivatives exchange

    Data center infrastructure. Built the team's app for planning changes and tracking physical assets down to the cable path.

02

Toolkit

Practice

  • Data architecture
  • Data engineering
  • Database administration
  • DevOps & infrastructure
  • Software engineering
  • Engineering leadership
  • LLM applications

Data platform

  • Python, SQL
  • Snowflake, Redshift
  • dbt, Fivetran
  • Airflow, Dagster
  • Kafka, Spark
  • Looker, Hex, Lightdash

Databases

  • SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Cassandra
  • Vertica
  • Neo4j
03

Now

Greenside Ventures

Founder

A digital product studio in the golf space. These days the toolkit is pointed at golf: same engineering, smaller blast radius.

04

Contact