About
I am the Cofounder of Packback, the AI-powered learning platform that awakens and fuels students' lifelong curiosity. As Chief Product Officer, I helped scale Packback to more than 3 million student users and $26M in ARR, culminating in a 6x exit to private equity firm PSG Equity in 2024. Along the way, I led our product design, user experience, and engineering teams in crafting a product experience used at hundreds of universities and community colleges across the United States and Canada.
Today, I run an independent product design practice, partnering with brands to build their end-to-end product offerings with a focus on taking new products from zero to one. For new engagements, reach out at jessica@jessicatenuta.com.
I am also the founder of Talas, the AI operating layer for private equity value creation. Talas gives firms and their portfolio companies' executive teams a shared source of truth — critical company metrics paired with the qualitative context behind them, each mapped to the firm's exit-readiness scorecard — accessible directly or connected to your preferred AI model (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) via MCP. I built it after Packback's acquisition to support the strong board collaboration, institutional knowledge transfer, and executive-level visibility I saw firms need most.
Earlier in my career, I designed brands for portfolio companies at Lightbank and Listen Ventures, and founded my first company, Inkblot Designs, in high school — creating and selling hand-illustrated custom shoes. I also cofounded Play Together, a Chicago-based non-profit art-and-music label benefitting local arts education.
My work has been featured in Forbes, the Chicago Sun Times, Fast Company, the Techweek 100, TEDx, and Chicago Inno.
Read my writing on Medium, where I cover design, product strategy, and building purpose-led startups.
