In 1996, before the internet could answer such questions, a newlywed couple in Israel spread 15 university brochures across a bed.
Roei Ganzarski had applied to American business schools back then, ranked 20 through 50, the ones his life savings could afford. His newly wed wife had agreed to move with two conditions. She picks the place. And after two years, they come home.
She looked at the covers and pointed at one: red brick buildings from the 1800s, cherry trees in bloom, blue skies. The University of Washington business school.
“There was no asterisk that says this only happens two weeks a year in Seattle,” Ganzarski laughs. “The rest is rain.”
They came for two years. That was three decades ago. Half the ultimatums held, as he likes to joke. Today they are American citizens, parents of three, and he is the CEO of Alitheon, a company teaching ordinary cameras to prove that physical objects are real. And yes, he is still married.
The path between the brochure and the corner office was anything but straight. Years in aerospace. A software company doing real-time scheduling optimization. Then a leap that made the industry stare: electric airplanes.
Leading magniX, Ganzarski put the world’s first all-electric commercial aircraft in the sky in 2019. Months later came the eCaravan, then the largest all-electric aircraft ever flown. His team secured the first FAA Special Conditions ever issued for an electric propulsion system, a regulatory door nobody had opened before.
Then he walked away from airplanes to chase a different question: can a camera prove an object is authentic?
Alitheon says yes. Its software reads the microscopic surface details unique to every physical item, turning the object itself into its own ID. No tags, no chips, no stickers, no serial numbers. The technology now secures everything from fine watches to gold bars to medicine.
To entrepreneurs looking for the throughline, Ganzarski offers the mantra he has repeated since he was 16: only dead fish go with the flow.
“The fact that all people do something doesn’t mean I need to,” he says. “The fact that everyone’s going to that market doesn’t mean I have to go to that market. It might be good. But it doesn’t have to be.”
That refusal to follow the current explains a career of unfashionable bets. Electric aviation before it was credible. Product authentication before most founders knew the counterfeit economy existed. Even his hiring philosophy runs contrarian. He wants no “yes-men”, and he refuses to be one.
His second rule keeps the optimism honest: the light at the end of the tunnel could be a train. Every opportunity gets questioned. Every plan gets a backup.
And his third rule keeps him grounded: always remember where you come from and where you’re going. For Ganzarski, that means carrying his beginnings forward without dwelling on them, and asking his company to treat its own past the same way. Learn from the mistakes. Then move forward.
Thirty years after a brochure decided his future, he is still betting on the unglamorous problems everyone else walks past.
“I don’t think outside the box,” he says. “I just don’t see a box.”
For the founders coming up behind him, that might be the whole lesson.
