Our Team
Shannon Lijek
Shannon spent over 20 years at the intersection of technology, strategy, and operations. Before founding Paradox, she held senior executive roles at Newmont and Freeport-McMoRan, two of the world’s largest gold and copper producers, where she led strategy at the enterprise level, drove measurable production gains at the mines, and built the operating rhythms that let complex organizations perform consistently. Before that, she spent nearly a decade as a McKinsey Partner advising industrial and mining clients on performance and organizational transformation. She began her career at Lockheed Martin as a software engineer, eventually leading a radar software development team and deploying systems in support of active military operations.
She has sat in the room where capital allocation decisions get made, where turnarounds either take hold or don’t, and where the gap between a good business and a great one comes down to whether the fundamentals are actually in place.
That’s what she brings to Paradox.
When she isn’t working on acquisitions or operational transformations, she is supporting creative endeavors, including co-producing her first feature film, Sharing Air. This work has taught her as much about patient, long-horizon building as any acquisition has.
MBA, Entrepreneurial Management, The Wharton School · MS, Computer Science, University of Southern California · BS, Computer Science, University of Arizona
Kelsey Pistotnik
Kelsey spent over 16 years in federal government and public health doing one thing: walking into complicated situations and making them work. That meant coordinating COVID-19 vaccine rollout across Alaska, managing Ebola response logistics in Sierra Leone, building health information systems for the Pacific Islands and the American Southwest, and building a 65-person national branch from the ground up. Emergency response, technology implementation, large-scale program management. She has done all of it under pressure, at scale, with real stakes.
Before founding Paradox, she decided it was time to take those skills somewhere they could move faster and go deeper, inside businesses where the work is tangible and the impact is immediate. She knows what it looks like when an organization runs well and when it doesn't. She has built the systems, led the teams, and done the unglamorous work of making complex operations function under pressure.
That's what she brings to Paradox.
When she isn't working on acquisitions or operations, she is traveling and experiencing new cultures, drawn to new places and the people in them, and maintaining a yoga and meditation practice that keeps her grounded through it all.
MPH Environmental and Occupational Health, Emory University · BA, Anthropology, University of Oklahoma
