Our Team

  • Stephen Zerfas, Cofounder and CEO

    A former management consultant (Bridgespan), self-taught engineer (ex-Lyft infra), and viral author (pseudoynmous), Stephen became obsessed with scaling meditation after it transformed his mental health.

  • Alex Gruver, Cofounder

    Alex led go-to-market at autonomous vehicle startup Zoox, helping sell the company to Amazon for $1b. He previously worked at Rivian and Bain, and published ML papers in college. He’s found nothing has given him agency over his own wellbeing like meditating into peak states.

  • Tamaz Gadaev, ML Engineer

    Tamaz’s prior roles include leading ML R&D for Samsung Galaxy Watch biosensors analysis and computer vision research. He learned the jhanas after joining the team on a Jhourney retreat and still “can’t believe they’re real.”

  • Judah Newman, Head of Curriculum

    Judah was previously a Data Scientist & ML Engineer specializing in audio signal processing. He became passionate about various meditation traditions teaching jhanas after learning them with help from the Jhourney team. He later joined the team full time to lead teaching.

Advisors

  • Kathryn Devaney

    Cognitive neuroscientist; Berkeley research faculty

  • Graeme Moffatt

    Former Chief Scientist of Muse, founder of System2 Neurotechnology