Meet Noogata’s New VP, Product Strategy

For Guy Zinman – Noogata’s new VP, Product Strategy- the Path to an AI Start-up was Paved with Academic Research

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Guy Zinman to Noogata as VP, Product Strategy. Guy brings 10+ years experience as a General Manager at SparkBeyond and as a Research Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.

Guy has a deep understanding of how AI brings disruptive change to companies across different industries and functions. At SparkBeyond, Guy was part of the founding team and led partnerships with companies like Microsoft and McKinsey. During his tenure, he grew the company from five people to 180+ employees and an eight digit ARR.

While at Carnegie Mellon University, Guy led a consortium with Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to create an open-source system for integrating genetic data into clinical workflows.

He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science and Computational Biology and has published ten academic papers including two publications in the acclaimed Nature journal.

Guy is a proud father to Bar (5) and Ella (1), and is married to his best friend, his lovely wife Arava. He loves to travel and has been to 47 countries to date.

Q: Why did you join Noogata?

Noogata is solving a lot of important business challenges. First, the e-commerce industry is experiencing explosive growth. It started before the COVID pandemic but has grown exponentially since then.

From an analytics point of view, e-commerce is still a nascent field. There is a lot of room to support the retailers, the brands, and the many newcomers to the space in making better decisions based on market dynamics.

This is where Noogata comes in – we make analytics accessible to business users without prior experience with artificial intelligence. We know that you cannot run your business based on gut feelings alone. Noogata provides data-driven decision making for businesses that need to keep up with ever changing consumer trends.

Lastly, at the end of the day it’s all about people. Great ideas and a growing market are not enough if you can’t execute your vision. Not only did Noogata figure out a worthy problem to solve and find an elegant solution to solve it, they have built an amazing team.

Q: What are you looking forward to in your new role at Noogata?

2022 is going to be a very critical year for Noogata. We are going to build the foundation of Noogata’s offerings in a way that can scale to thousands of customers all while addressing the most pressing business challenges. There are many aspects that need to be addressed quickly, from building out new product features that support our customer’s evolving needs, to building the marketing engine, to ensuring we are creating a platform that our customers are delighted to use.

I am truly excited about being part of the Noogata team during this period of tremendous growth.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge for organizations to adopt AI?

AI has become an overused buzzword. Lots of organizations understand the promise of becoming data-driven, but fail to integrate analytic outcomes into their business processes. I’ve had many experiences working with large organizations that did not know how to leverage their own data to create tangible business impact. They need to first plan the business process that needs to be carried out and then build the modeling and AI infrastructure rather than the other way around.

Q: What’s a fun fact about you that many people may be surprised to learn?

I was part of a research team that created a strain of mice that could live 22% longer by altering a single gene. This paper was published in Nature and has received nearly 1000 citations to date.

Q: If you weren’t in Product Strategy, what would you be doing today? (Having already made a transition from academia to technology)

I would probably establish my own start-up in the smart home sector.  One idea is a ‘Noogata’ for smart-home use cases for the less tech-savvy populations. The goal would be to surface up the true potential in improving our daily lives, with just a simple smart speaker and a few inexpensive devices.