Jonathan Garini and the trouble with making things easy

Choosing a company name can become an expensive exercise in self-expression. Jonathan Garini and his co-founder gave themselves a more awkward assignment: find a name that worked on the internet and on an American toll-free telephone number. Garini searched online. Yishai Levanony, the chief technology officer, checked available numbers. Eight hours later, they had their answer: Extent.

By October 1998, Extent, established the previous September in Ramat Gan, was making remote-access management software. Its young chief executive was already treating the route to the customer as part of the engineering problem. A name had to be reachable. An invention needed a way in.

There is a useful way to read the ventures that followed. Across telecom software, blockchain applications and enterprise AI, Garini has worked around the places where complicated systems meet ordinary expectations. People want to connect, purchase, ask and proceed. The technical arrangements tend to have several additional questions.

A single account, please

By November 2009, Garini was Alepo’s vice president of products, discussing a deployment for Telkom Kenya. The assignment involved fixed and mobile services, existing IT systems and a single customer account. Alepo’s proposed infrastructure brought identity and balances together, with activation, vouchers and a customer self-service portal among its components.

The customer-facing proposition was pleasantly modest: buy and manage different services through one web interface. Beneath it sat the work of integrating systems that already existed. Garini’s stated aim was a consistent experience across services and an infrastructure that made new offerings easier to introduce.

A single account sounds like a small courtesy until you consider the alternative. Each separate service can become another identity, balance or administrative task. Joining them asks a software company to understand both the network and the commercial relationship. In this part of Garini’s career, the product was the cooperation between those two things.

The button with a network behind it

In July 2010, Alepo introduced a policy manager with a particularly legible feature: a “turbo button” for temporary extra bandwidth. The same system could reduce bandwidth for heavy users and apply download limits. Early deployments included Digicel Jamaica, Telkom Kenya and Cobranet in Nigeria.

Garini described congestion and service quality as connected problems. Internet-delivered services were expanding faster than network technology, he said, creating pressure on operators. More detailed service offerings could give customers choices while helping operators manage the network.

The little button makes a good exhibit in a career otherwise crowded with enterprise terminology. It offers something a person understands immediately: more speed when you need it. Behind that request are rules about who gets what and how limited resources are shared. The interface has one verb. The infrastructure has homework.

Alepo’s participation in the MultiService Forum extended this work to interoperability. Garini spoke about working with network suppliers so customers could use components from different vendors. The promise depended on successful testing between systems. For the buyer, compatibility is the difference between a collection of purchases and a functioning network.

Digital collectibles meet the credit card

The Xooa chapter brought a different vocabulary. In August 2021, Garini was billed as Xooa’s founder and CEO for a webinar with Cooley lawyers Bobby Ghajar and Marcus Peterson. Their subjects included copyright licensing, counterfeiting and resale royalties for NFTs. Technology could create a new transaction; rights holders still had familiar questions about what they were selling.

In January 2022, the Associated Press announced a photography NFT marketplace built by Xooa. It would offer contemporary and historic photojournalism, with original metadata describing the photographs. The announcement specified purchases by credit card as well as cryptocurrency wallets. Even in a venture built around blockchain, the familiar payment method deserved a place.

Later that year, Garini explained the payment decision in an interview with Checkout.com. Xooa wanted to serve people who did not have crypto wallets. It had initially launched with crypto payments and had promised customers an ordinary-money option. He recalled launching the additional integration about two days after testing.

His recollection of choosing a provider was unusually human for a discussion about payment infrastructure. He liked being able to reach people who listened, including senior decision-makers. Responsiveness helped the technical work proceed. Enterprise software can accumulate a great many automated messages before someone answers the actual question.

The episode also puts a boundary around the blockchain story. A marketplace’s technical sophistication cannot tell you whether someone will complete a purchase. The payment experience matters in its own right. Garini was discussing an adoption problem in the practical language of promises, testing and a checkout customers already understood.

