Meet RE - Founders
Proud of our past, excited about our future
Valerie Kogan and Alex Gikher founded RE Partners to enable organizations to transform through the strategic use of technologies that enhance performance and empower growth. They provide strategic value that goes beyond the deep technology and business expertise you would expect from a trusted partner, bringing empathy, connection, and human-centered design to the digital transformation journey.
With more than 20 years’ experience of delivering positive strategic outcomes to Fortune 1000 companies, Alex and Valerie like to make the hard work fun, exciting, personal, and deliver long-lasting positive impact.
RE PARTNERS
Valerie Kogan
Co-Founder, Chief Customer Officer
Valerie grew up dreaming of becoming a musician and has a classical music degree from the world-renowned Gnessin Academy of Music in Moscow, Russia. Circumstances led to a change in career path, and today, rather than composing musical masterpieces and conducting orchestras, Valerie loves nothing more than to decipher, transform, and re-orchestrate business processes to improve performance.
She honed her IT skills in customer-facing leadership roles gaining extensive experience conducting transformational and complex projects for large multinationals and startups alike. She still can’t quite believe how she transformed from a keen violin player that didn’t know how to turn on a computer to someone that helps companies in the pharmaceutical, oil and gas, fashion, and other industries to address their business challenges through advanced technology implementations.
RE PARTNERS
Alex Gikher
Co-Founder, Chief Revenue Officer
Meanwhile, Alex grew up in Odessa, Ukraine, dreaming of working with computers and becoming an entrepreneur. Inspired by American movies, he started his entrepreneurial journey at the age of 8 years old. Alex advertised his first business by scrawling the words “hand car wash” in red paint on the biggest piece of plywood he could find. Over the next few weeks, he washed a total of 3 cars before deciding that the market wasn’t ready for his disruptive innovation. At the age of 11, he moved with his family to the US, where he discovered there are many more willing customers for the companies he founded.
After gaining a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s in management, he honed his craft in several leadership roles in organizations such as SAP America and EPAM Systems. During his first week at EPAM, he met Valerie while working on a proposal for a large, multinational ERP project and was impressed by her drive to be successful and make her clients even more successful. Perhaps what surprised Alex the most was her ability to understand people’s needs and how to organize teams to deliver quantifiable value to a project.
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Valerie found Alex to be obnoxiously talented and knowledgeable but was drawn to his passion
and unconventional problem-solving abilities that she instantly recognized could be an asset when dealing with complex challenges. They clicked immediately, forming a seamless working relationship. They soon decided to form RE Partners so they could take a customer-centric, boutique approach to projects.
So, what’s changed?
Well, Valerie and Alex can now take personal responsibility of project delivery and ensure that every project delivers on the promises they make and delivers both real business and human benefits. But most of all, the formation of RE Partners has allowed the dynamic duo to put their partners’ needs and best interests at the heart of everything they do.