The SEC Basement and the Birth of Digital Finance
It started, as most unexpected careers do, with a professor who refused to accept typewritten papers. Kristina had enrolled in college to study the human mind. What she got instead was a forced march to the computer lab and an involuntary education in WordPerfect 4.2 and 5.1. While classmates complained about memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the Reveal Codes screen, she was quietly learning something more fundamental: that structured text was a language, and she already knew how to read it.
That accidental fluency landed her at the Washington Service Bureau in January 1992, and it immediately kept her home from it. President George H.W. Bush was collapsing at a Tokyo state dinner. She was flat out in Washington, DC with what appeared to be the exact same stomach flu. She has always quietly wondered whether there was something in the Chesapeake before he left on that trip. They recovered on roughly the same timeline. He returned to the White House. She reported to the subterranean SEC Public Reference Room. Not microfiche. Not digital. Hot-off-the-press capitalism in physical form.
"The job was pure competitive theater. Pull the paper, slam it onto the commercial copier without a jam, hand it off to a sprint-courier, and jam pages into a screeching thermal fax to feed Wall Street before anyone else."
She held the original, fresh-ink Starbucks S-1 IPO prospectus in her bare hands when Howard Schultz was just a guy with 140 coffee shops and a dream. Speed, accuracy, and an almost athletic relationship with a commercial copier. She thrived.
Because she had survived the WordPerfect crucible in college, the SEC selected her as a beta tester for the original EDGAR system, the project that transitioned global corporate finance from physical paper to digital ASCII reality. She was there at the beginning of modern financial data.
The Wisconsin Blizzard and the Voicemail That Got Her Hired
The next chapter began with a geographical gamble. Kristina moved to Madison, Wisconsin with no car and a DC subway mindset, and used her early-childhood development college credits to land a job at a local daycare. It was not her plan. It was not anyone's plan.
Then a sharp-eyed parent watched her command a room of chaotic toddlers with tactical precision, pulled her aside, and delivered a verdict that changed everything: "You do not belong here." That parent secured her an interview at a tech company specializing in COLD platforms (Computer Output to Laser Disk).
The night before the interview, a massive snowstorm buried Madison. Lacking snowshoes and any reasonable path to the office, Kristina left a lengthy, radically honest voicemail. She told them she was not coming. Not just because of the snow, but because this was a software support role, she lacked the specific skills required, and hiring and training her would be a poor return on their corporate investment.
The company called back immediately and hired her on the spot.She taught herself DOS on baud modems and Bulletin Board Systems, learned to write custom batch files to compress mainframe print streams, and was eventually flown to Florida to train clients on laser disk systems. The blizzard voicemail worked because it demonstrated something rare: a candidate who valued the organization's actual needs over her own interview. That instinct would define her approach for the next three decades.
The Consultant Years and the Art of Translation
A recruiter at a job fair recognized something in her, the adaptability of a fellow Air Force brat, and pushed her into enterprise IT consulting. She landed embedded at American Family Insurance, wrestling with their massive Agency Data System. She became the rare translator who could hold a conversation with a mainframe engineer about the actual problem and then turn around and explain the same situation to a vice president without losing either of them.
That translation skill was the real product. The technology changed constantly. The human dynamics never did.
She shifted next to New Resources Corp, parachuting into northern Wisconsin to rewrite WinCaps, a complex, physics-based product selection system for Greenheck Fan Corp. She survived brutal winters on month-to-month contracts, keeping core engineering logic running while the company decided whether to renew her existence every thirty days. The era closed with a CRM transformation for Conseco Finance that made her life a logistical circus: driving from central Wisconsin to St. Paul, then flying to Rapid City, South Dakota, to drag local offices off fragmented spreadsheets and onto a unified platform.
The House Frame and the 48-Hour Double Offer
She got engaged, moved back to the East Coast, and landed in Connecticut as a triple-threat PM, BSA, and BA for FitLinxx in Stamford, building smart, connected fitness tracking hardware a full decade before Peloton or the Apple Watch existed. A year in, the dot-com bubble began cracking. She survived the first wave of layoffs.
Then, while under contract to buy a home, not just any home but a raw piece of land with a standing wooden house frame on it, her boss dropped a terrifyingly subtle hint: "Are you sure about buying right now?"