The colleagues in the picture

When Zach Danker-Feldman announced the Xooa-Alepo merger in December 2023, he thanked Garini for believing in him and providing opportunities. His account described work on strategy, enterprise pitches and new applications. Garini replied with something less ceremonial: he would miss their Zoom calls and hoped they could work together again.

That exchange gives the company history a human scale. A change in leadership creates an organizational diagram; it also ends a recurring conversation. The business names provide the chronology, while the meetings explain how people actually spend their working lives.

Garini’s public LinkedIn profile adds two details outside the corporate titles. He invests in early-stage startups through Garini Ventures and lists an FAA private-pilot credential issued in November 2018. Neither needs to become a sweeping theory of his character. They are simply other commitments alongside the software work.

A useful answer has to survive checking

Today, Alepo lists Garini as founder and CEO. FifthElement.ai also names him founder and CEO. At FifthElement, the proposition combines a platform for enterprise AI agents with implementation work: select a valuable workflow, demonstrate a result and expand from there. Sandeep Patel leads technology; Ronald Moreira leads customer success; Tom Baker leads agentic AI.

The connection to Alepo became explicit in September 2024 with Aly, a virtual sales agent built on FifthElement’s platform. Garini described finding more qualified prospects among visitors a company’s marketing had already attracted. Alepo described leads arriving in Salesforce with details about the prospect’s interests. The intended handoff ran from conversation to a salesperson’s next action.

Garini’s more recent comments put increasing emphasis on the reliability of that handoff. In a September 2026 discussion of AI sales assistants, he warned that an incorrect answer delivered with confidence could be worse than silence. His objection was practical: if an engineer must independently check a figure, the software may have added work.

“In technical industries, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer.”

Jonathan Garini, September 2026

A second recent discussion, about finding sales opportunities in existing customer conversations, carries the same concern into commercial records. Garini argues that useful signals already sit inside businesses. Moving them to the right person is the neglected task. The product discussion distinguishes a proposed action from an unattended change to the customer database.

Before the answer, sort the cupboard

His advice on enterprise knowledge is correspondingly unromantic. Use short summaries, descriptive metadata and routes to deeper documents. Consolidate duplicates and review old material. Preserve version histories and access controls. When AI finds competing policies, a person still needs to decide which one governs.

For security teams, he has argued for incremental assistance with repetitive work such as log analysis and alert triage. Context matters: previous incidents, threat information and the organization’s workflows affect whether an output is useful. In a separate discussion of security agents, he stressed the quality of the interfaces connecting them to existing systems.

This is a demanding version of ease. The person asking a question sees a short exchange. The organization must maintain the material behind it, connect the relevant tools and decide who may act. A tidy answer cannot repair an untidy chain of responsibility.

Return to the next small decision

Garini has described a project where disagreement among global teams slowed progress. His team revisited priorities weekly, using technical feasibility, customer urgency and actual usage to guide decisions. Subject specialists worked with AI architects early. The account places alignment close to the work, where a change in understanding can still alter what gets built.

His hiring advice follows a similarly practical sequence: a process should teach candidates as well as assess them. Applicants need to understand how the organization works and how they can grow. In his comments on data storage, he looks beyond capacity to how systems organize and anticipate access to information.

His storage argument brings the discussion back to infrastructure. Information has to be available at the speed an application needs it, and the system needs to manage how that information is used. He has described architectures that anticipate access patterns and treat storage as an adaptive part of an AI strategy. The files behind a fluent answer still have to live somewhere. That observation fits comfortably beside the earlier network work: the visible service depends on arrangements most customers have no reason to inspect. Building those arrangements means attending to the next request before it arrives.

The problems have changed since Extent’s telephone-number search. The distance between having technology and making it usable remains a productive place to work. A customer needs an account that makes sense. A collector needs a payment method. An employee needs an answer that stands up when checked. Each is a small request with a considerable business behind it.