About
Born in the USSR, raised in Israel, educated in Canada, and employed since across Ireland, Israel, and the United States.
My early career was at Google, running sales across a handful of products and markets - Russia, Turkey, Israel. It was less a job than an apprenticeship in how corporate America actually works, and an unusually good seat for watching the AI revolution start from the inside.
The moment that stuck with me: sometime in 2017, Google Translate quietly started translating in context instead of word by word - the Transformer paper working its way into a shipped product roughly five years before anyone outside the industry had heard of ChatGPT.
At the start of 2023 I left my job to go after a $150B market research industry I thought was overdue for a rebuild: an AI agent that could run a real qualitative interview at the throughput of a survey. Sub-200ms latency was still unheard of, S2S models weren't even in alpha, and context windows were laughably short. Building Genway AI took me all the way to Sandhill Road San Francisco and exposed me to the entire spectrum of characters, builders, doers, challengers and dreamers.
Things I Believe
At the age of 16, I was fortunate to receive a merit scholarship to attend a UWC high school in Canada - Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific. It was a life-changing experience, and I stand by the UWC mission statement. I intend to leave the world in better shape compared to how I got it.
I began my life from the very bottom: a single child of a single-parent, immigrant household with very limited resources. Put your heart into everything you do in life - education, work, side gigs, hobbies, people - it will get rewarded. In 99% of cases, hard work and consistency overcome talent.
Years back, I received help from the founder of a $10B company. When I asked him why he does it, he told me that everyone got help when they were getting started. "And you shall love your neighbor as yourself" is a commandment from the Jewish tradition (וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ). Give back to the communities from which you received; see yourself as fortunate to be in a situation to help - it's a mitzvah.
Professional Experience
Built AI agents that could run a real qualitative interview — not a survey with better UX, an actual conversation — at a scale no human research team could match. Backed by a16z Speedrun, JBV, and a few others; sold it into companies like Amazon and Salesforce, which was its own education in how enterprises buy software. Did the founder thing: product, sales, pricing, fundraising, hiring, in whatever order the week demanded.
Sold chargeback-mitigation software to online merchants, which mostly meant convincing three skeptical teams — payments, finance, risk — to agree on anything. Joined before the Series B and watched the sales org get built in real time as the company grew past 300 people.
Helped publishers make money from the ads on their sites — walking them through Google's ad-serving stack and the stranger corners of programmatic: auctions, header bidding, yield curves, floor prices. Two years of becoming fluent in a language most people are relieved to never learn.
Advised brands and agencies on how to spend their YouTube budget: which ad formats, how to measure whether any of it worked, and when a dollar was better spent on TikTok or Meta instead. A front-row seat to how advertisers actually think about video, which is not how platforms pitch it to them.
Worked with growth-stage startups — Monday, ExpressVPN, Lemonade, Artlist among them — on scaling their advertising as they moved from scrappy to systematic. The job was less about the ad product than about the moment a company outgrows its early growth hacks and needs something more repeatable: budget structures, measurement it can trust, campaigns that don't fall apart at ten times the spend.
ETI stood for Educational Tourism to Israel: a two-week summer program bringing teenagers aged 15–18 from China, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, India, and Vietnam to Israel to study innovation, sustainability, and technology. The idea came straight out of my own two years at UWC and out of studying Asia — I wanted to recreate what happens when you put kids from very different cultures in a room together and give them something real to build. Still the thing from my twenties I'm proudest of.