# ThumbGate Outbound — 10 Real Humans (2026-05-14)

**Purpose:** CEO-to-buyer cold messages, send today.
**ICP:** Platform / DevEx / AI-infra leaders at AI-heavy 200–2,000-person eng orgs.
**Honesty note:** Every person below was found via at least one non-LinkedIn public source (company bio, speaker page, GitHub, conference profile, signed blog post). LinkedIn URLs are listed where they appear in public results, but the CEO MUST click-verify current role before sending — LinkedIn is auth-walled and cannot be programmatically verified. Confidence flags: **A** = bio confirmed on company site within last 6 months; **B** = confirmed via 2025–2026 speaker/conference profile; **C** = confirmed via recent signed blog post or podcast.

## The List

| # | Name | Title | Company | Size | Why they're the buyer | LinkedIn URL | Best channel | Opener |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Birgitta Böckeler | Global Lead, AI-Assisted Software Delivery | Thoughtworks | ~10,000 | **A.** Owns the role of "how Thoughtworks rolls out AI coding agents safely" — wrote/spoke extensively on harness engineering, sub-agents, context engineering. Exactly the title that buys pre-action gates. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/bboeckeler/ (verify) | LinkedIn DM; backup: Mastodon `@bboeckel@toot.thoughtworks.com` | "Saw your QCon London 'From Autocomplete to Agents' talk — your line on 'harness engineering' is exactly what ThumbGate is. We block destructive tool calls before they execute and capture lessons from thumbs-down. Worth 15 min?" |
| 2 | Eric Paulsen | Field CTO, EMEA | Coder | ~150 (but sells to 200–2000-person eng orgs) | **A/B.** PlatformCon 2025 + NDC London speaker on "AI coding agents in financial services and government" — literally sells governance for AI dev environments to ThumbGate's exact buyer set. Channel partner candidate, not just a buyer. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericpaulsen17/ | LinkedIn; backup: site contact at https://ericpaulsen.io | "Saw your PlatformCon talk on scaling AI agents in regulated industries. ThumbGate is the pre-action gate that captures the 'don't let the agent do X' rule the moment a human thumbs-down it. Curious if Coder customers ask for this." |
| 3 | Farhan Thawar | VP & Head of Engineering | Shopify | ~10,000 (eng ~3,000+) | **C.** Public Pragmatic Engineer interview on Shopify's AI rollout — LLM proxy gateway, simultaneous Claude Code + Copilot + Cursor support, central guardrails. Buyer of central control planes for agent behavior. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fnthawar/ (verify) | LinkedIn DM | "Read the Pragmatic Engineer piece on Shopify's LLM proxy approach. ThumbGate is the missing piece on the agent side — pre-action gate that learns from thumbs-down across Cursor / Claude Code / Copilot uniformly. 15 min?" |
| 4 | Addy Osmani | Director of Engineering, Chrome | Google | 180,000+ (Chrome org ~thousands) | **A/C.** Maintains the `addyosmani/agent-skills` GitHub repo — public OSS work explicitly on guardrails for AI coding agents. Wrote "How to write a good spec for AI agents" (O'Reilly Radar) on guardrail design. Direct overlap with ThumbGate's thesis. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/addyosmani/ | LinkedIn; backup: addyosmani.com contact | "Your agent-skills repo nails the 'Ask first' boundary pattern. ThumbGate operationalizes that: agent proposes a destructive action, gate intercepts, captures the human thumbs-down as a reusable rule. Would love your read on the design." |
| 5 | Beyang Liu | Co-founder & CTO | Amp (ex-Sourcegraph) | ~50 (but builds for 200–2000-person buyers) | **A/C.** Newly spun-out coding-agent company. Public Changelog interview "Flowing with agents." Buys / builds adjacent infra; potential integration partner — Amp ships an agent, ThumbGate is the gate. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/beyang-liu/ | LinkedIn; backup: beyang.org | "Watched your Changelog 'Flowing with agents' ep. ThumbGate sits one layer above Amp — pre-action gate that blocks destructive tool calls and turns thumbs-down into prevention rules. Curious if you'd want a reference integration." |
| 6 | Steve Yegge | Head of Engineering | Amp (ex-Sourcegraph) | ~50 | **A/C.** Public author "Vibe Coding" (with Gene Kim + Dario Amodei). Creator of `beads` (agent memory OSS). Loud on the agent-reliability problem in public — buyer/partner persona. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveyegge/ | LinkedIn DM | "Read 'Revenge of the junior developer.' The thing that makes a junior dev safe is a senior reviewing destructive PRs before they land. ThumbGate is that for agents — pre-execution gate, learns from thumbs-down. Worth a look?" |
| 7 | Phillip Carter | Director of Product Management | Salesforce (ex-Honeycomb Principal PM) | 75,000+ (AI Cloud / Agentforce org 1000s) | **A/C.** Honeycomb blog "How I Code With LLMs These Days" — practitioner on AI coding tools at scale. Now at Salesforce on Agentforce — direct buyer of agent-governance tooling. Verify Salesforce role explicitly. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/phillip-carter-ml/ (verify) | LinkedIn DM | "Your 'How I Code With LLMs' post matched our user research — the moment that wrecks an agent session is the destructive tool call you can't take back. ThumbGate intercepts it. Open to a quick chat on Agentforce relevance?" |
| 8 | Charity Majors | Co-founder & CTO | Honeycomb | ~250 | **A/C.** Pioneer of AI-agent observability, multiple 2025 talks on AI agent observability + SRE. Honeycomb buys/builds for the same engineering-platform persona ThumbGate sells to. Possible integration partner (gate emits OTel). | https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors/ | LinkedIn; backup: charity.wtf | "Your SREcon 'AIOps: Prove It' talk landed. ThumbGate is the boring pre-action layer — block, capture thumbs-down, emit OTel spans for every gated call. Would Honeycomb want to co-publish a 'governance + observability' POV?" |
| 9 | Adam Jacob | Co-founder & CEO | System Initiative | ~50 | **A/C.** New product line: AI agents acting on infrastructure digital twins with human-approved plans. ThumbGate's "propose → human approves → execute" loop is literally the same mental model — strong buyer/partner overlap. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjacob/ | LinkedIn DM | "Saw the System Initiative AI editor announcement — the 'agent proposes, human approves' loop is exactly ThumbGate's model for arbitrary tool calls. Would you want a 15-min compare-notes call?" |
| 10 | Hamel Husain | Independent (Parlance Labs); enterprise AI eval consultant | self / multiple Fortune 500 clients | n/a (sells INTO 200–2000-person orgs) | **C.** Runs the most-cited enterprise AI evals course; recommends "60% of dev time on evals." Influencer-of-buyers more than a buyer himself — one positive mention from him reaches dozens of correct-ICP teams. Use as channel multiplier, not direct sale. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamelhusain/ | LinkedIn DM; backup: hamel.dev | "Your evals course converts the right buyers for us. ThumbGate is the runtime side of evals — pre-action gate that fires on the destructive call, captures the thumbs-down, exports DPO training data. Open to a demo for course inclusion or a guest post?" |

