I build things that bring people closer.

In 2005 I left my studies in Israel to learn Spanish, and ended up in a Buenos Aires hostel bunk that cost a couple of dollars a night. I brought in so many guests that the owner let me stay for free, and I thought, I could run one of these. One Christmas I sold hair straighteners in a US mall, broke a sales record and came back with more than $20,000 to open my own hostel in Palermo. The build went badly, but my parents and a man from the local Jewish community helped me finish it. The hostel grew into Mini Hostels, a booking business for hostels across Latin America, and in 2012 I sold both. It was my first startup that grew big and sold.

Back in Tel Aviv, I became CEO of Roomixer, which created a new revenue stream for hotels and vacation rentals. Israel's financial daily Calcalist covered it. Roomixer didn't work out the way I hoped, and after three years I moved on. It taught me as much as the wins did.

Recast was a studio karaoke for movies and TV, built on patented technology that let anyone step into a scene. It was playful, it was fun, and it had me splitting my time between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles. We won an award at the SVOD Europe tech conference and pitched at the IAC Startup Salon in Santa Monica.

I moved to the United States to build PassRight, presented at a startup competition in Mountain View and raised seed investment on that first trip. Staying was another story. Conflicting legal advice, a rejected first application and months of waiting before I finally secured an EB-1 green card. I missed a family wedding along the way. The whole thing was baffling, agonizing and costly, and I knew I couldn't be the only one going through it. Fixing that became PassRight's whole mission.

Our first product, Shop Immigration, connected immigrants with trustworthy attorneys at fair prices from Los Angeles. From there PassRight became known as The O-1 Visa Company. We built software that assessed O-1 eligibility and let applicants do most of the work themselves alongside experienced immigration attorneys. It started as a business, but along the way people's success started to matter to me in its own right. Timelines that usually took three to six months came down to around fifteen days, and more than 700 people, from students and engineers to artists, founders and investors, got their visas, green cards and renewals. Forbes covered the work in 2018. In 2020 I handed the CEO role to my co-founder, stayed on part-time as a founding partner, and fully stepped away in July 2021.

As managing partner of Global Talent Fund, I helped finance the US immigration costs of foreign tech talent through income sharing agreements. Around the same time I backed and advised SMBX, a marketplace that let everyday people invest directly in small businesses.

In 2019 PassRight moved its operations to Poland, and I spent about six months there. I was exhausted. Helping people had become the work I cared about most, but it didn't make me immune to burnout. I went back to my spiritual practice, and in November 2019 I flew to Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, planning to stay a few months. Then COVID hit, and I decided to stay.

Through 2020, as the world went remote, the idea for Yoko Village took shape in Santa Teresa, and in January 2021 we formally set up the companies behind it. The name means Ocean Sunshine Child. The vision was big, a gated community for creators with homes, a co-work center, a communal garden and kitchen, a school, a sports center and a spiritual center, all wrapped in jungle and ocean views.

Pioneer members from around the world bought into the vision, new phases of the project were announced, and Yoko was featured in travel, design and remote-work publications internationally.

Building on the coast of Costa Rica proved far harder than we planned. Land and construction costs climbed, permits and local processes moved slowly, and cash flow got tight. I wrote publicly about why the original model wasn't working and what I would do differently. Those lessons shape how I build today.

Oka started with a question I'd been carrying for years. What if people got to know and trust each other first, and only then decided to build something together? In early 2026, two weeks in Thailand with my co-founder turned that question into Oka Village, a global community built on small-group connection and the idea of One World Family. At its heart are Pods, small groups that meet over three sessions to really get to know each other, and I love facilitating them myself. I lead growth, marketing and partnerships, and I'm based in Thailand.