Nate Besthoff
My Projects

About Me

Nate Besthoff
My Background:
  • Major in Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation at USC's Iovine and Young Academy
  • Minor in Artificial Intelligence Applications at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering

I am a sophomore looking to pursue a career in product engineering, following a passion that I developed in high school as a student at NuVu in Cambridge, MA - a project-based high school modeled after MIT's architecture studios.

My Expertise and Interests:

I am becoming an expert in conceptualizing and developing MVPs for innovative products, having created dozens of rapid prototypes across various mediums. I have a technical background in Python programming and electronics prototyping. I am experienced in product design, experience design, architectural design, and user testing. I am also very passionate about AI. For example last summer, I spent weeks designing a curriculum that is being sold to teach SDRs to use AI tools for sales. My experiences feature a wide variety of disciplines, but my diverse skillset and experiences come together and have culminated into a deep interest in designing home automation products.

Objective:Secure a product design / product engineering internship for Summer '26

Work Experience

HaptiQ
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Mar 2025 – Present

Developing a smart wearable that helps individuals with walking impairments break out of freezing episodes through external haptic cues. Secured $15K in funding from USC Office of Research and Innovation and recently developed an MVP.

Skaled Revenue Performance Agency
Intern
Jul – Aug 2025

Designed a new service offering, a project-based certification curriculum for SDRs. I also designed an automated research + outreach workflow with Make, integrating Slack, Notion, and error handling.

LoopBack Analytics
Intern
Jun – Jul 2025

Designed an autonomous lead generation pipeline that scraped public data, qualified leads using the OpenAI API, and enriched contacts with the ZoomInfo API. My pipeline generated thousands of qualified leads from scratch.

Southbridge Boathouse
Co-Manager
Jun 2020 – Aug 2024 (Summers)

Guided customers through equipment selection based on skill level and conditions, matching users to the right experience. Managed intake workflow including waivers, payments, and safety tracking for all patrons.

Relevant Coursework

In Progress
Spring 2026, Maymester
EASC 360

Global East Asia Japan-Tokyo: Japanese Society and Design Thinking

Spring 2026
ACAD 281

Constructing Experiences

Spring 2026
ACAD 360

Design Strategy: Problem Solving

Spring 2026
ARCH 106

Workshop in Architecture

Completed
Fall 2025
ACAD 406

Purpose-Driven Innovation Incubator

A
Fall 2025
ACAD 324

The Practice of Design: Ideation

A
Fall 2025
ACAD 325

Human Technology Interaction

B+
Fall 2025
TAC-299

Special Topics – Law Without Borders: Law in a Cyber Universe

A
Spring 2025
ACAD 222

Introduction to Machine Intelligence

A
Spring 2025
ACAD 274

Designing Interactive Data Systems

A
Spring 2025
ACAD 182

Case Studies in Innovation

A-
Fall 2024
ACAD 181

Disruptive Innovation

A

Agent Native Product Engineering

As an aspiring Product Engineer, I seek to become an expert in utilizing Agentic AI to its fullest potential. The following is a list of areas that I am currently using or experimenting with:

  • Claude Code + Cowork
  • Claude Plugins and Custom Skills
  • Webhooks
  • Openclaw
  • LangChain and LangGraph
  • Crew AI
  • n8n and Make Automations
  • Prompt Libraries and Prompt Engineering
  • Learning Memory

Stay tuned for some cool agentic projects by the end of the month!