04About
Principals on every engagement.
Frank Speiser built product at SocialFlow (acquired). Payton Jonson has delivered federal benefits systems. Every Vardr engagement carries their direct accountability from kickoff to handoff.
Frank Speiser
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
Product, platform, applied ML
Frank is the co-founder of Vardr Partners and a longtime builder of data-intensive systems. He was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at SocialFlow, the social-media optimization platform acquired by Bitvore, where he led product across a real-time decisioning system that ran millions of publishing decisions a day.
Across the last two decades he has shipped agentic-AI systems in environments where decisions had to be both fast and defensible — publishing, advertising technology, and now public-sector benefits. He leads Vardr's product, platform, and applied-ML practice.
- Lives in
- New York, NY
- Reach
- frank@vardrpartners.com
Payton Jonson
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
Government delivery, program integrity
Payton co-founded Vardr Partners with a focus on bringing modern delivery discipline to government modernization. His career sits at the intersection of public-sector program operations and contemporary engineering practice — bridging the language of program offices, OIGs, and modern development teams.
He leads Vardr's government delivery practice: procurement strategy, accountable cutover planning, due-process and audit posture, and the long, careful arc of moving a benefits program from where it is to where it needs to be — without flag-day risk.
- Lives in
- Washington, DC
- Reach
- payton@vardrpartners.com
01Why Vardr exists
The firms that built the systems we live with now should not be hired to replace them.
Senior on every project
There is no partner-bait-and-junior-switch. Every engagement carries the personal accountability of a Vardr partner from kickoff to handoff.
Methodology in the open
Our frameworks are published. Anyone — including competitors — can read them. Procurement teams can interrogate them before a single email is exchanged.
No flag-day cutovers
Continuity of service is the first constraint. Every change ships behind a feature flag with parallel-run telemetry, and we'll say no to a procurement that requires otherwise.