Salome Mukhigulashvili

I'm originally from Georgia, a country with 8,000 years of winemaking and agricultural history, and I think that shaped how I see the world. I've always been drawn to solving real problems for real people.

In my undergrad I studied Agricultural Sciences, which is an unusual starting point for a product manager. But that's actually where my product journey began. I connected my childhood love for creating things with my growing interest in technology and built an AI tool that helped farmers detect vineyard diseases early. It won a hackathon, but more importantly, it showed me how powerful it is to take an idea, talk to real users, and turn it into something genuinely useful.

Since then I've been building products from scratch at two startups, including co-founding one of my own. I've run over 300 user interviews, led teams across design and development, and helped bring products from zero to paying customers. The biggest lesson I've learned is that users, not you, not your team, are always the real priority. Early on we built something people didn't actually want, and that mistake made me grow faster than any success could have. Now I try to pass that lesson on by supporting other student founders and teaching at GW.