Biography
A Founder Built on
Restless Curiosity
Zainab Ghadiyali didn’t start in tech. She studied chemistry and public health at UW–Madison, then spent time doing fieldwork in Bolivia and Honduras — experiences that taught her to sit comfortably with not knowing, to ask the obvious question, and to persist past the point where most people give up.
Her engineering career began at Facebook, where she eventually led product for Internet.org and Free Basics — the initiative that brought internet connectivity to more than two billion people. She built with Airbnb’s growth and hosting teams, and co-founded Wogrammer with Erin Summers — profiling 200+ women engineers, named a 2015 Foreign Policy Global Thinker and acquired by AnitaB.org.
After a decade in big tech and a chapter as a career and founder coach, she moved to Austin and launched Eat Cook Joy. Then came Stackbirds — an AI-agents company built on one thesis: founders should never be held ransom by a platform they don’t own.
Today she is building both simultaneously, reading three books at a time, and still answering her own LinkedIn DMs.
