Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Lilac Bar David has been in the banking and payments space for over 20 years. Previously, she was the Co-founder & CEO of Pepper, a banking system focused on millennials and young adults. Outside of tech, she has 3 kids, and enjoys everything to do with the sea - paddle boarding, swimming, etc. She enjoys paddle boarding because it helps her to clear her head. And when it comes to food, she is...

Prasad Kawthekar grew up in India, and eventually came stateside to school in Wisconsin. He took a java coding class, and was immediately hooked - which led to him pursuing computer science, focusing on artificial intelligence. He met his tribe during school, and stayed on for further academic experiences. Outside of tech, he lives in the Bay Area and enjoys being outside in nature. There was a ti...

Kwindla Kramer has always been interested in building things, and his parents gave him lots of opportunity. He spent his early days learning to program on the Commodore 64, and playing old games like Loadrunner. He was super interested in the internet while in College, and in 1996, he got the opportunity to be apart of the MIT Media lab. Outside of tech, he is a quasi vegan, and enjoys the foggy b...

Gilad Uziely is married with 2 daughters. He told me he met his wife on a taxi in Thailand, but that the story there was for a different podcast. He has always been an entrepreneur, along with his wife. They have built 2 small hotels in Italy, where his wife is from. Outside of tech and these things, he lives by the beach in Tel Aviv, and loves to surf. Recently, Gilad and his team built a product...

Nooshin Alibhai has a background in sales, event planning, and entrepreneurship. Outside of her professional life, she enjoys latin dancing, which is actually where she met her co-founder Eric. Eric Klimuk has also been in entrepreneurial roles throughout his life, starting companies early on in his life. Eventually, he dove into enterprise customer support, which led him to his current venture to...

Hikari Senju grew up in Westchester, NY, and was exposed to tech early on, as his family worked at IBM. His Dad is also a painter, so he has been driven through the intersection of art and tech. He studied Computer Science at Harvard, and was cross registered at MIT. It was at MIT that his passions united, and he knew that his life goals would be aligned between art and technology. He started his...

Jason Boehmig is lucky to be in tech, in his words. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do post college, and ended up at Lehman Brothers. In reflecting on what was unique about this moment in time, he decided it was tech's influence - and he wanted to be a part of it. Outside of tech, he reads a lot, and enjoys music, specifically collecting vinyl records and listening (they do sound better)....

Day to day, Adam Judelson is obsessed with complex problem sets in the product world. This has resulted in him getting more and more excited about simple, but powerful, productivity tools. He comes from Silicon Valley, joining Palantir Technologies in the early days, followed up by some VC backed startups. Outside of tech, he spends a lot of his free time with his kids, riding bikes and polishing...

Vlad Matsiiako was born in the Ukraine, but moved to the Netherlands to study his undergrad. He was one of the first data scientists at Bunq. He eventually got his Masters at Cornell, and actually worked at Figma, around the time of their acquisition - which he mentioned was super exciting. Outside of tech, he enjoys tennis and traveling, especially to Europe, meeting people and hearing their stor...

Bryce Crawford had a pretty simple path into tech. He attended school at Vanderbilt, originally wanting to be a history major. But after observing his Dad's role in tech sales, he thought the industry looked like a good way to make money. He's worked for Capital One, Gemini and Facebook, specifically on Instagram shops. Outside of work - he keeps on coding, while trying to exercise, stay i...

Shai Ber is 40 years old, living in Tel Aviv. He loves to travel, hike, and eat new kinds of food. He loves to swim at the beach often, but he admits, tech consumes a large amount of his life - and he likes it that way. Elad Ben-Israel is also from Tel Aviv, and is 43 years old - and he jokingly claims that he is the responsible adult in the company. Outside of tech, he enjoys attending burning ma...

Andrew Louder grew up west of Houston, TX, in a town called Katy. He got into tech during his web mastery class in High School. He's a business graduate from Texas A&M University, and he got a taste of what life would be like as an entrepreneur when he founded a social group of Latin American students. Outside of tech, he lives in Dallas, married with 3 kids, and is enjoying all that life...

