Dan Turchin

Dan Turchin is the co-founder and CEO of PeopleReign, an AI platform for IT and HR employee service automation. PeopleReign describes its mission around automating mundane work so employees can focus on “critical thinking, empathy, coaching, and intuition,” and lists Turchin as CEO and board member. He also hosts the “AI and the Future of Work” podcast, which PeopleReign says has 400+ episodes, 10M+ downloads, and is a top 1% global podcast.

Before PeopleReign, Turchin was CEO of AIOps company InsightFinder and co-founded Astound, an AI-first enterprise platform for HR and IT, where sources identify him as co-founder and chief product officer from 2016 to 2020. Earlier, he was Vice President of Product at BigPanda, Chief Product Officer at AccelOps, and Senior Director of Product Strategy at ServiceNow. BigPanda’s 2015 announcement says he was previously CPO at AccelOps, senior director of product strategy at ServiceNow, co-founder and CEO of Aeroprise, and a founding board member at Rhomobile.

Turchin co-founded Aeroprise in 2000 and served as CEO until the company was acquired by BMC Software in 2010. He has also served on the board of Auger.AI and is listed as a mentor at Alchemist Accelerator. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and a B.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.

As an investor, Turchin is publicly described as an active angel investor and startup advisor with a portfolio of over 30 companies. The Org lists him as a member of the investment committees at Sterling Road since 2018 and Spike Ventures since 2019, and Wellfound verifies him as an angel investor in PalleTech’s January 2016 seed round.

• Invests and advises from an operator’s perspective in enterprise AI, service automation, IT/HR workflow software, AIOps, and B2B SaaS.
• His PeopleReign thesis is human-centered automation: PeopleReign says, “We believe AI exists to augment – not replace – employees,” and frames AI as a way to remove mundane tasks so people can focus on innately human skills.
• Through Sterling Road, his investment-committee exposure is pre-seed: Sterling Road says it provides “Capital and Coaching for Founders from Idea to IPO,” usually starting with a $50K investment before a deck is polished or a round is closing.
• Through Spike Ventures, his investment-committee exposure is Stanford-network venture investing: Spike Ventures is described as an Alumni Ventures fund and community for Stanford alumni and friends that invests in companies with a Stanford connection.
• Public sources point to hands-on founder coaching as a major part of his investing style: he is listed as a mentor at Alchemist Accelerator and has hosted founder/investor conversations on AI, venture capital, and startup execution.