Eran Hammer is an accomplished technology executive with over three decades’ experience developing and delivering cutting-edge products and solutions. Eran’s career crisscrossed between being a serial entrepreneur and working for some of the largest companies in the world in the fields of finance, retail, media, and business consulting as well as non-profits and politics.From the early days of the web, Eran was fascinated by the power of technology to enhance and create new avenues for storytelling, and in 1994 Eran founded “A Different Stage”, the first digital-only publishing house for short stories. Throughout his career, Eran was actively involved in developing some of the core protocols powering the web which are used ubiquitously today.In 2015, after leading large engineering teams at Citi, Yahoo, Walmart, and others, Eran decided to go back to his film school roots and co-founded Sideway with his husband Michael to explore the intersection of software and stories. Sideway explored different experimental ideas and in 2020 developed “Hartley” – an entirely simulated social network app in which a mixed-media story unfolds through the fictional scripted world of a social media app. Sideway is currently working on its next production.