product-design-engineering
(2)
James Kubik
James Kubik is the co-founder and CEO of Somewear Labs, a San Francisco company building satellite-and-mesh communications hardware and software for teams that operate where cell towers end. A Northwestern product-design engineer and former Intuit product leader, he launched Somewear in 2017 after a childhood friend drowned in a Lake Michigan sailing accident with no way to call for help. Somewear's pocket-sized devices - Relay and the hybrid mesh/satcom Node - now serve every U.S. Department of Defense service, federal agencies, wildland firefighters, and backcountry explorers. The company raised a $13.7M Series A in 2022 backed by a roster of Fortune 500 CEOs.
Israel L'Heureux
Israel L'Heureux is the founder and CEO of Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io), a bootstrapped Palo Alto company that unifies the messy technology stacks of large quick-service restaurant chains under one platform built around OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Before restaurants, he co-founded Redline Networks, a high-performance application-acceleration company acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005 for roughly $132 million. A Stanford-trained product design engineer, he has moved from kicking off BMW's X5 program to building load balancers used by hundreds of enterprises to figuring out why a drive-thru line moves slowly.