Liat Primor and the Work Between the Job Titles

An industrial engineer is trained to notice how work moves through a system. A career, inconveniently, has no instruction manual. Liat Primor’s route from engineering to the chief executive’s office runs through portfolio management, international assignments, a large company’s inner workings and the decision to build a smaller one. Along the way, she has paid attention to something an organisation chart rarely captures: who gets to participate.

Primor is the co-founder and CEO of FeelBetter. Her professional base is Greater Boston; the company has headquarters in Boston and Tel Aviv. That geography suits a career spent crossing between organisations and countries. Yet the more revealing crossings in her story are between kinds of work: analysing operations, helping an executive office function, deciding where resources go, and eventually taking responsibility for an enterprise of her own.

There is a temptation to read those steps backwards, as if the founder was always waiting patiently inside the engineer. Her actual sequence deserves more interest than that. Before there was a startup, there was a substantial apprenticeship in a large business. Before the title CEO, there were jobs whose names promised less glamour and rather more work.

The engineer before the executive

Primor holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and management from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Tel Aviv University. These are useful bookends for understanding her professional vocabulary. One concerns the organisation of work. The other concerns the organisation of a business. Together, they provide a more concrete starting point than the familiar founder biography that begins with an unexplained passion.

Her career record includes an industrial engineering position at Teva, followed by European portfolio responsibilities, a chief-of-staff appointment, US pipeline strategy and a global portfolio role. The progression moves from a particular operating function toward a wider field of decisions. It also makes the eventual leap into entrepreneurship less mysterious. She had spent years inside an organisation before asking people to join one she was building.

Consider the words in those job titles: effectiveness, infrastructure, strategy, portfolio. None is likely to sell a memoir at an airport. Each concerns a question that follows a founder around: what should happen next, what can the organisation support, and which demands deserve attention first? Read this way, the earlier jobs are part of the story’s machinery.

A large company is an education in people

At Teva, Primor worked in Israel, Europe and the United States. She held senior appointments including vice president of global portfolio and chief of staff. International experience can sound pleasantly abstract on a biography. In practical terms, it places a person in different working environments while the job still needs to get done. The title travels; the surrounding assumptions may take a different flight.

A chief of staff works close to the point where information becomes a decision. A portfolio executive must think across competing commitments. Those responsibilities offer a useful way to understand the range in Primor’s background without inventing a private management philosophy for her. Her record includes both the executive office and the allocation of attention across a business. Both precede FeelBetter.

That matters because entrepreneurship is often introduced as a clean break with corporate life. Primor’s story invites a more interesting reading. Experience accumulated in a big organisation can become material for a smaller one. The questions change scale. The need to understand people, priorities and consequences remains stubbornly familiar.

The early company, before the polished account

By November 2018, FeelBetter was already appearing in accounts of new ventures founded by former Teva employees. Primor was identified with a business whose product and strategy were still being planned. It is an unusually useful glimpse of the beginning: a company with decisions ahead of it, rather than a completed origin story arranged for presentation.

The surrounding moment was one of upheaval at Teva, with experienced employees moving into other ventures. Primor’s new company belonged to that broader movement of expertise out of a large organisation. That context does not establish why any particular individual left. It does show that entrepreneurship was taking shape within an existing professional community, with people bringing experience acquired elsewhere.

There is something reassuringly ordinary about a venture at the planning stage. The later biography gets its tidy verbs: founded, raised, expanded. The beginning contains a less cooperative set: choosing, revising, figuring out. FeelBetter’s early appearance catches the business before the tidy verbs had taken over.

Two careers at the same table

Primor’s co-founder, Yoram Hordan, came from telecommunications, including a chief operating officer role at Comverse. He is FeelBetter’s co-founder and COO/CTO. Primor brought her Teva experience; Hordan brought a background in technology and operations. Their partnership joined two established careers rather than two identical résumés.

The pairing is a useful detail because the word “team” can conceal almost anything. Here there is a specific difference in experience. Primor and Hordan had worked in different industries before building together. A new company would have to make those experiences useful to each other. A shared venture requires more than agreement about the destination; people also need a workable division of responsibility.

FeelBetter’s leadership today includes engineering, business and other specialist roles, with Primor as CEO and Hordan leading operations and technology. The structure gives a clearer account of the enterprise than the image of a solitary founder supplying every answer. There are several kinds of expertise at the table. The chief executive’s work takes place among them.

The family lesson, carried into the office

In March 2026, Primor shared a photograph of herself with her mother. Her accompanying message returned to the belief her parents had instilled in her: women could choose what they wanted to become. The photograph has none of the usual executive scenery. There is water, evening light and two people together. No conference badge is required.

She used the occasion to acknowledge women managing careers alongside responsibilities at home and in their wider families. The emphasis was on the work people continued to carry, much of it outside a formal job description. That is a distinctive choice for a company leader’s public message. It makes room for the life around the career without pretending the career happens in isolation.

A year earlier, she had named women across FeelBetter’s team, board, advisory relationships and investor community, and thanked Hordan for leading a diverse company with her. Her stated ambition was equal representation across those parts of business. Naming colleagues gives that ambition a human scale. A principle is easier to picture when actual people occupy the sentence.

“You need to know that you will never know everything.”

Liat Primor, 2022

What happens after the formal meeting

Primor has also described the gap between holding a senior position and having equal access to the informal conversations around it. As she advanced, she found herself the only woman in management settings. Late-evening social plans could leave her outside the connections being made. Her point was practical: opportunity also travels through conversations that never make the agenda.

That observation belongs beside her advice about accepting uncertainty. A founder cannot wait to possess every answer before beginning. Equally, an organisation cannot assume that giving someone a title settles the question of participation. The interesting thread here is access: to knowledge, to colleagues, to the discussion where a possibility becomes a plan.

In 2022, Primor participated in the inaugural Circle of Women Founders programme, built around coaching, professional development and networking. The setting fits the concern she had articulated. Networks are part of the work. An invitation, a conversation and a useful introduction have consequences that an impressive job title cannot guarantee on its own.

Capital, customers and the next conversation

FeelBetter announced a $5.9 million funding round in July 2023, led by Firstime Ventures and Shoni Health Ventures. Random Forest VC, The Group Ventures and existing investor Triventures participated. The announcement put total funding at $8 million at that point. The date matters: a financing milestone records resources available at a particular stage, rather than a permanent description of the company.

By September 2026, Primor was taking part in a Boston discussion about how international companies become established in a new market. The conversation emphasised relationships, operational understanding and the people involved in purchasing decisions. For a founder with an international corporate background, it was a fitting subject: presence in a market is only the beginning of learning how to work there.

Her own 2026 year-end reflection reported new customers and an expectation that two more would go live before the end of the calendar year. Those were plans still ahead, expressed as such. They give the story a useful present tense. The former engineer, portfolio executive and chief of staff is still occupied with the next set of practical commitments. There are people to bring together, decisions to make and work to organise. A career chart can draw the line. Primor is doing the less orderly business of living along it.