switchboard
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Amir Ashkenazi and the art of changing his mind
A guitar lesson gave the Shopping.com and Adap.tv founder an idea for working together online. Then he had to decide whether the company he had built was solving the right problem.
Switchboard
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Matthew Levin
Matthew Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Lariat, an AI-native sales platform built to prospect into brick-and-mortar businesses. A UC Berkeley alum based in Brooklyn, he's a career B2B go-to-market operator whose past stops include Global Head of Marketing at Nosto and VP of Marketing at mParticle, plus early co-founding runs at Plenishable and the Switchboard project.