Zainab Ghadiyali is a Mumbai native who moved to the United States by herself at the age of 19 with $107 to her name, and supported herself through college and graduate school. She earned a B.S. in Chemistry from Winthrop University in South Carolina, and went on to graduate degrees in Industrial Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She expected 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.
Before tech, there was research. As an awardee of the prestigious Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) fellowship — and the first Winthrop student to receive it — Zainab worked in Berlin at one of the largest university hospitals in Europe, studying Chinese Acupuncture and publishing research in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Earlier, as Field Operations Manager for the nonprofit FIMRC (Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children), she built one of the most profitable models for delivering free pediatric care to children under five in low-income neighborhoods. The DAAD year and FIMRC together taught her two things she still leans on as a founder: how to design a study you can actually defend, and how to live in a language you don't yet speak.
She entered tech the long way around — through public-health field work, then a self-taught crash course in code. As a Tech Lead at Facebook, Zainab built products used by more than 1.5 billion people. She was part of the early Advertiser Growth team, where she identified opportunities that 4×'ed Facebook's advertiser growth during her tenure. She also conceptualized and built Facebook's first health-care product — Blood Donate — which drove 30 million new registered blood donors at launch and now reaches over 100M people globally. 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 — an award-winning non-profit and 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 reaches more than 4 million people, was named to the Foreign Policy Global Thinkers (Top 100, 2015) list for its work bridging the gender gap in technology, and was eventually acquired by AnitaB.org, where it continues today.
From Facebook she moved to Airbnb as Product Lead, working on growth and hosting teams during the company's pre-IPO sprint. From October 2022 through March 2024 she ran Head of Product, Infrastructure at Canva — overseeing the multi-cloud and telemetry foundations under a billion-dollar business. In between, she stepped out into a portfolio life — speaking at WARF, Mind the Product, Product School and SXSW; advising founders; serving as Chief of Staff for several leadership teams; and running her own Tech Leadership Circles on Leadership, People Management and Product. 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 — one of the fastest-growing food-tech startups in the U.S., now serving Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston — and Stackbirds, an AI-agents company launched in August 2025 around the mission of "building the world's largest labor force." She also writes The Leadership, Product, Tech Newsletter on Substack. Both ventures are unmistakably hers: small, ambitious, design-led, and hand-built around real problems she has lived through — including the international-ransom attack on Eat Cook Joy that became the founding story for Stackbirds. 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.”
