About Dmitri Sunshine
I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1984. My family immigrated to Atlanta when I was seven. We arrived with almost nothing, but we arrived together.
By high school I was teaching myself to code, which felt less like study and more like finally having the right toolkit for the problems I wanted to solve. At 19 I stepped out of college to build full-time; the work I was doing on my own had already outpaced what the classroom was offering.
In 2007, I founded InReach Solutions, an ERP SaaS platform for adoption agencies. I built the first version myself and bootstrapped the company from zero revenue to approximately 80 clients across the country.
For fourteen years I ran InReach without outside capital. There was no board, and every decision had to pay for itself.
The team was distributed and lean, and unreasonably committed to the work. In practice that meant social workers spent more of their week on their mission and less of it fighting their software.
A few years in, I went through a divorce and a hard reset. I came out with a sharper sense of what I wanted to build next, and with whom.
In 2021 I joined Cohere as COO during a critical growth phase. When I walked in, the company had almost no operational scaffolding of any kind.
My first year there was spent building it all from scratch. What I put in place survived my departure, which is by far the mark I hold myself to in operations work.
Today I run Solanasis, an AI-native firm doing fractional CIO and CISO work for small and growing organizations. I have a particular soft spot for mission-driven nonprofits and the people who hold them up.
What I actually do is tighten the systems my partners have quietly outgrown. I pay down the hidden risk that tends to pile up in the corners nobody is watching.
The thing I bring that most consultants cannot is that I have actually run the company I am advising. For nearly two decades I have been founder-operator, which is why when I walk into a partner's problems I have usually sat in that chair myself. That is what keeps me honest about the advice I give.
I am also building Matchkeyz, an AI-powered community platform with privacy-first architecture. It keeps me current on the technologies I advise my clients about.
I live in Boulder, Colorado with my two kids. When I am not working, you will find me on a mountain bike trail or building something with my hands.
I greet everyone with Aloha. It is more than a word; for me it represents warmth, respect, and a commitment to showing up fully in every interaction.