Manuel Portocarrero

Manuel is a technology executive who gives boards, investors, and CEOs a seasoned owner for technology and AI risk. Whether the seat is a board committee, a fractional CAIO/CTO engagement, or a diligence mandate, he takes accountable ownership — of strategy, governance, and the engineering organization — with outcomes the rest of the executive team can measure.

He brings an unusual combination to that seat. He spent six years as a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, examining more than 1,000 applications, with 221 granted U.S. patents bearing his examination — a public record — and qualifying as a Patent Agent by federal examination. Questions about what your IP actually protects get a straight answer instead of a referral. Before that he carried $400 million in commercial credit authority at Ford Motor Credit, ranked its top corporate lines-of-credit producer in March 2008, and came through the subprime collapse with zero defaults.

Earlier he ran data modeling and asset analytics on multibillion-dollar developments for BP, BHP Billiton, and Shell, spent two years in customer service and pharmacy operations at Paid Prescriptions LLC, a former subsidiary of Merck & Co., and at 26 stepped in as acting general manager of an industrial company in Peru with full P&L ownership. The through-line: technology decisions get argued in the language your executive team already speaks — risk, cost, and opportunity.

He holds an M.S. in Petroleum Engineering from New Mexico Tech and executive certificates in corporate directorship, data science, and AI governance from Harvard Business School, Wharton, and Oxford. He is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors. Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, working with companies across the U.S.

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