Behind Company Lines

Timur Khabirov is an American entrepreneur, designer, and investor best known as the co-founder and CEO of Prequel Inc., the company behind the Prequel mobile photo editing app.

In 2006, he launched a B2B company developing and maintaining high-load intranet applications, one of its major clients being American Express.

Timur later took an interest in digital design, computer vision algorithms, photo editing, video, and 3D - co-founding AIAR Labs. Based on AI technology, Prequel launched in 2018 as a complete package of graphics editing tools for mobile, and to date has been downloaded over 100 million times by users around the world.

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Noah Tucker is the Founder and CEO of Social Snowball, the word-of-mouth marketing platform for e-commerce merchants. Noah’s experience building Shopify sites, running ads, and working with influencers led him to Social Snowball, which now supports affiliate and influencer marketing for brands like Fanjoy, Goorin Bros, and Outway Socks.

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Kirill Potekhin started programming at 12. He made a website for his father's business and his father paid for his classes and work. At the age of 17, he co-founded Easy Ten, a mobile app to study foreign languages. They were #1 in App Store by revenue among educational apps in many countries and went through 500 Startup acceleration. Over the years they had more than 20 million users.

After that, he and his friend and colleague from Easy Ten founded PotehaLabs. They did various natural language processing and machine learning tasks, such as conversational bots long before ChatGPT (at a much smaller scale of course).

And then together with Vitaly again they started Adapty. It was a combination of their previous experience: running and growing a mobile app and lots of analytical and predictive ML. Adapty helps developers to implement subscriptions in the app and grow revenue by running A/B tests, receiving reports and insights, and other analytics. They bootstrapped it for the first year but then went VC way.

Kirill was CTO for the last 5 years, but since 2022 he combine that with being CPO. They grew Adapty from 13 employees at the start of 2022 to over 50 now.

His interested in politics and economics and like reading books/articles on how the former affects the latter. Kirill is a big fan of Wait But Why, Hoover Institution, Kurzgesagt, and RealLifeLore. Kirill is good at strategic board games and huge Lego Technic sets.

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Gene Hoffman currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Chia Network. Chia is a technology infrastructure company building a transformative open-source, public blockchain focused on real-world utility that is secure in approach, regulatory compliant, and sustainable by design. From 2017 to 2019, Hoffman was an advisor to the board of Chia Network before joining the Company as COO and President in August 2019.

Throughout his career in technology, Hoffman has built and scaled companies in enterprise software and SaaS, subscriptions, cryptography, and software development, served as a chief executive of a publicly traded company, raised over $215,000,000 in public and private markets, acquired four companies, and successfully sold three companies to PGP, Inc., Vivendi-Universal, and Amdocs. His success demonstrates the vital element of his entrepreneurial philosophy - deeply understanding the technology and starting with real utility and industry application creates foundational use cases and unlocks future potential. 

Prior to joining Chia, Hoffman served as co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Vindicia, a consumer subscription infrastructure company from 2003 until its sale to Amdocs in 2016. Previously, he co-founded the company that came to be Emusic.com, serving as CEO and President from 1998 to 2002. Hoffman has 23 years of experience in high-compliance security environments, including 12 years of managing PCI and SSAE-16 compliance for the storage of 220,000,000 credit cards. 

Hoffman identifies as a true cypherpunk. In 1997, he helped end U.S. export controls on cryptography while at PGP, Inc. by personally exporting the PGP Source Code book. Just as Hoffman has spent his career driving the adoption of digital transformation, today he sees decentralized blockchain technology as the next step toward the future of finance. 

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Born in New York City’s east village, Noah Kerner is the CEO of the micro-investing app Acorns and co-founder of the shareholder rights startup Say. His background is colorful: 4X entrepreneur, Co-author of "Chasing Cool” with the former CEO of Barneys, and former DJ for Jennifer Lopez. In his 20s, Noah built the leading creative agency for the young adult market, Noise. Before being acquired by Engine, Noise developed hundreds of products and marketing campaigns for this generation including Facebook’s first application, the first credit card to reward responsibility rather than spending for Chase, Vice's music site Noisey, and the top branded game in the App Store.  

Noah has been recognized as one of Billboard Magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30,” AdWeek’s “Top 20 Under 40,” Fast Company’s “Innovation Agents” and “Impact Council” members, and as a judge for the Webby Awards. He has also advised and invested in a variety of fast-growing startups, including WeWork, where he served as the first Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer from 2013-2014. 

Passionate about educating today’s youth, Noah has lectured on entrepreneurialism, fintech, and media at NYU, UCLA, Stanford, and Columbia and currently serves on the Board of VH1's Save The Music Foundation. Noah is a graduate of Cornell University where he studied Psychology and Economics.

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Tim Williamson is the Co-Founder and CEO of NieuxCo, a Web3 venture studio based in New Orleans. With experience leading and building companies in Web1, Web2, and now Web3, Tim was behind the conception and launch of key drivers of the entrepreneurial community, including The Idea Village, IDEAcorps, and New Orleans Entrepreneur Week. Tim formerly presided as President of NOLA Media Group, Louisiana's largest media company, reaching over 7 million consumers per month with $50M+ in revenues and 250+ staff. Earlier, Tim led the startup and growth of local media digital studios for Cox Interactive Media in New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Omaha.

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Throughout his career, Dan Goldsmith has focused on how the application of technology can change the world. His work in life sciences, education, and healthcare has allowed Dan to make an impact on a global scale and gain insights from hundreds of organizations. Dan is currently CEO of Tendo, a software company focused on seamlessly connecting patients, clinicians, and caregivers throughout the care cycle. Prior to Tendo, Dan was the CEO of Instructure, supporting the teaching and learning needs of more than 30 million students and teachers using Canvas. Dan also spent 8+ years at Veeva where, as Chief Strategy Officer, he helped the company IPO and become the leading software provider to the life sciences industry. Earlier in his career, Dan held senior executive roles at Accenture, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. Dan is an active advisor, investor, board member, and philanthropist. His service spans public, private, and non-profit organizations. Dan graduated from the University of Rochester and currently resides in the Philadelphia area, but he can often be found on the Silicon Slopes of Utah or working with organizations in Silicon Valley.

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Chris Sheng is a 3x founder and growth marketing expert. He has worked with 250+ venture-backed Saas companies on go-to-market and growth. Additionally, he is a resident growth advisor at Mucker Capital and works closely with other top VC firms and their portfolio companies. He is currently the CEO of LeadrPro, a software marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of Saas solutions.

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Jacob Jolibois is the co-founder and Chief of Product at Check, helping home service operators streamline and automate their business.

Over 15,000 operators across the US and Canada use Check to automate the tedious administrative tasks that come with running a home service business, helping them become more efficient and professional, grow their bottom line and find peace of mind.

Jacob brings together the business, technical, and customer objectives to build a product that operators love to use, improving the quality of life for them and their users.

He has spoken on stages around the world from TEDx to Web Summit and writes a weekly newsletter for thousands of founders and product leaders called Making Product Sense that dissects world-class products and companies.

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Jason Hirshman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Uncountable where he leads product development and the engineering team.  Jason was previously at Stanford University, where he received a Master’s in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics. He was selected for the Stanford A.I. Innovation Group, which sought to apply machine learning in impactful ways. Jason's prior industry experience includes building software at Palantir to model data from Syrian refugee camps, leading the mentorship program at StartX, and working as an engineer at BenchPrep.

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