Meet Hostfully

Margot Schmorak
CEO + Co-Founder

Margot has led marketing, sales, product, and strategy teams at Apple, Coveroo and ServiceSource (NASDAQ: SREV). Most recently she was VP of Marketing and Strategy for the $200 million business unit at ServiceSource. At Apple, she launched the first iPhone Developer Program in 2008. She is an avid traveler, so much so that her first son was on over 30 flights before his first birthday. Some of her favorite destinations are Yunnan (China), Vinales (Cuba) and Paris. Margot graduated from Vassar College, and holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business (UMich).

David Jacoby
President + Co-Founder

David is a proud Airbnb Superhost living in San Francisco. He loves welcoming guests from around the world and showing his kids what it means to be a good host. As a traveler, he’s couch surfed around the world, including Cairo, Lima, Jerusalem, Hanoi, and Kigali. David was COO and EVP of Sales and Marketing at WellCall, Inc., a health coaching and corporate wellness program company, where he grew the business from infancy to be acquired by Health Advocate in 2012. David graduated from the Wharton School of Business.

Noah Neiman
Head of Product + Co-Founder

Noah most recently worked at Apple, where he led Worldwide Promotions for 6 years and authored a patent on network-based rebate systems. Noah was also head of Analytics for iTunes Retail. Previously, Noah was an Engineer at Bosch and General Motors. He fell in love with travel at the age of 12 when he took a family adventure in the Pacific Northwest. His parallel love of all things automotive led him to name his first daughter after the Brazilian three-time Formula One World Champion (Senna). He has an MBA from the Ross School of Business (UMich) and graduated from Carnegie Mellon.

Bob Axford
CTO

Bob is an experienced leader who loves making complicated things simple. He’s held senior positions at several startups, including MapJam (500 Startups), Time.ly, and OtherLevels, which IPO’ed in Australia in 2015. Bob’s background in control-systems engineering has helped him flex his skills in a variety of applications, including banking and fast-moving startups. He loves traveling with his family in Australia and overseas, and playing his guitar in the local jam band.

Meli Axford
UX Design + UI Development

Meli’s skills have been gained through “lifehacking”. Meli was trained in user-centered design by Susan Wolfe, who founded the human factors department at Tandem. This sparked her interest and love for UX and UI design. Now she gets to combine it with her love for travel. She and her family have explored Australia, New Zealand, much of Europe, and the United States, often combining travel with virtual work and house-swapping. Meli holds a BA, MA and PY from QUT.

Mark Nelson
Lead Engineer

Mark is a full-stack developer who loves building things on the internet to make the world a better place. A startup veteran, he has held senior roles at Sparked.com and Proven.com, where he guided several products through the full cycle from ideation to launch. Mark currently lives in Albuquerque and loves travel, olympic lifting, and playing with other people’s pets.

Silvia Li Sam
Growth

Silvia is a storyteller at heart. She’s a growth hacker who has built the 4th largest publication on Medium and has recruited NYT best selling authors and top venture capitalists as writers. Her social media campaigns have reached 1.2 million users and her pieces average 30,000 views. She believes in tech for social impact. Thus, she’s driven initiatives in collaboration with Startup Weekend, Startup Digest, and Kapor Center for Social Impact. Silvia is only 21 and recently graduated from USC Marshall School of Business.

Angela Lau
Product + Analytics

Angela was born and raised in Hong Kong. An engineer by training, she worked as an engineer at NASA and Oracle, and then Apple, where she was a product manager. Angela is also an avid traveler, whose favorite cities include Prague, Kyoto, Florence, Tsunagu, and Rothenburg. As an MBA intern, she recently helped an Italian company reposition their organic food offering – and got to eat a lot of chocolate hazelnut spread in the process (Nocciolata). She graduated from the Haas School of Business (Cal) and loves to bake.

Nicole Prentice Williams
Business Development

Nicole is a multi EMMY-Award winning TV Producer who is passionate about travel and hospitality. She brings her skills from managing and creating content for leading brands (FOX, CBS, and NBC) to Hostfully’s business development team. Nicole was Supervising Producer for Current TV and Viacom. Nicole holds an M.A. from American University and B.A. from Pepperdine University. She’s won two EMMY awards and a Golden Mike Award. Her lifelong love of travel began at age 11 with a trip to Asia.

