Aranda & Co. / About
Who you'll work with
Aranda & Co. is Erick Aranda, William Li and Grant McKee. Erick runs the engagement and reports to you every week, with William on the technical side of every scope and Grant on security and vendor risk.
Erick Aranda
Founder
Erick's professional background is in sales and go-to-market strategy, using the latest AI tools and integrations on the market. Before that he spent ten years in the U.S. Navy. He enlisted and served in Sasebo, Japan, then graduated from the United States Naval Academy (B.S. Cyber Operations, 2021) and served four years as a surface warfare officer. He also holds an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business.
His own business runs on Claude Code under a written rules file, and nothing it drafts goes out until he has checked it.
If you've read A Message to Garcia, you know how we work.
William Li
William is a published researcher with an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business and a B.S. in marketing from Loyola Marymount University. His peer-reviewed work has more than 250 citations, and his research on bacterial spore germination used a neural-network-inspired model that he implemented in Python. Before Aranda & Co. he built a sensor prototype and data pipeline for predicting myopia risk. He works in Python, TensorFlow and Keras.
Before a scope reaches you, he works out what each tool can do and what connecting it to your systems would take.
Grant McKee
Head of Security & Vendor Risk
Grant works in information security governance, risk and compliance. He reads vendors' SOC 2 and HITRUST reports and checks how each one handles regulated data, such as health and payment records. He holds CompTIA Security+ and Network+.
On an engagement he reviews each AI vendor's security and data terms before any of your data moves.
How we work
Here are a few things that stay true on every engagement.
The people on this page do the work. Progress goes into a one-page scorecard every week.
Builders work from a written scope. When a project needs more hands than ours, outside builders work from a scope you approve first, and their work is checked against it before you sign off. Any share of a builder's fee that comes to us is listed in that scope.
We're independent of tool vendors. No vendor pays, certifies or partners with Aranda & Co. The assessment starts with what you already pay for, and sometimes the answer is to switch on a tool you already own.
A Navy veteran owns and runs the firm. We're based in the U.S. and work with companies worldwide, remote or on site. Any days on site, at home or abroad, go in the written scope.