product-discovery
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Rajiv Ayyangar Keeps Launching Into the Unknown
Product Hunt’s CEO learned to treat launches as questions, pivots as evidence, and a winding career as useful terrain. Now he is shaping the platform that once gave his own strange ideas their first audience.
Eli Finkelshteyn
Eli Finkelshteyn is the co-founder and CEO of Constructor, an AI-native product discovery and search platform for e-commerce. With a background in computational linguistics and natural language processing, he built Constructor over four years in stealth before launching in 2019. Today the company powers over 400 billion requests annually, counts Sephora, Under Armour, Gap, and REI among its clients, and has raised $91M in funding at a $550M valuation. Finkelshteyn's core belief: world-class search is a competitive moat, and no retailer should have to build it from scratch.
Hubert Palan
Hubert Palan is the Czech-born founder and CEO of Productboard, the AI-powered product management platform used by 5,400+ companies including Salesforce, Zoom, and Microsoft. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and spending nearly four years as VP of Product at GoodData, he founded Productboard in 2014 with co-founder Daniel Hejl to solve a problem he'd lived firsthand: the disconnect between customer feedback, product strategy, and what actually gets built. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 with a $1.725B valuation following a $125M Series D, and Palan has since led a bold AI-first transformation of the platform with products like Productboard Spark and Productboard Pulse.
Jonathan Widawski
Jonathan Widawski (known as Jo) is the co-founder and CEO of Maze, a continuous product discovery platform that lets teams run user research at the speed of product development. A veteran product designer and former UX instructor who worked with McKinsey, Rocket Internet, and PSG, he launched Maze in 2018 after experiencing firsthand how impossible it was for product teams to get reliable user data fast enough to matter. Under his leadership, Maze grew 6x during the pandemic, expanded to 60,000+ brands across 35 countries, and raised $60M total — including a $40M Series B in 2022 led by Felicis Ventures.
Munier Afshar
Munier Afshar is a co-founder at Maze, the AI-powered user research and continuous product discovery platform trusted by over 60,000 brands including Atlassian, Lowe's, and Sony. Based in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, Afshar helped build Maze into a category-defining research platform that raised a $40M Series B in 2022, bringing total funding to over $57M. Beyond tech, he serves as Vice President of the Afghan Relief Fund, lending organizational leadership to a nonprofit supporting vulnerable Afghan families. His career spans entrepreneurship, operations, and community impact.
Purva Gupta
Purva Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Lily AI, the Mountain View-based AI platform that bridges the gap between how retailers describe products and how consumers actually search for them. Founded in 2015 after her own frustrating experience shopping online as a newly arrived immigrant from India, Gupta built Lily AI into an enterprise-grade solution serving major retailers including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, J.Crew, and thredUP. The company has raised $62 million in total funding, achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, and is recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company. A Tory Burch Fellow, Ad Age Leading Women honoree, EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and venture partner at Unshackled Ventures, Gupta has become a prominent voice in retail AI and immigrant entrepreneurship.
Julie Bornstein
Julie Bornstein is the founder and CEO of Daydream, an AI-powered shopping search engine that raised $50M in seed funding in 2024 and publicly launched in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer, she grew Nordstrom.com from $10M to $350M in sales, transformed Sephora's digital business and launched Beauty Insider, scaled Stitch Fix to $1B as COO, and sold her AI fashion startup The Yes to Pinterest in 2022. With a Harvard BA and HBS MBA, Bornstein has spent 25+ years at the intersection of retail, technology, and artificial intelligence.
David Pereira
David Pereira is a Brazilian-born product leader, author, and keynote speaker based in Munich, Germany. He is the creator of the 'Untrapping Product Teams' newsletter (23,000+ subscribers) and the author of the Pearson/Addison-Wesley book of the same name. With 10+ million readers reached since 2020 and 88,000+ LinkedIn followers, he is one of the most prominent voices in modern product management. His philosophy centers on cutting through 'bullshit management' to enable teams to create real value for customers and businesses.
Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is the founder of Product Talk and the author of 'Continuous Discovery Habits' (2021), the definitive book on modern product discovery. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who transitioned from front-end engineering to product management to coaching, she pioneered the Opportunity Solution Tree framework and has trained more than 18,000 product professionals through Product Talk Academy. She coaches product teams at companies like Spotify, Tesco, CarMax, and Snagajob, and is widely recognized as one of the most influential people in global product management.
Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan is the founder and partner of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), widely credited with defining modern tech product management. A former SVP of Product at eBay and veteran of Netscape and HP Labs, he has spent two decades coaching the world's leading tech companies - Google, Apple, Netflix, Airbnb - through his books INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, and TRANSFORMED. His core conviction: great products come from empowered teams of missionaries, not mercenaries executing feature lists.
Paweł Huryn
Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.