20MinuteLeaders

Itai is an Israeli magician & stand-up comedian, having performed and emceed conferences all over the world for over 15 years (most notably in front of the biggest tech companies one can imagine). Due to his ability to effectively convey promotional messages, companies have chosen him as a presenter on social media. He has weekly spots on several TV shows, and co-founded a weekly dinner-show, "Sorcerers Night", that has been ranked #1 activity in Tel Aviv since 2014.

Gigi is a founding partner of NFX (www.nfx.com), a $275m leading seed venture firm in Silicon Valley and Israel. He founded 6 startups over the years including Playtika and Inception and invested in many others including Kenshoo, Moon Active, Plarium, MyHeritage, Optimove, Selina, Houseparty, R2Net, SimilarWeb, NanoRep, Replay Technology, SpaceApe and others. Gigi serves on the Supervisory Board of Bertelsmann as well as on the client advisory council of Facebook.

Sapir focuses on early stage investments, focusing on her expertise in deep technology, from idea stage to B Rounds. Within Pitango she is responsible for companies' due diligence process. Previously, she was a Software Engineer at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and more recently Cloudshare. Sapir is also a Board Member of the 8200 Alumni Association. In 2017 she founded the 8200 Alumni Youth Community and has been leading it since.

Zoe is one of America’s most respected litigators, having achieved more than $500M in jury verdicts and settlements for her clients. This includes more than a dozen trials on hormone therapy chases that resulted in verdicts in excess of $260M. She is passionate about complex cases including mass torts, defective medical products or drug cases, as well as human rights issues. Besides litigation, Zoe is an avid Burning Man participant and an incredible adventurer!

David is a serial entrepreneur, co-founded 3 startups, and built 6 marketplaces (3 of which exited). He has almost 20 years of engineering and startup experience and has been fortunate to invest in, advise, and mentor many startups in a variety of industries. Today, David is the CTO of Stride Travel, the #1 US marketplace for multi-day tours and adventure travel packages.

Yaron is the founder of Maverick Ventures. Previously, he founded the Tel Aviv Angel Group where he was involved in business development for its portfolio companies and five exits. He is a graduate of Zell Entrepreneurship Program (IDC) and holds an MS in Law. Yaron sits on the board of the United Hatzalah (non-profit Emergency Medical Services Organization which consists of over 6,000 volunteer first responders).

Marcel Kornacker is a tech lead at Cloudera and the architect of Apache Impala (incubating). Marcel has held engineering jobs at a few database-related startup companies and at Google, where he worked on several ad-serving and storage infrastructure projects. His last engagement was as the tech lead for the distributed query engine component of Google’s F1 project. Marcel holds a PhD in databases from UC Berkeley.

Shahar is the Chief Digital and Information Officer of El Al Israel Airlines, aiming to make it “the Smart Airline for the Startup Nation". Previously he was the Chief Digital Officer of Bank Hapoalim (Israel’s largest bank), where amongst many things he helped launch Bit (Israel's largest p2p payment app). He was recognized as Israel "top 100 influential people" in digital for 2017.

Adi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Calmigo, an innovative calming device that uses guided breathing, grounding techniques, and relaxing scents to provide immediate relief for moments of anxiousness and stress.She has 18 years of experience in management and engineering (Elbit, Stratasys), and was recently named one of Israel’s 70 most brilliant young women by Lady Globes business journal.

Sean is the co-founder and a Managing Director of Venture Out, a company dedicated to helping founders with big tech day jobs validate their startup idea before pursuing it full-time. Previously he was the entrepreneur in residence (EIR) for the Techstars Alexa accelerator, was Senior Product Manager at Amazon, and sold a B2B SaaS company, Gingr. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.