Trevor Owens · San Francisco
Helping founders
build what’s next.
Operator, investor, and author. I build the systems, places, and communities that help founders turn ambitious ideas into companies.
- Companies backed
- 80+
- Entrepreneurs impacted
- 200,000+
- Cities taught
- 150+
- Cities with Corgi cafes
- 4
Take a closer look.
Get in touchNow: Relief
Relief is a debt relief startup helping people get out from under credit card debt, personal loans, collections, and past-due medical bills. The app links to your accounts, analyzes what you owe, and submits reduction requests to your creditors, with an AI debt advisor, credit monitoring, and legal support tools along the way.
Role: VP of Strategy. Visit relief.app
Work and career
Open a chapter. Each one is a different medium for the same job: find the real constraint, run a tight experiment, then scale what works.
2026– Relief VP of Strategy
VP of Strategy at Relief, the self-service debt relief app helping 200,000+ people negotiate down credit card, loan, collections, and medical debt.
Open relief.app →2026 Corgi Cafe Head of Cafe Expansion
Head of Cafe Expansion at Corgi, the AI-native insurance carrier. Scaled a 24/7 cafe network as Corgi’s physical presence in founder cities: San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, and London. Led market selection, site sourcing, leases, build-outs, openings, operations, artist residencies, and founder programming.
Open corgicafe.com →2021–2026 Bitcoin Frontier Fund $7M · 80+ companies
Early-stage fund (formerly Stacks Ventures) investing in teams building applications, protocols, and infrastructure on Bitcoin, Stacks, Lightning, and adjacent layers. Built one of the first dedicated Bitcoin accelerators, including an Ordinals program. Hosted The Ordinal Show and twice-weekly builder Spaces.
Xverse · ALEX · Liquidium · Bitflow · OrdinalsBot · Zest · Ducat · Unisat · Gamma · OnChainMonkey · LunarCrush · Asigna · Maestro · Satflow
Open btcfrontier.fund →2021–2023 Ninjalerts & Pizza Ninjas Product + culture on-chain
Co-founded Ninjalerts, a real-time Ethereum wallet and contract tracker for NFT traders. Later created Pizza Ninjas, a Bitcoin Ordinals art and IP project. The work set records in Sotheby’s digital assets auction, selling one artwork for $138,700 (2.23 BTC), and won 1st place at the New York Short Animation Festival in 2025.
Follow the work on X →2014–2019 Javelin Techstars · $2M raised
CEO & CTO. Productized Lean Startup methods into software and enterprise programs used inside Google, Salesforce, Intuit, News Corp, and others. Partnered in China through Lean Venture Partners with Chinaccelerator, People Squared, and Google.
2010–2013 Lean Startup Machine 150+ cities · 6 continents
Founded the world’s largest grassroots Lean Startup training program: three-day workshops that taught founders to test the riskiest assumption before writing code. Created the Validation / Experiment Board. Worked with GE, Amazon, Microsoft, Huawei, and the United States Postal Service. Coached White House Innovation Fellows. Spoke at Princeton, Columbia, and the White House.
The Lean Enterprise
How Corporations Can Innovate Like Startups
By Trevor Owens and Obie Fernandez.
A field manual for running innovation inside large organizations: not as a slogan, but as structure, incentives, and an “innovation colony” that can actually ship.
Featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and Business Insider, among others.
Praise for The Lean Enterprise
“Owens shows us how corporations can leverage lean startup methods to drive innovation.”
“Owens has a framework for empowering the greatest entrepreneurial talent to thrive inside an organization.”
Talks, interviews and panels
Talks, interviews, panels and cafe launch videos, newest first.
Showing all 10 media items.
Press & writing
Coverage of Corgi Cafe, Bitcoin Frontier Fund and digital culture, alongside my own writing. Original sources and saved reference listings, gathered in one place.
Insurtech Corgi launched an Artist Residency Program for artists, illustrators, writers
Jul 21, 2026 DecryptBitcoin Frontier Fund Launches Accelerator to Boost Ordinals Adoption
Aug 14, 2023 NFT CultureRevolutionizing Retro Gaming: Pizza Ninjas Brings N64 to Bitcoin Blockchain
Feb 23, 2024Contact Trevor Owens
Press, partnerships, Relief, or founders building the next big company: start here.