Our Leadership Team
There are several teams at Culture Trip, spread across three offices in London, Tel Aviv, and New York, and a community of freelance creators across the globe. We come from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds, but have one unifying mission: we want to inspire people to go beyond their cultural boundaries and connect with the world around them.
At a time when walls are going up and the focus is so often placed on what separates or divides us, we at Culture Trip believe it’s more important than ever to nurture an open-minded, culturally inquisitive world by highlighting what unites us all as human beings.
Everyone at Culture Trip, from engineers and data scientists to creators and sales and marketers, wants to look outwards, learn about, and embrace the world in all its complexity and difference.
At Culture Trip we tell stories and create content; we design products and deliver amazing user experiences; we combine technology and creativity to break new ground, help people explore and plan their journeys, and strive to bring the world closer together.
Dr Kris Naudts
CEO & Founder
favourite city: Jerusalem
Dr Kris Naudts trained as a medical doctor and psychiatrist in Belgium and began his career in academic psychiatry at the prestigious Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. He later became medical director at a private psychiatric hospital. Kris holds five degrees - in medicine, general and forensic psychiatry and psychology, and a PhD in neuroscience.
Kris founded Culture Trip to pursue his passion for entrepreneurship, culture and creativity. After several years of bootstrapping, Kris raised more than $100m in funding to propel Culture Trip into its next phase of growth. He speaks (and reads) Dutch, English, French and German. When not working, you can find him reading, travelling or in a theatre, jazz club or art gallery.
Dr Nick Jakobi
Chief Data Science & Strategic Projects Officer
favourite city: Brighton
Nick has a PhD in evolutionary robotics and worked at several artificial intelligence startups before joining Google as one of their first European product managers in 2006. During nearly eight years at Google, Nick worked on YouTube, emerging markets and offers. He then joined State, a social network, and later to Facebook in 2014 as the lead PM on the brand solutions team. Nick joined Culture Trip in 2017 to build out the product, design and data science teams.
Dr Ana Jakimovska
Chief Product Officer
favourite city: Skopje
Ana is passionate about the cross section of tech, content, conversion and AI that result in best-in-class user experiences and digital products. She holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and has worked in media in product roles for the past 15 years. Ana joined Culture Trip from the Guardian where she was Director of Product. Her other roles were at Sky News, BBC Worldwide, Channel 4, ITV and Which?. She's originally from Skopje, a destination she warmly recommends to curious travellers.
Dmitry Shishkin
Chief Content Officer
favourite city: London
Dmitry enjoys working on the intersection of creative and tech. Originally from Moscow, he joined Culture Trip from the BBC World Service, where he worked as digital development editor for 41 foreign language news teams. Before that Dmitry worked in various senior editorial development roles for the digital part of BBC News. His passions in life, apart from his family, are reading, cooking and travelling as well as walking his Rhodesian Ridgeback, Charlie.
Nathaly Carvajal
Chief Financial Officer
favourite city: Paris
Nathaly has a background in computer science and financial engineering, and joins Culture Trip from Houzz, the leading global technology platform for home remodeling and design, where she was responsible for managing twelve plus countries and preparing the company for IPO. Prior to that Nathaly held multiple finance and corporate strategy roles at Google, HTC, NBC Universal and Citibank, as well as Rubicon Project which was successfully listed in the NYSE. Her interests include traveling off the beaten track, learning new languages and visiting new art galleries.
Karen Kesner
Chief People Officer
favourite city: Austin
Karen launched her HR career at a pivotal time in technology in the Pacific Northwest and Silicon Valley. She helped ready one of the earliest tech start-up IPOs at RealNetworks in 1997, and the sixth-largest IPO at Visa in 2008. Karen joined Culture Trip from travel industry leader Booking.com, where she was a member of the core leadership team. Before, she led the growth and transformation of globally diverse teams that pioneered technology innovation at Microsoft, Washington Mutual (Chase), Apple, Visa and Audible. Her passions, outside her love for her work and family, are her love for world adventures and her many pets.
Ben Shacham
Chief Revenue Officer (Travel)
favourite city: Vilnius
After studying at Oxford, Ben joined PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he worked with businesses of all sizes — from fast-growing start-ups to FTSE-listed companies — on audits, transactions and accessing the capital markets. He joined Culture Trip in 2015 as its second employee and has held a number of roles across the company. He is a keen sportsman, enjoying rugby, boxing and muay thai when he was growing up and more recently running, cycling and yoga. In his spare time he enjoys travelling, building bikes and watching Arsenal.
Inbal Rosenshtock
SVP R&D
favourite city: Tel Aviv
Passionate about technology, Inbal graduated from the Technion in Haifa, Israel, with a BSc in Information Systems. Inbal joined Elbit Systems as a real time developer in the avionics field, and in her next roles she worked on big data environments. Directly prior to Culture Trip, Inbal was vice president of research and development for C-B4, a predictive analytics startup. An enthusiastic artist, Inbal tries to travel as much of the world as possible and is always thinking of her next adventure.
Bieke Claes
General Manager US
favourite city: Tel Aviv
A Belgian native and resident of New York City, employs her extensive international experience along with her MBA and law degrees in service of global, mission-driven projects. She is the former Managing Director at the Belgian-American Chamber of Commerce, where she founded Atelier, a successful incubator and accelerator for European scale-ups, with locations in NY and SF. She is inspired by opportunities to build stakeholder trust and enthusiasm around big, bold visions, and bring them to fruition. Bieke loves connecting people, building partnerships, promoting equal attention for IQ and EQ in the workplace and the education system, attending personal development workshops, practicing sports and eating chocolate.
Alexandra Rieck
Chief Communications Officer
favourite city: Rome
Alexandra has over twenty years of PR experience in travel, e-commerce, media and hospitality. She joins Culture Trip from Time Out Group plc where she was Global PR Director, leading all communications across the business including Time Out Media and Time Out Market. Previously, she was Head of PR UK & Europe for lastminute.com and before this the company's Head of PR in Germany. At Culture Trip, Alexandra is focusing on growing the brand globally through consumer, corporate and trade communications. She holds an MA in History of Art which continues to be her passion; she also enjoys cooking, travelling, walking and reading.
Anne Bourgeois-Vignon
Executive Creative Director
favourite city: Salina
Anne’s interests lie at the intersection of arts and culture, innovation and media. Anne previously held the role of global digital director at Magnum Photos where she led Magnum’s digital publishing activities, including launching magnumphotos.com. Anne has also held roles as creative content director of NOWNESS (Dazed Media) and Photography Director of Forward Publishing (WPP Group). Anne is passionate about photography, yoga, and sourdough. Food is a major motivation.
Kathelijne Beckers
General Counsel
favourite city: New York
After studying law in Belgium and Italy, Kathelijne worked as a lawyer in Brussels. Prior to joining Culture Trip, Kathelijne worked as legal counsel at Materialise, a global 3D printing services provider listed on Nasdaq, where she worked on a number of M&A projects and software and technology transactions, and advised on securities laws and filings. Kathelijne is a member of the Disruptive General Counsel Network. In her spare time Kathelijne enjoys travelling, running, swimming, and baking cookies for her family and friends. Kathelijne loves New York for the energy it exudes.