Ziggy Hallgarten

Grew up around the hospitality industry as my dad started a company called Northview, an owner/operator of hotels and resorts. I used to work in them as a kid, first taste of hospitality was folding towels every vacation as a 10-year old pool boy at Hawk's Cay.

Went to Cornell's hotel school; this wasn't necessarily a lifelong dream of mine but ended up being the best/most interesting school I thought I could get into, so was pretty focused on hospitality/real estate from day one of college.

Worked at Cushman and HVS during college, doing hotel brokerage and then hotel appraisals/consulting and then worked at PGIM my junior year internship which led into my first job out of school. Less than a year into PGIM, I ended up jumping ship and going to work at Northview (again not really ever planned), but wanted to get back into the hotel space. Was there for a little less than two years and then went to work at a midwest-based family office called Oliver Companies, where I was able to take on more of a leadership role and help them through a pretty cool phase of growth.

In November 2024 I literally wrote down that in the next year I needed to start a company, just had this itch, both my parents were entrepreneurs (mom started a very successful rug business) and had always been somewhat entrepreneurial. I was learning about AI/tech/software/startups through friends in the space and just general research and got really excited about a couple problems I was dealing with in my day-to-day.

Then went to a couple friends who were engineers, said this is everything that sucks in my job, let's work to automate it. A couple weeks later, we had an MVP, some early users, we incorporated, quit our jobs, and the company was kind of born from there.

Interests: I love watersports (surfing, kiteboarding, snowboarding, wakeboarding), love team sports as well, grew up an athlete, still play soccer and basketball all the time, love to travel and cook as well.