Before she could hit highway speed on her commute home, the next wave hit. She was laid off a month before closing on her house. A wooden skeleton stood on a lot in Connecticut. The mortgage deadline was not moving.
She dialed a recently laid-off recruiter from her car. Through pure networking instinct and a career's worth of relationship capital, she secured interviews and walked away with two simultaneous offers before the mortgage deadline closed in: MetLife, managing Assembly projects, and Wood Logan, a wholesale annuities firm in Stamford. She chose Wood Logan. The house got its walls. The career got its next chapter.
At Wood Logan, she helped roll out the nation's first structural 529 College Savings Plans in 2001, right as Manulife Financial was acquiring the firm and folding it into the larger $11 billion ($18 billion CAD) John Hancock acquisition. She was living inside one of the largest cross-border insurance transactions in North American history before she fully realized it.
The $11.8 Billion Ship and the Keys Thrown Two Weeks In
Five years after turning down MetLife to save the house, MetLife called back. This time, she said yes. She walked in right during the historic $11.8 billion acquisition of Citigroup's Travelers Life and Annuity, the deal that made MetLife the largest individual life insurance company in the United States by sales.
Two weeks into onboarding, her new boss pulled her aside. She was going out on immediate medical leave for surgery. The corporate keys landed in Kristina's hands.
She did not just keep the lights on. She took the wheel of the largest individual life insurance integration in North American history, putting the panicked, stressed-out human teams first and working outward from there to the systems, the platforms, and the global architecture.
At that point, she had already climbed: BSA and BA, then Project Manager, then Program Manager, then Portfolio Manager, then full IT Portfolio Leadership. Twelve years. A billion-dollar global transformation portfolio. A multinational EPMO she built and ran across the United States, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC.
Along the way she ran the infrastructure restack program, migrating legacy acquired entities off aging platforms and onto MetLife's primary architecture. The roster included MICC (the Travelers entity), General American Life, MetLife Investors, and CitiStreet Associates - the 403(b) and 457 retirement firm that came with the Citigroup deal and served more than 1.5 million customers managing $30 billion in retirement plan assets. She also oversaw the large-scale operational and workforce transition from Connecticut and New York to The Research Triangle, NC.
She hit the Gartner portfolio benchmarks so consistently that it stopped feeling like an achievement and started feeling like a personality trait. She negotiated vendor contracts, ran M&A integration across more than 25 project teams, and built the governance frameworks that made the whole sprawling operation visible, accountable, and actually executable. Nobody threw her a parade. That was not the point. The point was that it worked.
The Trapdoor, the 24 Hours, and the Brand New Key
There was an unwritten promise she had made to herself years earlier: relocate to North Carolina after the kids graduated. MetLife had been moving people there for years, and the idea had always made a certain kind of sense. Then 2016 arrived and recalibrated everything. She lost her husband to sarcoma. You do not upend children from everything they know, every friend, every familiar street, every anchor they have left, after something like that. North Carolina could wait. The kids came first.
By 2017, several members of the executive leadership team, including her direct boss, had departed MetLife to launch something new. She stayed. There had been an unwritten understanding that a relocation to North Carolina was part of her path forward. But nothing in corporate life is ever truly settled until it is, and by 2018 the landscape had shifted entirely. She found herself out of a job, two years into widowhood, with a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old at home and an aging parent uprooted to a small condo across town to be tended to. Corporate life had reminded her, not for the first time, that assumptions are not agreements. She filed that lesson and got back to work.
Now there was also the childhood home to deal with. Her mother had kept the Connecticut shoreline house since 1975, and it needed emptying before it sold. This sounds manageable until you factor in the cube freezer. A chest freezer the approximate size and weight of a Buick that lived in the basement, accessible only via a rickety, narrow hatchway staircase installed by someone who had clearly never considered the possibility that anyone would need to bring anything back up. The freezer had been growing its own ecosystem for an indeterminate period of time. Liquid was already making an exit from the back corner before they even touched it. They dragged it up anyway. Nobody asked too many questions about what had been in it.
On top of the standup refrigerator, someone had placed a steak. Taken out to thaw, presumably destined for the broiler, then apparently absorbed into the general passage of time along with everything else. The military-style cabinets lining the walls had started their lives on a US Air Force base somewhere and had been redeployed across five states by the time Kristina was six years old. They had outlasted most things. They were still perfectly good. She cleared them anyway.
