About Hayyim

I am a married Silicon Valley technology executive with over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience in turn-arounds, start-ups and shut-downs. I have lived in Silicon Valley for 20 years. I hold a couple of patents and wrote a bunch of article for techie magazines.

This blog is my small way of illustrating that being a business leader, technologist AND religious Sephardic Jew are not mutually exclusive terms.

Science, logic and religion were harmonized nearly 1,000 years ago…only to be set aside by people who prefer religious superstition, visceral fear and physical force to control others.  I’ve had my Y-DNA and mt-DNA fully sequenced, sliced and diced in order to uncover hints of my ancestry through SNP analysis.  Regardless of how I cut it – roughly

•  3.0% African (Sudan, East Horn of Africa, UAE and Levantine)
•  1.5% Asian (Han)
•  95.5% mixture of Mediterranean Europe and Northeastern Europe (Iberian, Catalonia, Bretagne, Amalfi, Belarus, Poland).

When my ancestors fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, they avoided the Shabbatai Tzvi controversy, esoteric textual interpretation (Kabbalah), and pogroms…maintaining their Rationalist Tradition as they traveled through Turkey, Poland, Amsterdam, on their way to the Western Hemisphere.  My Maternal ancestors, Kosher Vintners, landed in Croatia (Split) then spread out into Bosnia, Serbia and Slovenia where they stayed until the Balkan Wars of 1912/13.

Prior to the Inquisition, my Paternal ancestors were highly educated court Jews and Viziers of Spanish and Portuguese Royalty. Before arriving in Spain, they were part of the Radhanite Trade Network operating in Major cities and ports of the Mediterranean – in Kairouan (Tunisia), Fostat (Egypt), Constantini (Algeria) and headquartered in Ramleh (Palestine).

My Paternal family has been in the Western Hemisphere for over 350 years having worked for Sir Hans Sloane, John Custis IV, and Sir Artur Rawdon to commercially exploit Caribbean botanical specimens of cocoa, cotton, tobacco and fruits. They came ashore to Colonial Virginia in 1790.  In my family tree, I count the following people as distant cousins