Itai Kohavi Founder, Lecturer
Itai Kohavi is founder of the NoveLook Institute and an expert in the area of innovations; he's a lecturer, serial entrepreneur, and investor. His companies have been featured in major media outlets such as CNN, the NY Times, and BusinessWeek; and have won numerous industry awards. He was awarded “The Youngest Entrepreneur of the Year” from Tel Aviv University when Comfy Interactive, the company he founded at age 23, went public four years after inception with a market cap of over $100M. At that time he became the youngest CEO to take an Israeli start-up public. Since then Itai has founded two other companies of leading, innovative products within their industries. Itai has lived and worked in Israel, New York City, and Silicon Valley, and has done business in 14 countries. He has developed products that have reached over a million individuals; and his companies have had tens of millions of dollars of cumulative sales. Itai has raised over $55M worth of investments from Angel investors, leading VCs, investment banks, strategic partners, and institutional investors. He holds several patents and has done business with top executives of some of the world’s leading companies.
In the last several years Itai has been a guest lecturer at the MBA programs of several universities including Columbia, Northwestern and Tel Aviv; and speaks at international high-tech events. Itai received a joint MBA degree from Northwestern and Tel Aviv universities.
Itai is a published author of a novel, a children’s book, and scriptwriter of a crowd-sourced thriller. He loves riding his mountain unicycle, and dares to be naive.
Itai at a New Media convention in Rotterdam
Simona Valsky Program Director
As a Program Director, Simona is the go-to person for everything relating to the Tapas MBA Program .
Simona holds B.A. degrees in both Economics and Asian studies from Tel Aviv University, and a current student for MBA at Tel Aviv University.
Simona is part of the Microsoft Ventures team acting as the Operations Manager, also responsible for the Microsoft Ventures Academy.
She loves to bake, dance salsa and travel around the world.
Simona Valsky
AIisa Mick First Program Director
Alisa works as an Organizational Counsultant and holds an M.Sc. in Organizational Consulting from the Recanati Business School, Tel Aviv University. She also holds B.A. degrees in both Psychology and Asian studies from Haifa University.
Prior to heading the Tapas MBA program, Alisa was the Associates Dean’s Assistant at the Arison School of Business in IDC Herzeliya, and professoriate research and teaching assistant in both Haifa University and IDC Herzeliya.
Alisa is fluent in English, Hebrew and the most important language of all, Finnish (!).
She loves to travel, study, and practice Pilates.
Alisa lives by her motto which is : “Learn something new every day.”
neral Manager Colordesk
Alisa Mick
Novel Brains We Trust
Amir Tzafrir - Senior Partner at Goldfarb Seligman Law Offices
Udi Boker - Phd. a faculty member of Computer Science at IDC, Director at Mercury Interactiive
Yoav Samet - Vice President, Corporate Development at Cisco, General Manager Colordesk
Carmit Hirsch - UI & Product Consultancy
Dafna Eylon - President Eylon Associates, Associate Professor of Psychology at Richmond, Senior Fellow at Wharton
Dotan Emanuel - Googler at Google, VP R&D TelMap, VP R&D Genieo
Moshe Mor - General Partner at Greylock Partners, CEO at SPL Worldgroup
Oded Koenigsberg - Associate Professor of Marketing at London Business School
Ron Shalev - Assistant Professor of Accounting, Taxation and Business Law at NYU Stern School of Business