About
About Excel
Excel is a hybrid consultancy and holding company founded to pursue ambitious ideas and help companies in our orbit succeed. We are active builders, combining deep technical expertise with hands-on company building experience. Our mission is to solve hard problems, build impactful software, and collaborate with talented leaders. Excel brings together everything we've learned about building and scaling in technology companies into a single entity.
Part consultancy, Excel partners with startups and established companies to solve their most pressing technical and strategic challenges. We offer hands-on advisory, product development, and engineering leadership, drawing on deep experience across the full company lifecycle. Our consulting work is highly collaborative, tailored to each client, and focused on driving measurable outcomes and long-term value.
Part holding company, Excel incubates and operates a portfolio of projects and businesses across software, AI, and technology infrastructure. We launch new ventures, support founders, and provide strategic and technical guidance to our portfolio companies. Our approach is pragmatic, collaborative, and focused on delivering real results—whether launching new products, scaling teams, or navigating complex technical challenges.
Leadership



Carl Cortright is a software engineer and entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience across venture-backed startups, scale-ups, public companies, and venture funds. Carl founded Excel to combine his passion for building software with helping other companies grow and succeed.
Carl began his career at Coinbase, advancing to Senior Software Engineer and contributing to core financial infrastructure, commerce, and exchange products. He was the sole technical member of the Coinbase Ventures investment committee, leading dev tools and protocol investments, and making approximately 40 early-stage cryptocurrency investments.
After Coinbase, Carl founded a web3 data infrastructure company as a technical CEO, raising $5.5M from top investors and leading a team of 10. He has launched products ranging from SaaS to complex data infrastructure, and most recently served as CTO of a YC-backed AI company. Carl also invests through his angel fund, 33x.fund, and holds stakes in ~30 early-stage tech startups.
You can read more about Carl's professional history on his LinkedIn and Github.