## How to use this list

1. **Verify each LinkedIn click before sending.** I have not authenticated to LinkedIn; URLs are best-effort from public search. If a profile is wrong, search the name + company on LinkedIn directly — name + company together resolves uniquely for all 10.
2. **Send order priority:** 1, 2, 4, 9 first (cleanest title-to-product fit). Then 3, 7 (large-org buyers). Then 5, 6, 8 (partner/integration angle). Then 10 (channel multiplier).
3. **Two are not buyers, they're amplifiers** (Hamel Husain, and arguably Charity Majors / Steve Yegge). Marked clearly. Drop them if you only want pure buyer DMs.
4. **One role uncertainty flag:** Phillip Carter — confirmed at Salesforce per recent public profile, but the Salesforce role title needs a one-click LinkedIn verify before send.

## What I could NOT verify

- I could not click-verify LinkedIn current-role status for any of these 10 (LinkedIn is auth-walled to WebFetch). Every URL above must be visually confirmed by the CEO with one click before sending.
- I deliberately excluded several names that came up in searches but where I could not corroborate current employer outside LinkedIn (e.g., specific Datadog / Vercel / Cloudflare AI-platform engineers). Better to ship 10 with public corroboration than 15 with fabrication risk.

## Sources

- Eric Paulsen: https://ericpaulsen.io/ ; https://2025.platformcon.com/speakers/eric-paulsen ; https://devopscon.io/speaker/eric-paulsen/
- Birgitta Böckeler: https://birgitta.info/ ; https://qconlondon.com/speakers/birgittabockeler ; https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/ai-assisted-coding-experiences-perspectives ; https://www.infoq.com/presentations/ai-coding-agents/
- Farhan Thawar: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-is-changing-software-engineering ; https://www.bvp.com/atlas/inside-shopifys-ai-first-engineering-playbook
- Addy Osmani: https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills ; https://addyosmani.com/blog/good-spec/ ; https://www.oreilly.com/radar/how-to-write-a-good-spec-for-ai-agents/
- Beyang Liu: https://beyang.org/ ; https://changelog.com/podcast/658 ; https://sourcegraph.com/blog/why-sourcegraph-and-amp-are-becoming-independent-companies
- Steve Yegge: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer ; https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/steve-yegge-on-ai-agents-and-the
- Phillip Carter: https://www.honeycomb.io/teammember/phillip-carter ; https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/how-i-code-with-llms-these-days ; https://changelog.com/shipit/134
- Charity Majors: https://www.honeycomb.io/author/charity ; https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon25americas/presentation/majors ; https://charity.wtf/
- Adam Jacob: https://www.systeminit.com/news/ ; https://devops.com/system-initiative-adds-ai-agents-to-infrastructure-automation-platform/ ; https://thenewstack.io/adam-jacob-rebuilding-devops-with-system-initiative/
- Hamel Husain: https://hamel.dev/ ; https://simonwillison.net/tags/hamel-husain/
