Humans of Tech - Bracha Kurtzer Gross

Meet Bracha Kurtzer Gross, Artemis’ newest Executive Recruitment Associate. What struck us about Bracha is that she’s a connector at her core: someone who is endlessly curious about people’s hopes, challenges, and motivations, and obsessed with linking them to the right opportunity, resource, or relationship so they can move closer to their goals. From nonprofit and government to Fortune 100 boardrooms, she’s approached every role through the lens of “How can I help?”. She’s a textbook Enneagram 2 who refuses to see sales as transactional and instead treats every interaction as a chance to understand what someone is really trying to accomplish. As she steps into her work with Artemis, Bracha describes it as the purest version yet of what she’s meant to do: facilitating meaningful connections for founders and leaders in tech who see a problem, take a risk, and are building something real.

From AI Skeptic to All‑In Girl

When Bracha talks about what pulled her into tech, she starts with a moment of real resistance. In June 2024, at an AI conference in San Francisco, she watched a marketer proudly walk through an end‑to‑end AI content workflow: personas, content calendars, video scripts, and felt nothing but dread. The work was totally soulless. It crystallized a fear she’d been circling for a while: that if we outsource too much of our thinking, the world we see, hear, and consume will flatten into something beige and boring, and we’ll forget what it means to be fully human. She swore off AI, determined to protect her own creativity and originality from the lure of “easy.”

That conviction held, until it met a very real, very tedious spreadsheet. At the time, Bracha was running a secondhand fashion brand and had just opened a brick‑and‑mortar space designed for Jewish women aged 18 to 80, with programming across meditation, learning, and community. Mapping out an event matrix for all those audiences and rooms was taking hours. Her husband gently pushed her to try an AI tool “just once.” She loaded in her context, goals, and structure, hit enter, and in 30 seconds had a thoughtful, if imperfect, program plan. It was an earthquake. AI hadn’t replaced her creativity; it had amplified it, stripping away the busywork so she could focus on the ideas, nuance, and human experience only she could bring.

That experience flipped a switch. Bracha didn’t just warm up to AI, she ran toward it. With a background in political science and a deep love of philosophy, she started asking bigger questions: if “I think, therefore I am” has defined so much of Western identity, what does it mean when machines can “think” alongside us? What uniquely human beauty are we still bringing to the table? (How smart is she?!). Today, she calls herself an “all‑in girlie” on AI and lights up in rooms like Leaders & Lattes or Toronto Tech Week, where founders and operators trade candid notes: what they’ve tried, what broke, what’s actually working, in real time. It reminds her of those early COVID remote‑work days when kids wandering into Zoom calls cracked open a new empathy for people’s full lives. In a similar way, this AI wave feels like a global reset and leveling of the playing field: there’s no cohort with a decade‑long head start, just a world of people experimenting at once. For someone with roots in art, art history, and culture, that’s the most exciting shift of all, watching AI unlock creativity for everyone.

Learning to Let Go

When Bracha talks about who she is today, she starts with a year that transformed her in ways she never could have imagined. In the span of a few months, she was hospitalized four times and nearly died twice, watched the company she worked for wind down in slow motion, and had to close the brick‑and‑mortar business she’d poured her savings and energy into. It was a season of endings across facets of her life. For someone whose default mode had always been “I’ve got this, I’ll just push harder,” it felt like being cosmically put in a time‑out. She was stuck in a hospital bed with no way to fix anything, just forced stillness.

In that stillness, something in her shifted. A brother‑in‑law gently asked if the universe might be telling her to accept help. Her Jewish practice deepened, and with it, a realization: the idea that she had ever been in control was an illusion. Surviving at all felt like grace, not grit. In Jewish thought, she explains, there’s a constant balance between Bitachon, total reliance on God, and Hishtadlut, taking personal responsibility for your effort. You show up, do the work, and also accept that the ripple effects are far beyond what any of us can see or manage. Losing her business, her health, and the future she’d imagined forced her to live that tension in every physical, emotional, and financial way.

That experience now sits at the core of how she shows up at Artemis. In a role where you can do everything “right”, shake the trees, run a great process, line up all the steps, and still have things not land, she’s no longer afraid of what she can’t control. The only guarantee she believes in is the energy she brings to the table: her preparedness, her care, her values. A commission‑based role that once would have felt too uncertain now feels aligned with a deeper truth that if an opportunity is meant for her, it will come; if it doesn’t, it wasn’t hers. That perspective has softened her Type A edges at work and at home. She describes it as becoming a former version of herself: less clenched, more grounded, and far more focused on what she can actually own, showing up fully, doing the work in front of her, and trusting the rest.

Belonging as Your Whole Self

Ask Bracha about belonging at work and she’ll tell you she’s often felt “mostly in, but not fully.” In past roles, even with leaders who genuinely tried to make her feel included, there were always parts of her she kept a little tucked away: her Jewish practice, her identity as a mom, the depth of her community involvement, the full range of what she cares about. At Artemis, that changed. After her very first conversation with Erin, she hung up the call, ran up the stairs, and announced, “I just met the best person ever.” The stakes had felt low enough that she showed up as her realist self: this is who I am, this is who I’m not, and instead of needing to edit, she felt seen.

From there, she made herself a promise: she would be the most “her” version of herself throughout the process, and if that pushed anyone away, they simply weren’t her people. The opposite happened. What she’s felt from the team is genuine curiosity, care, and reciprocal identity‑sharing. Colleagues who want to know her as a recruiter, yes, but also as a religious Jewish woman, a mother, a community builder. Coming out of such a profound period of loss and recalibration, she says she simply doesn’t have it in her to be anything but fully herself anymore. Life is too short, and too fragile, to spend it masking. For Bracha, real belonging looks like a place where you can be celebrated in your fullness, and turn around and celebrate everyone else’s fullness too. That, she says, is exactly what she’s found at Artemis.

Dreaming of Teleportation (and Togetherness)

For all her excitement about AI, Bracha’s real moonshot piece of tech is simple: teleportation. With family across the world, her life is stretched across time zones. Her number‑one value is family, and the thing she looks forward to most is being in the same room as the people she loves. She imagines a world where popping over for Shabbat dinner or a visit with her siblings doesn’t require flight alerts and vacation days, just a quick jump. For someone who spends her days connecting founders and leaders to the right opportunities, the idea of erasing distance for the sake of connection feels like the ultimate upgrade.

In the meantime, she’s building the kind of future she can reach from here: helping founders and teams who care about people as much as product, and who want to use technology to create more room for the very human things that matter most: creativity, purpose, and time with the people you love. Whether she’s talking about AI, leadership, or belonging at work, Bracha keeps returning to the same through‑line: tools are only as powerful as the humanity behind them. At Artemis, she feels like she’s finally in the right room, on the right wavelength, doing the work she was meant to do, and we’re so happy she’s here.