Alex Turetsky
Founder, Runaway Studios
Alex has shipped software for more than twenty years. He co-founded Intellijoy, the most downloaded educational developer on Google Play five years running, and spoke on app monetization at Google I/O. At Runaway Studios, he delivered 156 educational apps in six months for clients including Disney, Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, LeapFrog and Amazon.
Earlier in his career, he was a software architect on high-volume systems, including routing software for U.S. Transportation Command. He studied Talmud for six years before earning a Master's degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins. He also runs Apotropos, which automates back-office work for skilled nursing facilities.
Jacob Turetsky
Builds and runs Frondesk
Jacob built Frondesk from end to end: the number you text, the assistant behind it, and the servers it runs on. When Meta blocked Frondesk's access to the official WhatsApp platform, he rebuilt the messaging layer himself and kept the service online. He also built FastLink, a tool that lets an AI agent work in a real web browser, and he uses it every day.
Before Frondesk, he worked in the warehouse of the Chicago Chesed Fund, a nonprofit that redistributes donated goods. Inventory there was tracked by hand, so he built StockAI, which lets the staff manage stock by typing requests in plain English. He also revived AndDaaven, an abandoned prayer app his community uses every day. He rebuilt it for modern phones and cleared a backlog of about 40 issues, some of them nine to sixteen years old.