How Gil Finkelstein is empowering developers with Openbase

What fuels Finkelstein’s passions

Hailing from Israel, Finkelstein managed to make the move from Tel Aviv to Silicon Valley by continuously pushing himself towards his goal of becoming an entrepreneur. However, those dreams did not actually materialise until he welcomed his first daughter into the world.

When his daughter was born, he decided to redesign his life and structured his work around his needs, rather than the other way around. He quit his day job, which had him working from 5am to 8pm, and decided to put all of his focus into building a more sustainable life for him and his family.

Finkelstein’s journey to Openbase

The first company that Finkelstein founded was a venture offering innovative and cost-effective branding for startups. After building it up to great success, the company was sold in 2015.

After the turnover of his first business, he decided to further polish his skills in product design and joined the team at Airobotics as an art director and design lead. After this stint with the world’s first and only regulatory compliant commercial pilotless drone solution, Finkelstein went on to become a trailblazer in the design space.

His penchant for design quickly made him one of the top graphic designers in Israel, which is no small feat. His love for creating aesthetic products led him to get involved with passion projects such as Mblinq, a made for a mobile platform that compiles a user’s entire social media and portfolio into one aesthetically pleasing webpage; Moockup, a platform for designers to showcase their work, mockups, and creative sources; and Mako, one of the most popular independent Israeli news and entertainment portals l with over 36 million unique monthly users.

By 2020, with new skills and fresh fiery ambition, he was ready to return to the entrepreneurial life and joined the team at Openbase – a platform that allows users to browse, compare, and access millions of open-source tech packages.

The rise of Openbase and all that it offers

Finkelstein’s many years of experience have given him insight into what the tech industry is sorely lacking: a platform that is aimed at developers that allows a quick, effective, and painless search into a wide database of open-source software. Gil has no doubt that Openbase is the solution.

It might seem like a big leap from design to UX but, in fact, design is a key component in delivering a standout user experience. Not only does good design consider visual appearance, it must also consider functionality of programs and tools to be fully optimised. In order to truly understand their target audience of developers, Gil spent some quality time doing research and surveying the population about what they truly need.

As author Alina Wheeler once said, “Design is intelligence made visible." Gil was not designing Openbase simply to look appealing, he was driven to help design a platform that could revolutionse and streamline the process for developers. The truth is that great design should actually go almost unnoticed, as it creates such a smooth flow for the user that they aren’t even aware of when the design elements are coming into play to make their overall experience better.

One example of his standout choices was to build Openbase completely on a dark theme model. With his background in design, Gil understood the efficiency and ease of using dark mode throughout the development process. It was obvious to him that the platform should follow the same concept.

Not only does Openbase act as a database, it also helps developers to choose and manage their open-source packages by providing comprehensive insights and monitoring. For each package, you can find reviews by fellow developers, as well as powerful data about the package's popularity, reliability, activity, and more. It empowers developers to build better products much more efficiently.

To learn more about Gil’s personal journey and the development of Openbase, check out this link.

Gil is also in the process of launching an exciting new app that will utilise AI technology to help create art for NFTs within the landscape of blockchain technology. The product is already creating a huge amount of hype and traction – even Snoop Dogg is jumping on board and joined Gil’s product community.

You’ll have to wait for the details, but we can say that it will stand out as one of the few NFT related products that are actually simple and easy to use.