The house sold. At a loss. Had she waited another year or two, a pandemic-era New Yorker fleeing the city for anything with a yard and a zip code that was not Manhattan would have bought it sight unseen, probably while still wearing their apartment slippers, probably for considerably more than she accepted. She thinks about that with the specific, low-grade anguish of someone who made a perfectly reasonable decision at exactly the wrong moment.
Desperate to land something and determined to keep moving, she launched martinelli and co., known as m&c, which also happened to be the initials of her two children: Madisyn and Conner. Not everything is a complete coincidence.
The Kforce chapter started the way the best chapters always do: sideways. A recruiter called to ask whether she needed to hire anyone. She did not. But she had a different question. Did he have a job for her? Less than twenty-four hours later she was in interviews. There was a desperate need for a fixer. Well. Hello.
First came United Technologies and the massive corporate separation that spun Carrier and Otis into independent public companies. No clean handoffs. No tidy org charts. Just an enormous, complicated machine that needed someone to roll up their sleeves and figure out which wire connected to what. She became the re-adhesive glue. The person who showed up wherever things were not quite sticking, quietly held them together, and moved to the next gap before anyone had time to notice there had been one.
Then COVID arrived. Because the merger apparently was not complicated enough. Suddenly everyone was home, nobody knew what was happening next, and the entire planet had discovered Zoom simultaneously. She did what she always does when things get messy. She started finding loose ends. Then tying them. Then finding the loose ends nobody had realized were loose yet. Not glamorous. Extremely useful. By March 2021, the work had run its course.
She went to sleep that night thinking she probably had a few days before anything happened. She woke up to fourteen meeting invitations. Fourteen. Her immediate reaction was not excitement. It was: what did I do? Nothing, as it turned out. The UTC/RTX payroll integration worksrteam needed help. A lot of help. Someone had circulated her name and by morning her calendar looked like she had accidentally been appointed to a cabinet position. So she logged in and got to work.
Raytheon Technologies, as UTC and Raytheon merged into one of the largest aerospace and defense combinations in history. Because apparently after years of insurance-company acquisitions, her professional specialty had quietly become: call her when the organizational chart looks like it was drawn during an earthquake. Systems. People. Payroll. Processes. Deadlines. Dependencies. Teams that had completely different answers to the same question. Her natural habitat.
One day she saw a job posting for a bank. The same mid-sized Wisconsin bank where she and her late husband had opened their very first joint account together. She believed it was a sign.
The interview was conducted from the Florida house. It was going well. Then her brother materialized behind her in the pool area: shirtless, leather-tanned, beer belly leading the way, entirely unbothered by the fact that a senior executive interview was in progress on the other side of the camera. She was certain she had lost the role in that exact moment. She had not. She got the job anyway. Some things cannot be explained. Some brothers cannot be contained.
The role was SVP, EPMO Technology Portfolio and Transformation at Associated Bank in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was, in the best possible way, the best of both worlds. She loved the Midwest. Old colleagues, old friends, and family within reach. And Wisconsin has a specific gift to offer the world that no other state can replicate: the Sobelman's bloody mary, which is less a drink and more a meal, a lifestyle, and a commitment. The Wicked Hop in Milwaukee ran a close second. She settled in. She believed, genuinely believed, that she had found the place that would be the Final Act in her corporate career. (Unbeknownst, it was, but not in the way she had anticipated)
A month shy of two years in, deep in the negotiations of two multimillion-dollar platform investments, her boss texted her. It had been great working together. She was gone. Then a meeting request appeared, mysterious in its brevity. She and her boss had walked through succession planning together. She was the named successor. She walked into that room expecting to step into the role. It was not an assumption. It was a plan. She already had a strawman 30-60-90 in her head. She walked out without one.
She was asked to shut down her laptop, pack it up, and go. And that was that. No transition, no KT, no Goodbyes. She handled what came next through the appropriate channels.
"Do I stay in an industry that refuses to value my worth as a tenured worker with institutional knowledge?"
She sat with that question for approximately 24 hours.Then she built coaigence. From scratch. In a day. Using AI from the very first morning. She finally named her sidekick Raivyn.
