Gil Shklarski is a former CTO-operator who scaled Flatiron Health's engineering team from 2 people to 350 through Roche's acquisition, bringing an unusually diverse background spanning elite Israeli Defense Forces tech units, a PhD, and engineering roles at Microsoft and Facebook. He's known for creating the "Xanax for Decision-Making" framework—a widely-referenced decision matrix that helps scaling teams categorize choices and maintain autonomy—and for advocating an "opportunistically lazy" engineering culture where people automate themselves out of their current jobs to tackle harder problems.

• A strong focus on developer tooling and infrastructure that improves engineering efficiency and reliability. He is drawn to solutions that modernize the software development lifecycle, such as his support for a platform that acts as a flight simulator for developers to practice handling production fires without real-world consequences, or his investment in automated QA tools that free up teams to focus on building rather than testing.
• Enthusiasm for life sciences and the intersection of biology and technology. He frequently engages with the biotech sector, attending major industry events like the JPM Conference where he jokingly wondered how many new molecules were represented in the crowd, and he actively celebrates startups working on therapeutic discovery and objective neurology measurements.
• Advocacy for engineering leadership and healthy team culture. Beyond just the technology, he shares resources on management best practices, emphasizing the importance of self-compassion for leaders and promoting tools that make technical hiring more objective and skill-based to help companies scale effectively.
• Curiosity regarding Generative AI and its practical applications in daily life. He experiments with large language models for creative tasks, such as asking chatbots to narrate stories in the style of famous naturalists, and shares anecdotes about navigating the new world of prompt engineering with his family.
• Frustration with legacy inefficiencies in healthcare and logistical systems. He has expressed exasperation with modern digital health services that still rely on outdated technologies like fax machines to communicate with hospitals, signalling an appetite for startups that solve these specific interoperability friction points.