I’m Justin Steele.
Engineer who became a philanthropy operator who is now, again, an engineer. Father of four. Oakland, CA.
I lead True Steele Labs, an AI product studio for mission-driven organizations. I started True Steele a year ago as a fractional Chief Impact Officer. The work was valuable but the value was hard to prove — and meanwhile the products I was building on the side, for clients and for myself, were tangible and undeniable. AI changed what one engineer with deep domain expertise can ship. So now I make that explicit: I help mission-driven teams build AI tools that actually work, in weeks, not years.
For ten years before that, I was Director of Americas at Google.org — the company’s largest philanthropy team by dollars deployed — overseeing a $698M grantmaking portfolio that pioneered the $100M Google Career Certificates Fund, the $75M AI Opportunity Fund, and the $1B Bay Area Housing commitment. Before Google I was at Bain & Company, The Bridgespan Group, and Year Up United (Deputy Director, National Capital Region). I hold joint MBA/MPA degrees from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School and a chemical engineering degree from UVA, where I served as the National Academic Excellence Chair for the National Society of Black Engineers.
Today I’m also CEO and co-founder of Kindora, a public-benefit corporation building AI fundraising tools for the 85% of nonprofits priced out of professional platforms. And co-founder of Outdoorithm — the consumer technology platform my wife Sally runs as CEO — and the Outdoorithm Collective, the sister nonprofit Sally also co-founded and chairs, getting urban families outside.
When I’m not shipping code I’m camping, coaching, and parenting. My north star is simple: the best outcome of this studio is that Kindora or Outdoorithm takes off and I stop taking client work entirely. Until then — I take a few projects at a time, fixed-fee, four-to-eight weeks. If you’ve been burned by tech projects before and want to talk to someone who has been on both sides of the table, get in touch.
Launching The Last Mile’s prison education program in Indiana ended in a hoops shootout on the Governor’s backyard court against board member MC Hammer. I won. Sorry, Hammer.
A few project slots a year. Take one.
Engagements start with a 30-minute call. We’ll talk about the problem, whether the studio is the right fit, and what the first scoped sprint would look like.