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About Bruce Cleveland

The Operator Behind the Framework

Operator. Investor. Advisor. Author. Bruce has spent 30+ years building, scaling, and investing in companies that define categories and dominate markets.

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Built by Experience

Bruce doesn’t operate like traditional consultancies. He joins your team as a partner, co-developing artifacts and transferring Market Engineering discipline you can sustain.

Board Member & Strategic Advisor

Bruce serves on the boards of multiple startups and has advised enterprise executive teams navigating funding rounds, market pivots, and category launches.

Taught & Trusted by Institutions

His books are used at leading universities and business schools worldwide.

Media & Thought Leadership

Bruce has been featured in leading business and technology publications, podcasts, and industry conferences as an expert on scaling startups.

Founder & CEO Experience

Bruce founded and led GreenFig (renamed Ziplines Education) as CEO, giving him firsthand experience navigating the challenges that founder face.

Bruce Cleveland

Bruce Cleveland is a former technology operating executive, venture capitalist, and startup founder. He has held senior executive positions at Oracle, Apple, Siebel Systems, and C3 AI. He served as General Partner at two venture capital firms, and was founder and CEO of GreenFig renamed to Ziplines Education.

He is the author of the bestseller Traversing the Traction Gap, a prescriptive guide taught in universities and used by investors and founders worldwide, and the Market Engineering: Because Markets Don't Engineer Themselves.

Today, Cleveland lives in Bend, Oregon with his wife and dog, Finn. Bruce acts as board and executive advisor to startups, technology companies, and venture firms using the Traction Gap Framework and Market Engineering methodologies to build market leaders.

Bruce Cleveland sitting at a table with his legs crossed.

Learn the Foundation

Bruce Cleveland has codified decades of operating and investing experience into two essential books—one focused on when to execute, the other on how to win your market.

Book cover of 'Traversing the Traction Gap' by Bruce Cleveland with a blue gradient background and white text.

Traversing the Traction Gap

The bestselling and prescriptive guide to scaling startups from product to market leadership. Navigate the critical gap between building a great product and achieving repeatable revenue and enduring market leadership.

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Book cover titled 'Market Engineering' with subtitle 'Because Markets Don't Build Themselves' by Bruce Cleveland, featuring a purple background and a mechanical hand pointing downwards amidst various hanging objects and levers.

Market Engineering:

Because Markets Don't Engineer Themselves

Master the five tenets of Market Engineering: category design, positioning, messaging, storytelling, and thought leadership.

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Let’s Engineer Your Market Advantage Together

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Client Testimonials

Bruce delivers a standout market engineering masterclass—combining real-world experience with clear, actionable frameworks that fundamentally shift how founders think about building markets, not just products.

Phill Robinson
Founder and Chair
Boardwave

Market Engineering is a prescriptive blueprint CEOs and leadership teams can use—especially in the medical device industry. Bruce’s approach guided us to engineer an entirely new frame of reference for physicians, patients, and investors alike. Every leader who aspires to market leadership should read, and rigorously apply, this book.

Drs. Patty Buehler, MD and Knute Buehler, MD
Co-Founders
Osheru

The principles Bruce describes in “Market Engineering” are foundational for startups and enterprises alike.

Doug Pepper
General Partner
ICONIQ Ventures

Too many companies skip the foundation and jump straight to tactics — hiring sales reps, launching campaigns, optimizing funnels — without first establishing who they are in the market's mind. 'Market Engineering' is the systematic approach to getting the fundamentals right first, including category design, positioning, and narrative, before deploying any go-to-market tasks.

Jon Miller
Co-Founder Marketo & Startup CEO

Market Engineering is a prescriptive guide that provides principles and processes useful for all CEOs and their senior leadership teams. Teams that learn and leverage these principles will be the ones who succeed in this fast-changing era.

Dan Streetman
CEO
Tanium

Bruce Cleveland is that rarest of creatures – a guy who has deep experience on both sides of the table. Bruce gets right up in the face of the truth: It takes as much effort to create a great market as it does to create a great product.

Bret Waters
Stanford University

Bruce Cleveland builds a strong business case for the CEO needing to 'own' Market Engineering. This is a must-needed playbook for any CEO to execute a systemic approach to making Market Engineering the vehicle for becoming a true market leader.

John Baird
Founder and Chairman
Velocity Coaching - CEO Coach - Apple, Doordash, Nike, and others

Bruce is one of the leader experts on scaling startups, especially in the enterprise.

Aaron Levie
CEO and Founder
Box

Traction. This is the word that haunts their fund-raising lives. What is it? Why is it so elusive? How do you get it? How do you demonstrate it? These are the questions that the Traction Gap Framework helps management teams and their investing sponsors address.

Geoffrey Moore
Author
“Crossing the Chasm”

In today’s AI-driven landscape, new technologies are multiplying at unprecedented speed—leaving customers awash in a sea of competing tools, apps, and agents. To truly stand out amid this noise, emerging companies need more than great features; they need Market Engineering.

Waverly Deutsch
Retired entrepreneurship professor
University of Chicago, Booth