Nikita Fedorov has been a tech guy all his life. He loves physics, and eventually decided to try out being a developer, starting out with PHP and doing it for 7 years. Eventually, he moved into leadership and management of engineering teams. Outside of tech, he into his side projects and playing video games, of which is favorite is the game Dark Souls. While he was an engineering manager, Nikita w...

This week, we’re sharing something special: The No Priors podcast. No Priors is your guide to the AI revolution. At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo ask the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders the biggest questions - people like Cristobal Valenzuela, Founder/CEO RunwayML and Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft. They ask questions like: How f...

George Novik's life is his work, so it's strange for him to think of life outside of his startup. But outside of tech, his hobbies include swimming, surfing, and computer games. He loves to surf at the United Emirate States. He is uncertain of the wave sizes there, as the variance is high. A few years ago, George was hired to build a marketplace for his friends company. Fast forward, he an...

Rickard Hansson is 48 years old to date, but started tinkering with his Commodore 64 when he was young. Later in life, he fell in love with building things and distributing it - IE building for others. He built his first commercial product at 15, which was a CRM built in Pascal. Outside of tech, he is a father of 3 and is a movie buff in his spare time. His favorite movie is a story about a tree d...

Andy Skipper currently resides in Belfast, Ireland, though he is from London originally. He's been knee deep in tech since he was 12 years old, as a hobby programmer. He left college early to start his first software development agency, prior to joining the startup world during the .com era. He loves tech, but loves people as well - which lead him into his current venture. Outside of tech, he...

Egil Østhus is based out of Norway - which obviously means he loves skiing. But outside of this, he loves to run outdoors, through the woods and on the streets. He has not done a full marathon yet, but dreams of doing the New York marathon someday. He's a family man, married, with 2 boys - none of which like to run with him, but they all enjoy being active and hiking. In a past role, Egil'...

Aviram Hassan started hacking his way into stuff at a young age, primarily from online multiplayer games. The first game was a fan based game for Pokemon, when he was 8 years old, which was helpful for him to learn English. He served in the Israeli military, prior to become a startup solution architect and backend developer. Outside of tech, he is a family man with a 6 month old, born around the s...

Shem Magnezi is from Tel Aviv, and started his software engineering career when he was in high school. It wasn't really professional, just hacking some stuff together, which is the way he learned the typical starting tools like HTML, Javascript, and the like. Post college, he served in the Israeli Military, in intelligence, and then moved into startups, then bigger companies like Facebook, and...

For Puneet Gupta, his professional work and personal hobbies collide. He has been enamored with tech since his early days, and finds coding to be quite therapeutic. He spent many years launching prominent cloud solutions, and has a track record for success there. Outside of tech, he is a family man with 2 boys, living in the Bay Area with his extended family. He is into motorcycles, and is falling...

Glauber Costa is a family man, with three kids at home. So he admits, that with a startup and kids, there is not much space for anything else. He made mention that the jump from 2-3 kids was hard, and we joked that he playing zone defense now over man to man. AS of this recording, he had already seen the Mario movie 3 times with his kids, and enjoys playing video games with them. But, his game to...

Sefi Genis lives in Tel Aviv, and started in with technology early on in his life, maintaining the school website when he was younger. He served in the Israeli military, specifically in the cybersecurity unit, followed by working at some interesting and successful startups. Outside of tech, he loves to travel, ninja warrior, and scuba diving. One of his favorite places to dive was Thailand, which...

Naré Vardanyan has a statistically unlikely story. She grew up in Armenia, without electricity during a war. She recalls that her parents gamified the experience, which allowed her to experience it much differently than the hardship it was. Her upbringing was very community driven, focused on caring for others. Eventually, she went to work for the United Nations, in her words, so she could save th...

Ron Richardson studied robotics and embedded systems in Arizona, and is a former Marine - which is where he got his start in logistics. His biggest influence has been his parents. He mentioned his Mom introduced him to a personal website builder, which kicked off his learning into HTML, PHP and JavaScript. Outside of tech, he has a passion for traveling, and is big into horror games and movies. On...