user-research
(6)
Bharat Singh Shekhawat
Bharat Singh Shekhawat is a co-founder and Head of Engineering at Entropik, the Bengaluru-based human insights company he helped start in 2016. He builds the systems that turn signals from faces, voices, and eye movement into measurable read-outs of how people feel and decide, and has spent more than fifteen years designing data-intensive platforms and turning research ideas into shipping products.
Oren Friedman
Oren Friedman is the co-founder and CEO of Rally, a New York-based user research CRM that pulls participant recruiting, scheduling, incentives and consent tracking out of spreadsheets and into one workflow. A Nashville native and Vanderbilt graduate, he built the product with CTO Alec Robins after years selling enterprise research tools at Remesh and AlphaSights. Rally went through Y Combinator's W22 batch, closed an $11M Series A led by Canapi Ventures in June 2025, and counts Adobe, Sonos, MongoDB, GitLab, BILL and Monzo among its customers.
Lindsey Allard
Lindsey Allard is the co-founder and CEO of PlaybookUX, a video-based user research platform she launched in 2018 to make customer feedback fast, affordable, and accessible to anyone from a solo freelancer to a Fortune 500 team like Google. A former Division I lacrosse player at Dartmouth and a graduate of the first Quantic MBA class, she ran product at three startups before building PlaybookUX with her college teammate Kristen Giovanniello. The company is bootstrapped, profitable within its first year, and reached roughly $1.8M in annual revenue without spending a dollar on advertising.
Ariadna Bogolepova
Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
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.