Alex S. Shilman

Hi, I’m Alex-a behavioral scientist turned venture capitalist turned speaker turned… well, still trying to figure out how many hats one head can wear.

By day, I invest in deep tech and early-stage startups as Managing Partner at New Gate Capital, where I spend a disproportionate amount of time listening closely to founders-what they’re building, why it matters, and how they think under pressure.

By training, I’m a social psychologist obsessed with how humans actually make decisions (hint: not the way we think we do). For the past decade, I’ve helped governments, startups, and Fortune 500s make better choices, design smarter systems, and gently outwit their own biases-preferably for good.

I speak globally on behavioral innovation, decision-making, and the psychological blind spots that shape our tech, our lives, and our inboxes. My work sits at the intersection of science, strategy, and storytelling-with a bit of self-deprecating humor, because behavioral science without humility is just… science fiction.

I come to all this with a layered perspective. I was born the eldest son of Ukrainian immigrants to Israel-raised as an immigrant within an immigrant: a Russian-speaking Jew growing up in an ultra-Orthodox community, learning to navigate one culture while carrying the codes of another. Eventually, I stepped beyond that world, back into the broader, complex mosaic of Israeli society.

That early experience shaped everything I do. It taught me how identities are built, how systems bend or break around the margins, and how people make sense of the worlds they inherit. It gave me a front-row seat to human behavior-and an unshakable curiosity to understand it better, build from it, and sometimes, gently challenge it.
These days, I live in Jerusalem with my beautiful wife, Noa, our two bright and curious daughters, and a baby son who’s already showing signs of strong opinions.