Christophe Fraise
Angel Investor and Advisor

Christophe Fraise is an investor and advisor based in San Francisco. He comes from a finance background having started his career after college at a hedge fund. He spent his later years in product marketing and product development. He has made a dozen angel investments including Chariot, BloomThat, Vastrm, Whale Path and Rinse. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Steven Carvell
Associate Dean at Cornell School of Hotel Administration

Professor Steven Carvell is Associate Dean and Academic Director of the Hospitality Entrepreneurship Institute at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. He believes hospitality is one of the most ancient traditions of humanity.

Steven’s recent research projects compared the performance of branded and unaffiliated hotels, and the economic capital market antecedents of venture capital cycles. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Financial World, Leaders, and the Wall Street Journal. Steven has spoken at seminars for the largest hotel companies in the world. He holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Binghamton

Steven McArthur
Former President of Expedia and CEO of Vegas.com

Steven McArthur has over 20 years of experience at leading companies including Expedia, AOL, and HP. He was also CEO of Vegas.com, which was acquired by Renmark Media in 2015 (NASDAQ: MARK). As President of Expedia from 2004-2007, Steven led the significant transition of North American brands Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Expedia.ca, and Hotwire.com. He was also EVP at AOL SVP at HP, where he ran a $1B business focused on distribution of third-party software across HP’s portfolio of devices.

Steven holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science from Queen’s University Belfast. He lives in Seattle with his family.

Jonah Schwartz
Serial CTO of Venture Backed Startups

Jonah Schwartz is a veteran CTO/Founder who has built successful companies from the ground up. As CTO and co-founder of consumer internet companies like Dot & Bo, Rumpus, and MyComix, he has inspired engineering and product teams to build superior products that satisfy millions of customers.

Jonah founded his first company at the dawn of the Internet. After graduating from the UC Berkeley with a degree in EE and CS, Jonah joined Inktomi, and then Gemini Mobile Technologies (now Cloudian) in 2001 as a Founding Engineer and Software Architect. He was Founding Engineer at Dotspotter, acquired by CBS Interactive, and founded venture-backed Rumpus and Dot & Bo. Jonah lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.

Tom Nielsen
Early Googler, Investor + Co-Founder

Tom Nielsen joined Google’s in 2002 when everyone still reported to a single Engineering VP. As the cross-department tech lead for Google Toolbar, he created the first intelligent popup blocker and helped grow the user base to over 250M users worldwide. Later, he was the #2 engineer on Orkut.com. Tom won two Founders Awards for his accomplishments and also holds numerous patents, many relating to social networking. Before and after Google, Tom was a senior engineer at multiple venture-backed startups.

He lives in Eureka Valley, with his wife and their YouTube famous pug, Lelu. He is also a vacation rental host of a 1-bedroom studio apartment with great city views.

Won Choe
Marketing Advisor

Won Choe is a digital marketing expert. He devised the marketing playbook for Dot & Bo, an online home decor site, which grew from 5 to 60 employees in one year. Won also ran digital marketing at The University of Phoenix, managing a $100M budget across search, display, and social media. Won was also consultant at Verizon where he testified before public utilities commissions on the costing and pricing of network services.

When he isn’t optimizing digital media, Won surfs, plays tennis, and practices to be a better bongo drummer. He loves to travel, having visited Costa Rica, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. Won holds a B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley.

Carrie Davis
Travel Expert and Airbnb Superhost

Carrie Davis was most recently Director, Strategic Alliances at San Francisco Travel, creating strategic marketing partnerships with one of the world’s most popular destinations. Major brand partners included Airbnb, Lyft, Levi Strauss & Co., Virgin America, Wells Fargo, Giants Enterprises, American Express and Disney. Previously, Carrie was a Senior Account Executive at Google, driving $15M in online sales and revenue growth with Fortune 1000 advertisers in the Retail Vertical. Carrie was also a Senior Account Manager at WHERE Magazine & GuestBook, the leading monthly visitor magazine and upscale in-room hotel book. She has a BS in Advertising and Marketing from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Carrie is an avid traveler, visiting 31 countries (and counting) and is a proud Airbnb Superhost.

Arlene Singer
Experienced Entrepreneur and HR Expert

Arlene Singer was CEO of WellCall, a pioneering corporate wellness company she founded in 1996 and grew for 18 years until it was acquired by Health Advocate in 2012. Arlene then served as Vice President, Wellness Services for HealthAdvocate, while overseeing the integration of WellCall. Prior to WellCall, Arlene served in senior HR roles for over 20 years, including Director of Compensation and Benefits at Wells Fargo. Arlene has a BA from University of Massachusetts, and a Master’s in Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell. She has been a home sharing host for over 15 years with her two homes in San Francisco and Guerneville, CA (wine country).