Heretic is led by Mariam Naficy, Founder and Chairman of Minted. Naficy has over two decades of consumer Internet experience.
Naficy is known for seeing around corners and pioneering both e-commerce and online creative communities. She launched Eve.com, the world’s first cosmetics e-commerce site, in 1998 and sold it successfully in 2000, and led Product Management at Movielink, an early downloadable movie service. Naficy was early to recognize the potential of online creative communities and founded Minted, one of the most successful community-based e-commerce companies in the world. The company generates several hundred million dollars in sales each year.
Minted pioneered decentralized decision-making through crowd voting, the funding of a designer ‘middle class’, and driving creative output through artist collaboration.
Naficy sits on the Board of Directors of Minted, Medium and Every Mother Counts. She is a Trustee of Williams College and a member of the Advisory Council of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Hakan is head of AI/ML at Heretic with over 10 years of industry and academia experience in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Prior to joining Heretic, Hakan focused on machine learning and generative AI engineering across multiple domains. He is driven by his passion for exploring new ML methods and their mathematical foundations, as well as their applications across different domains. He has developed end to end supervised and unsupervised machine learning pipelines and applications.
Previously, he worked as an Assistant Professor, where he delivered numerous research talks and taught applied math courses at various universities in Turkey, Europe, and the US. Following a postdoctoral fellowship, he co-founded a mathematical modeling startup focused on designing math and strategy games. The startup also developed a discovery-inquiry based elementary math education program using these games, which has been adopted by many private schools in Turkey.
Hakan holds a PhD in Mathematics and Bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration and Mathematics from Middle East Technical University in Turkey.
Aljosha "Yosh" Novakovic is the Director of Engineering at Heretic, with 7 years of experience in both frontend and backend programming. Yosh also has startup experience, as he has founded two startups in the past, and continues to be driven by a passion to build and innovate.
Prior to to Heretic, Aljosha ran his own startup Dog World, in which he built out the full site architecture and led all growth and business operations. He also gained experience from working at Rivian when it was in an early stage, and was at IBM on a new team that built out solutions for Fortune 500 clients, leveraging AI.
Yosh lives in San Francisco with his wife and two dogs, and enjoys traveling and learning from new cultures. He speaks four languages, and has family in Serbia and Brazil.
Andrew Carr is a computational mathematician specializing in machine learning and large language models. Andrew focuses on generative AI research and applications across modalities and sectors.
Andrew has been at the forefront of generative AI technology advancements through his work at OpenAI, Google, and Gretel.ai, where he focused on subjects such as privacy-first synthetic data, AI code generation, and novel self-supervised pre-training methodologies.
Outside of his work at Heretic, Andrew is the Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Cartwheel, an early-stage generative AI company.
Andrew holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s Degree in Computation and Applied Mathematics from Brigham Young University.
Sida focuses on incubating companies at the 0-1 stage at Heretic through in-depth multimodal research and prototyping.
Prior to Heretic, Sida led strategy and new product incubation at Syndicate, a web3 company building decentralized investing tools. Before that, she designed human-centered ventures at IDEO and Atomic across fintech, e-commerce, education, and energy. She first built her business chops as a management consultant where she learned the “rules” of business building. Since then, she tries to break the rules to upend status quo industries.
In her free time, Sida keeps tabs on the fast-faced web3 space and angel invests in mission-driven founders.
Sida has a BA in political science and visual arts from Columbia University. To her mom’s dismay, she has just half an MBA from MIT since she dropped out to build companies.
Peter Sjolander is Heretic’s Senior Director of Venture Strategy and Development. Peter has 10+ years of experience at the intersection of technology and media with a focus on strategy, business development, and operations.
Prior to joining Heretic, Peter was a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte Consulting, where he advised technology and media companies on growth and go-to-market strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and operational topics. Additionally, Peter has 5+ years of media and entertainment industry experience at Marvel Studios and TIDAL Music.
Peter holds an MBA from Yale School of Management and a BA and BS from The University of Southern California.
Heretic is looking for anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit to shape the future of media, social networks, and commerce.