Biography
A Founder Built on Restless Curiosity
Zainab Ghadiyali grew up moving between continents and disciplines. She studied chemistry and public health at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, expecting a career in medicine — and ended up in software. The translation, she has said, was simple: both fields ask you to look at a system, find the broken piece, and design the smallest intervention that fixes it.
She entered tech the long way around — through public-health work in Latin America, then a self-taught crash course in code. By 2014 she was an engineer at Facebook, working on Internet.org and shipping software that, at one point, was used by close to two billion people. The scale never quite stopped feeling absurd to her, and she has talked openly about the productive discomfort of not yet knowing what you're doing — what she calls the "ignorance advantage."
“Most of the most interesting things I've worked on, I started without knowing how to do them. The trick is being honest about that — and then being willing to learn faster than the problem is moving.”
In 2015, alongside Erin Summers, she co-founded Wogrammer — a journalistic project that interviewed and profiled more than two hundred women engineers across the industry, deliberately reframing them as makers and inventors rather than tokens or trailblazers. Wogrammer was named to the Foreign Policy Global Thinkers list and was eventually acquired by AnitaB.org, where it continues today.
From Facebook she moved to Airbnb, leading product on growth and hosting teams during the company's pre-IPO sprint. She then stepped out into a portfolio life — speaking at WARF, Mind the Product, Product School and SXSW; advising founders; and serving as Chief of Staff for several leadership teams. Conversations from that period (the First Round Review feature, the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, the Alicia Diamond chiefs-of-staff piece) remain some of the clearest distillations of how she thinks about career design.
Today she is the founder of Eat Cook Joy, an Austin-based service that pairs busy households with vetted personal chefs, and Stackbirds, an AI-agents company building tools to keep founders out of platform lock-in. Both ventures are unmistakably hers: small, ambitious, design-led, and hand-built around real problems she has lived through. She still reads three books at a time. She still recommends a Colombian telenovela transcript as a Spanish-learning hack. And she still answers her own LinkedIn DMs.
“Curiosity is a muscle. If you stop using it for a year, you'll feel the atrophy in your work — and even more in your career.”