Gefen Skolnick

Gefen Skolnick is a first generation immigrant, proud queer woman, and coffee lover. She started Couplet in order to bring the love and joy of great-tasting, specialty coffee to the masses. Couplet’s goal is to make more coffee fun and approachable by skipping the pretentiousness of specialty coffee and getting right to delicious coffee. Not only has Gefen worked as the co-director of technology for the largest women’s hackathon in the U.S., but she also built her own apps and participated in multiple fellowship programs. She became a lead partner at a venture fund backed by the founders of Tesla, Reddit, and Twitch before creating her own coffee brand and locking in funding using just Twitter. And did we mention that she did all this by the age of 23! Gefen had planned to bootstrap her company – funding from Twitter was never in question. As fate would have it, however, her persistence to advocate for underrepresented minorities helped her grab the attention of not one but 30 angel investors pre launch. When the brand’s first check came from Jen Rubio, it pushed Gefen to work on Couplet Coffee full-time directly after graduating college. Her passion for being an advocate stems from seeing first hand how community college graduates are extremely under-resourced. Through Twitter, Gefen built a community for underrepresented founders that reached 1,000 members in days, currently at almost 3,000.