google-alumni
(22)
You can leave Google. Xoogler keeps you connected.
What began with 40 people over drinks now connects tens of thousands of Google alumni. Inside the community turning a former employer into a source of new colleagues, companies and capital.
After 18 Years at Google, Stephanie Hofmann Is Rewriting Lenovo’s Checkout Story
The longtime Google executive has moved from explaining digital change to owning its outcome - building a global commerce operation where creativity, finance and customer experience must all agree on what growth means.
Malika Shrivastava Has Spent Her Career Teaching New Things How to Feel Familiar
After building markets for diapers, smartphones, browsers and lock-screen media, Qure.ai's first CMO has taken on a subtler assignment: giving a consequential technology a language people can trust.
Kobus Jooste Left Google's Scale to Chase a More Difficult Metric: Impact
After two decades inside research labs, infrastructure companies, startups, and Google, the engineer behind Syllable AI has settled on a plain test for ambitious work: can you see what changed because you were there?
Mike Huang Built His Career Where Data Meets the Messy Real World
Before Glow became a suite of consumer apps, Mike Huang spent fifteen years learning how people behave around software. His path from enterprise products to social experiments to a data-driven startup offers a quiet lesson in building for lives that refuse to fit a spreadsheet.
Corey Moran Is Bringing the Spreadsheet to the Runway
After years translating luxury for Google, Corey Moran has returned to the brand side with a precise brief: make Michael Kors storytelling, customer experience and data behave like one idea.
Tarjei Vassbotn Is Building a Memory for Work
After Google, wireless sensors and a conference-room pitch that went nowhere, Tarjei Vassbotn found his next problem hiding in plain sight: work remembers almost nothing.
Alon Chen
A family WhatsApp thread about Friday dinner became Tastewise, an AI system built to tell food companies what people want before the focus group comes back.
Romain Sestier
Romain Sestier is the co-founder and CEO of StackOne, an integration platform that lets B2B SaaS products and AI agents connect to hundreds of enterprise systems through one unified API. After a decade spent maintaining integrations by hand at companies like Maxymiser, ContentSquare and Yieldify, and after building a product from zero to $1 billion in incremental revenue at Google, he and long-time collaborator Guillaume Lebedel started StackOne in 2023 to build the integration layer they always wished existed. The company reached six-figure revenue within weeks of launch and raised a $20M Series A led by GV in May 2025.
Christian Facey
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Ahmed Gaballah
Ahmed Gaballah is the founder and CEO of SOKNA, Egypt's first end-to-end funeral services platform. After 16 years in California building products at Google, Adobe and Facebook, he returned to Cairo in 2019 to fix one of the messiest, most painful logistics problems anyone ever faces: burying a loved one. SOKNA handles paperwork, body preparation, transport, cemetery setup, condolence halls and repatriation, and has grown into a profitable operation serving families across every Egyptian governorate, with a cemetery project and international expansion now in motion.
Raj Gajwani
Raj Gajwani is Chief Business Officer at OpenArt AI, the San Francisco generative-AI creator suite for images and video. Before OpenArt he spent over a decade at Google, scaling DoubleClick's channel program to $1.3 billion in revenue and founding Orion Wifi, one of the most successful projects out of Google's Area 120 incubator (now part of Android). He also runs Day 0, an enterprise AI strategy consultancy, and serves as a board member, advisor, and angel investor across startups including Couchsurfing, MultiView, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance. A Harvard graduate who also studied at the London School of Economics, he sits at the intersection of frontier AI products and enterprise go-to-market.
Tigran Sloyan
Tigran Sloyan is the Co-Founder and CEO of CodeSignal, the AI-native skills platform transforming how the world hires and develops talent. Born in Armenia and educated at MIT in Mathematics and Computer Science, he co-founded CodeSignal in 2015 after witnessing first-hand how resume bias blocked talented people from being seen. The company has raised $90M+, counts Google, Meta, Netflix, and Anthropic among its clients, and is on a mission to #GoBeyondResumes - replacing credential gatekeeping with verified skills.
Yigit Ihlamur
Yigit Ihlamur is the co-founder and General Partner of Vela Partners, an AI-native quantitative venture capital firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former Google Senior Program Manager and Oxford-trained AI researcher, he has pioneered the concept of 'Ventech' — using proprietary AI systems to evaluate and fund seed-stage AI founders at speed. Vela Partners issues $100K–$500K checks with commitments in 2–7 days, has backed 40+ AI startups, and earned a NeurIPS 2025 Best Poster award for its startup success forecasting research. Raised in Turkey by an entrepreneur father and mathematician mother, Yigit started coding at age four and competed as a top-10 national chess player before bringing that same obsessive discipline to venture capital.
