Axel Neff
Product Department Head
I am a proven starter and tech professional, who has served in various leadership roles for early-stage and enterprise companies.
Achieving Billion dollar valuations on two separate startup ventures.
My undergraduate education was at Swarthmore College where I earned a BS in Engineering. Working briefly in commercial / residential land development afterwards. Fostering an early admiration for new development.
I later joined the social media startup Vkontakte. Which allowed matching analytical thinking with my love for tech. It was a natural progression.
At VK I served as Director of International Strategy under COO and
CFO. Noteworthy contributions include : rebranding site to VK.com,
iPod growth campaigns for global expansion, led partnerships
with likes of Apple, Google, PayPal, etc. During tenure at VK, the
company grew from 100 ,000 accounts to over 100 Million daily active
users. Achieved peak valuation of $3 Billion USD.
In 2012 , I was a Co-founder & CIO of Telegram Messenger,
responsible for creating / operating global businesses, overseeing
build-out of a custom cloud designed to optimize speed, security
and reliability. We launched in 2013 to much fanfare and ultimately
reached over 1 Billion messages per day.
Peaking initially in 2014 at 15 Million downloads per day, users on 6 continents,
Telegram quickly reached a valuation in excess of $1 Billion USD.
Since then, my efforts were primarily focused on US projects,
branching into various industries. From 2015-16 I served as CCO
of Blackmoon Financial Group, helping enter the US fintech market.
In 2017-18 , I co-founded a Voice startup for hospitality service
optimization, and drove efforts to bring a software engineering
bootcamp into my hometown.
The thrill of the tech remains my passion as I continue to seek
rewarding opportunities to help others. I desire till to remain
creative while leveraging of my verifiable tech experience. My
current role with Indeed.com embodies this, where our company
motto is We Help People Get Jobs. Feel free to contact me via
LinkedIn.
Y Combinator Startup School