Ashley Aruffo is the VP of Product and Operations at Craft, a San Francisco-headquartered supply chain intelligence company that maps supplier networks and delivers risk insights to procurement professionals, risk analysts, and government agencies. Rising to prominence over five years with the company, she became known for building intelligence products for the defense industrial base, where Craft now works with more than 36 government agencies and resolves over 40 streams of data into a single verified picture of a company. Craft raised a $32 million Series B in February 2023 led by BAM Elevate, with participation from Greycroft, Uncork Capital, High Alpha, ServiceNow Ventures, and Point Field Partners, and holds a five-year, $28 million contract with the Secretary of the Air Force for supplier risk and intelligence technology.
Previously, she served as Division Head of Product, Applied AI at Black Knight, the mortgage technology company that acquired her prior employer. She arrived there through HeavyWater, a Philadelphia machine-learning startup whose AIVA product automated the extraction of income, asset, and insurance information from mortgage documents, and which Black Knight acquired in June 2018. At HeavyWater she confronted the constraint that defines small machine-learning companies: a startup cannot earn the customer trust required to obtain the training samples its models need, a bottleneck the acquisition resolved by handing the team access to an established book of lending clients.
Earlier in her career she worked as a Product Manager at Energage, an employee-engagement software company, after entering product directly out of college and, by her own account, performing every job a startup has to offer. Her work has spanned B2B and B2C products, though she has concentrated on enterprise software built for narrowly defined jobs.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
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