Daniel Svonava
Daniel Svonava is the Co-Founder and CEO of Superlinked, an ML infrastructure company building self-hosted inference infrastructure for vector search and document processing. A Slovak-born engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, he spent six years as an ML Tech Lead at YouTube building ad performance systems powering over $10B in annual ad revenue before co-founding Superlinked in 2021. Superlinked raised a $9.5M seed round led by Index Ventures in March 2024, and the company is on a mission to make vector-based retrieval accessible and production-ready for enterprises.
Tim Jung
Tim Jung is the Founder and CEO of XL8.ai, a San Jose-based AI company building the world's most accurate machine translation engine for media and entertainment. A Columbia University PhD and former Google tech lead, Jung left a career launching NLP search features to solve a problem he saw up close: the media industry's broken localization pipeline. XL8 has since translated 800,000+ hours of content across 45+ languages, raised $11.5M including a $7.5M Series A led by KB Investment, and built a platform where AI doesn't replace human translators but makes them dramatically faster.
Belsasar Lepe
Belsasar 'Bel' Lepe is co-founder and CEO of Cerby, the identity automation platform built to secure the applications that traditional identity tools ignore - the sprawling layer of disconnected, nonstandard, and unmanageable apps that enterprises actually run on. A first-generation Mexican-American and Stanford Computer Science graduate, Lepe started at Google at 18, then co-founded Ooyala - a video technology company that achieved two exits totaling over $440M - before turning his attention to the gaping hole in enterprise identity security. Cerby raised $54M in Series B funding in 2025, counts L'Oréal, Fox, and Allstate among its customers, and has grown ARR 10x in under two years.
Maximus Greenwald
Maximus Greenwald is the co-founder and CEO of Warmly, an AI-powered revenue orchestration platform that helps B2B companies identify, prioritize, and engage high-intent buyers in real time. A Princeton CS & Public Policy grad and ex-Google PM (where he helped build the famous 'Where's Waldo' Google Maps Easter egg), Max survived seven major pivots over five years to turn Warmly into a signal-based selling category leader with $3M+ ARR and $21.5M in total funding. Known for his mantra 'slope over y-intercept' and his 'Purple Cow' series on remarkable entrepreneurs, he is one of the most candid voices on the realities of finding product-market fit.
Sameer Shariff
Sameer Shariff is the co-founder and CEO of Cambly, a San Francisco-based edtech platform that connects English learners worldwide with native-speaking tutors via on-demand video chat. A Princeton and Stanford-educated engineer who spent five years at Google, Shariff co-founded Cambly in 2012 after a trip to Argentina revealed how dramatically conversation practice accelerates language fluency. After a failed Series A attempt, he drove Cambly to cash-flow positivity without touching raised capital - then raised $60M from Benchmark, Bessemer, and others once the company no longer needed it. Cambly has ranked #1 in app stores across 150 countries and reaches an addressable market of 1.5 billion people seeking English fluency.
Othman Laraki
Othman Laraki is the co-founder and CEO of Color Health, a company he has steered from affordable genetic testing to pandemic-scale COVID infrastructure to a $4.6B-valued virtual cancer clinic serving over 7 million Americans. A Moroccan-born Stanford and MIT alumnus who learned to code by typing programs from magazines in Casablanca, he built Twitter's first revenue products as VP of Product before pivoting to healthcare. Today he sits on the American Cancer Society board as its only non-clinician, partners with Google and OpenAI to deploy AI in oncology, and angel invests in companies like Pinterest, Slack, and Instacart.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD is a French-Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author based in London. After leaving a marketing career at Google, she founded Ness Labs - a bootstrapped newsletter and community focused on science-backed mindful productivity - while simultaneously earning her MSc and PhD in Applied Neuroscience at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) proposes replacing linear goal-setting with a circular, experimental approach to growth. As a UKRI-funded postdoctoral research fellow at King's College London, she studies the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity and has proposed the 'Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD'. Ness Labs has grown to 120,000+ newsletter subscribers and a paid community of 2,000+ members.
Michael Lynch
Michael Lynch is a bootstrapped solo founder who quit Google after seven years to build software and hardware businesses entirely on his own terms. He grew TinyPilot - a KVM-over-IP device built from a $100 Raspberry Pi kit - into a $1M/year business and sold it in 2024 for ~$600K. He writes with radical transparency about money, failure, and the craft of independent software development at mtlynch.io, and is now writing 'Refactoring English', a book on writing for software engineers.