I’ve spent my career at the weird edge of consumer tech — a camera that flies, a droid that rolled out of a movie, sunglasses that record your life. I’m the person who gets strange hardware out of the lab and onto shelves, then finds the people who fall in love with it. Right now I’m consulting, building personal agents, and studying the gap between digital and physical AI. Soon, I’ll be back in the land of robots — humanoids, in ordinary homes.
I advise, back, and participate as a board member for consumer products.
I was nineteen years old, selling printing services door-to-door in Metro Detroit. Every product I’ve launched since has been about helping humans feel something — flight, friendship, identity, connection. The next one is about helping humans feel seen: creating the connective tissue between digital and physical AI. There are very few operators alive who have shipped at consumer scale across each of these categories. I am one of them.Read the essay →
I'm a consumer-hardware and AI operator. Over twenty years I've launched more than 160 products across drones, robots, smart glasses and commerce — including the Parrot AR.Drone, Sphero's BB-8 and Snap Spectacles. Two of the companies I worked at went public during my tenure: Parrot on Euronext and Snap on the NYSE. I founded and ran a venture-backed startup, Petalfox, which became Whym. Today I advise founders on go-to-market and I'm building toward consumer humanoid robots in the home. I'm based in Los Angeles.
That's the work I do. I've launched more than 160 consumer products and managed over 20,000 retail points of sale globally, including Apple's 420 stores, Amazon, Disney Stores, Nordstrom and Harrods. I ran the commercial side — sales, channel, margin structure and pricing — not just the campaigns. I currently advise the CEOs of Freespoke, Particula and PopSockets. The fastest way to start is hi@kellyny.land.
I take on four kinds of work: advisory retainers, fractional C-level engagements in product, go-to-market and executive leadership, board seats, and angel investments. Since 2024 I have been an entrepreneur-in-residence with Bright Ventures, M13 and Alpaca VC, and I'm building toward the consumer humanoid robot market. I like early stage, when the path isn't clear yet. Email hi@kellyny.land.
I'm one of them. I've held SVP, CMO and founder/CEO roles at Parrot, Sphero, ROLI, Snap and Whym, went through two public offerings during my tenure, and have held executive, observer and advisor board seats for twelve years. The field is genuinely small, and most lists of it are built from founder-CEOs and researchers rather than the commercial operators who actually took the products to market.