Cadence AdvisorsAdvisors Group

Team

The people who'll actually be in the room.

Four partners. No junior staffing, no subcontracting. The person who scopes the work is the person who does the work.

Amara Okafor

Managing Partner

Builds the client engagements that other firms can't scope. Former product lead at Stripe; ran the AI practice at Bain.

Amara spent seven years at Stripe shaping the payments stack behind Billing and Radar, then moved to Bain & Company to stand up its AI practice across the Financial Services vertical. She has advised 30+ operators on model selection, build-vs-buy, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes pilots survive past quarter two. At Cadence she owns the commercial relationship with every engagement and is the final signatory on every deliverable.

Background

  • Product Lead, Billing & Radar — Stripe (2016-2021)
  • Senior Manager, AI Practice — Bain & Company (2021-2024)
  • Board observer, three Series A+ AI-native startups

Education

MBA, Wharton. BS Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon.

Focus

  • Commercial structuring for AI engagements
  • Billing, pricing, and monetization systems
  • Partner to CFO and CRO

Daniel Reinhardt

Partner, Strategy

Translates AI hype into operating plans that CFOs will sign. Ex-McKinsey Digital, Harvard MBA.

Daniel led digital transformations at McKinsey Digital for nearly a decade, with deep reps across industrials and mid-market SaaS. He is the partner we put in the room when a client's board wants a five-year plan and their engineering team wants a two-week prototype — and those two things need to stop contradicting each other. Daniel writes the strategy memo; the rest of the firm builds against it.

Background

  • Partner, McKinsey Digital (2018-2024)
  • Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company (2014-2018)
  • Analyst, Goldman Sachs TMT (2012-2014)

Education

MBA, Harvard Business School. BA Economics, Yale.

Focus

  • AI operating model design
  • Build-vs-buy-vs-partner frameworks
  • Board-level AI strategy memos

Priya Ramanathan

Principal, Engineering

Ships the code that makes strategy real. Ex-Anthropic solutions, Stanford CS.

Priya was one of the first ten hires on Anthropic's applied team, where she spent three years turning Claude deployments into production systems for enterprise accounts. She leads Cadence's technical delivery: model selection, retrieval architectures, evaluation harnesses, and the deep-plumbing work that separates a working demo from a working product. If a client's engineers can read her pull requests after we leave, she did her job.

Background

  • Solutions Architect, Anthropic (2022-2025)
  • Staff ML Engineer, Scale AI (2019-2022)
  • Research Engineer, Google Brain residency (2018-2019)

Education

MS Computer Science, Stanford (NLP focus). BS EECS, UC Berkeley.

Focus

  • LLM application architecture
  • Retrieval-augmented systems and eval design
  • Handoff-quality engineering

Marcus Whitfield

Director, Operations

Runs the engagements. Ex-Ramp ops, UChicago. Keeps projects boring, on-time, on-budget.

Marcus joined Ramp as employee #42 and built out the operations function from five people to eighty through the company's 10x revenue expansion. He owns engagement delivery at Cadence: scoping, staffing, weekly status, and the quiet discipline of closing out a project cleanly. Our clients see Marcus more than any other partner, and that is by design.

Background

  • Director of Operations, Ramp (2020-2024)
  • Operations Manager, Flatiron Health (2017-2020)
  • Consultant, Boston Consulting Group (2014-2017)

Education

BA Economics, University of Chicago.

Focus

  • Engagement delivery and staffing
  • Client communication cadence
  • Post-engagement knowledge transfer