Our Story

As co-founder and CEO of Side, Guy Gal (yes, that’s his real name) believes the future of real estate is local, boutique, and agent-owned. Prior to Side, he founded three other successful companies: Kingmaker, Biz, and Kognitive. A tech entrepreneur, innovator, and angel investor, Guy is an advisor to Vidyard, a YCombinator Top 100 company, and was also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix Partners.

Ed Wu, our Chief Innovation Officer, helps agents spend less time on tedious tasks and more time with their clients. He keeps us ahead of the curve by driving product development and bringing in the best vendors. Before Side, Ed co-founded Vidyard, an online video platform for businesses. He holds a B.S. in Information Systems Science from Salve Regina University and is a proud Y Combinator alum.

Real estate rebel Hilary is a co-founder of Side and serves as its Chief Broker Officer. In this role, she’s on a mission to challenge industry norms and elevate standards for the Side Community and beyond. She brings 20 years of industry experience to the table; before starting Side, she operated a boutique real estate brokerage and a law firm specializing in real estate transactions. She holds B.A. degrees in Communications, German, and Accounting from the University of San Diego, along with J.D. and LL.M. Taxation degrees from Golden Gate University.

Steve Capezza (aka Capz) has over two decades of experience in proptech and in leading large-scale business teams. In his role as President, he leads Side’s go-to-market and customer success organizations. Capz joined Side following nearly 10 years at Zillow Group, where he most recently served as SVP of Business Operations. In that role, he oversaw Zillow Premier Agent, which connects consumers searching for homes on Zillow with real estate professionals. Prior to Zillow Group’s acquisition of Trulia, he spent two years leading Trulia’s San Francisco sales and operations teams. Before Trulia, he held leadership and management positions at Z57, Inc. and GreatCall. Steve holds B.A. degrees in sociology and Chinese from Occidental College, as well as a Certificate of Sales Leadership and Behavioral Science from The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania.

Elizabeth Tse oversees all operations-focused activities at Side, launching our partners and caring for our employees. Previously, she was SVP of Operations at Upwork and COO for Samasource. Prior to that, Elizabeth was VP of Global Billing, Payments, and Collections at eBay and held senior positions at Zuora and Providian Financial (now JP Morgan Chase). Elizabeth holds an MBA from Cornell University and a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University.

Carmine “CJ” Napolitano leads financial strategy and operations at Side. He has more than 25 years of experience as a CFO, COO, GM, and CEO, and has completed over $1B in corporate financial transactions. Prior to joining Side, CJ was part of industry-leading teams at Propel, Electric Cloud, Computer Access Technologies, LeCroy, Centric Software, Wavefront Technologies, and Merrill Lynch. He earned his MBA from New York University with Distinction and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A Bay Area tech veteran, Ryan Smith brings more than 20 years of product and software engineering experience to his role leading the engineering team at Side. Prior to Side, he was VP of software engineering at LendingClub, where he helped grow their engineering team by 4x in his first two years. Ryan has also held previous engineering leadership roles at companies including Salesforce, PayPal, and Cisco. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.