What followed was not a slow rebuild. It was an eruption. She spent the next year learning everything she could get her hands on: generative AI, prompt engineering, context engineering, agentic systems, automation, RAG, AIEO and GEO, no-code and vibe-code development, voice and avatar AI, workflow automation, AI governance and ethics, Python, large language models, and natural language processing, not as a hobbyist, but as someone who understood that the only way to help others navigate a technology was to actually understand it. She logged more than a thousand hours of continuous AI education while simultaneously taking that knowledge directly into the world.
She spoke to college students, community groups, chambers of commerce, professional associations, corporate teams, small and medium-sized businesses, and nonprofit organizations. She sat with state and federal legislative figures to understand where AI rules, regulations, bills, and disclosure requirements actually stood and then translated that into plain language for the people who needed to know but had no access to the room where those conversations were happening. She helped manage the overwhelm when people felt genuinely uncertain about their jobs, their relevance, and their futures.
PMI-SNEC, the Southern New England chapter of the Project Management Institute, has been part of her professional world for as long as she can remember. When the opportunity came to bring AI education back into that community, she did not hesitate. You go back to where you came from. You give what you have learned to the people who were there before the titles and the portfolios and the billion-dollar budgets. That is not a workshop. That is a homecoming.
She taught eight-week AI foundations programs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese for Hispanic and Latino business owners, entrepreneurs who had every bit of the drive, the vision, and the work ethic, and deserved the same access to the tools and knowledge that everyone else was already getting. No watered-down version. The real curriculum, in the language that worked best for the person in the room.
Business Insider published her story on Mother's Day. She was laid off at 55 and, within 24 hours, launched coaigence. The piece circulated across more than twenty publications globally. Then came the Wayne's World moment she had not seen coming: a public access television appearance on Optimum CityLights and Culture4ACause that she describes, accurately, as one of the more surreal and delightful experiences of the entire run. She also received an invitation to call into the Kim Komando Show, internationally syndicated and heard by millions of listeners, which is not something that happens to people who are not doing something genuinely worth paying attention to.
She built tools. She built utilities. She built platforms. At least partly to make her own life easier, which is the most honest origin story for any product.
There is a 1971 Melanie Safka song called Brand New Key. "I've got a brand new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new key." She hears it often. Not because of the skates. Because of what the song is actually about: two things that are useless without each other, and the moment someone pays close enough attention to realize they belong together.
In April 2026, a gentleman who runs the Networking in Action chapter in Monroe, Connecticut, a natural connector, the kind of person who listens to every conversation for the sound of two things that belong together, made an introduction. On the other end was a man who had established his own AI consulting company exactly one month before coaigence was incorporated. Thomas Appling of Freedom Forge AI. Same instincts. Complementary knowledge. Genuine synergy, which is a word that usually means nothing and in this case meant everything.
They began tag-teaming workshops and presentations and speaking engagements. They built together: The Internal Brain, LifeHouse OS, SEOlution, and others still in motion. The shared focus was always the people most at risk of falling behind by the AI wave: the SMBs, Enterpreneurs, Communities. Those who had every reason to participate in the AI economy and deserved every tool to do so, presented with dignity, without condescension, and in a way that made the most sense.
But beneath all the technology was what Kristina had always understood best: PEOPLE. For more than thirty years, her work had centered on helping people navigate change. Today, that means young adults trying to enter a workforce changing faster than schools can update the curriculum. Older adults determined not to be left behind. Small businesses and multicultural entrepreneurs trying to compete. And experienced professionals asking a question no one should have to ask: Does everything I spent twenty years learning still matter?
It does. The tools changed. The human problem did not.
There was no playbook for any of it. There was just the same instinct she had carried since the SEC basement and the blizzard voicemail and the house frame: sit down with the actual human in front of you. Find out what is keeping them up at night. Figure out what is standing between them and their goals, their stability, their ability to take care of their family. And then help. Not with a one-size-fits-all deck and a retainer. With a genuine conversation and whatever combination of knowledge, tools, and connections will actually move things forward for that specific person in that specific situation.
That is not a consulting model. That is a worldview. And it took thirty years, several displacements, a lightning-struck freezer full of shellfish, and one deeply memorable shirtless brother to get there. Rest In Peace Bobby.
That is the resume.
coaigence is what comes next.
Thirty years of watching organizations struggle at transformation, not because of the technology but because of the humans inside it, has a way of clarifying purpose. coaigence exists because practical, human-first AI adoption should not be a luxury reserved for organizations with eight-figure transformation budgets.
Meet Kristina