The next frontier of innovation in construction

At Shepherd, we believe it’s time for insurance companies to recognize contractors for the investments they are making to be safer, more productive, and more efficient.
Justin Levine
Justin has spent his entire career at the intersection of construction, technology, and risk. After starting in industry as an Enterprise Risk Manager for Hunter Roberts Construction Group in New York City, Justin founded TradeTapp, a SaaS platform for commercial General Contractors. The company was acquired twice, first by BuildingConnected, then Autodesk.
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Mohamed El Mahallawy
Mo was an engineer and team lead at Airbnb the last 4 years. He was the first engineer on the Airbnb Luxe team post-acquisition, and then later helped create Airbnb Omni - an internal marketing platform which powers all of Airbnb’s external marketing campaigns (including more than 2 billion emails per year).
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Steve Buonpane
Steve has 17 years of underwriting experience in construction casualty. Prior to joining Shepherd in 2021, he spent 12 years at Chubb and since 2015 led the Construction Casualty underwriting operations for its Major Accounts division. Steve was most recently Chubb’s North American Construction Industry Practice Leader, a $650M operation.
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Iris Jiang
Meet Iris, a software engineer with a passion for learning and pushing herself to new heights. After serving as a product team lead at Qualia, she took the leap to expand her skills by enrolling in Hackreactor, a rigorous coding bootcamp. Through her hard work and determination, she graduated from the program and joined Shepherd as a software engineer. Iris is excited to continue growing her skills and contributing to the success of the team at Shepherd.
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Avi Banerjee
Avi has 4 years of product engineering experience helping take early-stage startups from zero to one. He loves the challenge of harnessing data to transform the world's most complex B2B and B2B2C industries. Before joining Shepherd, Avi lived in Lake Tahoe, helping to build and scale Ridgeline's Data Platform and Reporting teams.
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John Watts
John has close to 8 years of construction underwriting experience, spending 5 years writing primary casualty lines between Zurich and Chubb where he focused on writing large loss sensitive construction practice programs and projects. Before joining Shepherd, John was most recently with AXA XL, where he was a Senior Underwriter in their Subcontractor Default Insurance practice, providing performance risk coverage for the nation’s largest general contractors.
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Sasha Wiegand
Sasha has over 15 years of actuarial experience and was most recently a Senior Consulting Actuary for Oliver Wyman, specializing in property-casualty lines. Prior to joining Oliver Wyman in 2016, Sasha was a Consulting Actuary at Ernst & Young for 6 years, and she began her actuarial career at Progressive Insurance Company, focusing on pricing and loss reserving. Sasha is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries
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Costas Hadjipateras
Costas has 11 years of underwriting and management experience in the casualty space. Costas started his career with Chubb's primary Construction Group in Los Angeles, and eventually managing the Foreign Casualty unit for Chubb's Pacific Region. Before joining Shepherd he was most recently with the Hartford, where we has an Executive Underwriter in their Northern California Middle Market Division.
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Maureen MacIsaac
Maureen’s career has spanned fintech, economics and traditional finance. Most recently she was a senior product manager at Nova Credit, a Series B fintech serving immigrants worldwide. Prior to working in tech, Maureen was an economist at the Canadian central bank where she built macroeconometric forecasting models and researched machine learning methods. She started her career in credit risk analytics at Barclays in London, UK.
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Chris Bolick
Chris has close to a decade of experience underwriting casualty in both the USA and Asia markets. He started his career with Chubb’s Global Casualty group in Los Angeles before doing stints in both Thailand and Hong Kong in Chubb’s APAC Major Accounts Casualty group. Before joining Shepherd he was most recently the Deputy Head of Major Accounts P&C for Chubb Hong Kong.
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Laura Watts
With over 10+ years working for tech start-ups in San Francisco, Laura has focused her career on a variety of Customer Experience roles - leading and building teams in support, operations, and account management. Most recently, she was a Manager of Customer Success at Autodesk for 3 years - where her team focused on the implementation and adoption of Autodesk tools for enterprise general contractors and trade contractors. With this experience, she has joined Shepherd to help develop and execute a high-touch and engaging customer experience for Shepherd customers. Her background and perspective working in construction tech will also play a crucial role in expanding Shepherd’s Casualty Pro program.
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Danil Kolesnikov
Danil was a software engineer at Fanatics where he worked on building data pipelines for an internal platform that gave insights into user behavior. Prior to that, he co-founded a startup focused on enabling data science teams to share their technical knowledge.
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Lindsay Plotkin
Lindsay has close to 10 years of underwriting experience, primarily in construction and complex, liability-driven programs. She spent the first 7 years of her career at two large P&C companies prior to accepting a job with Shepherd at the start of 2021. Lindsay sits in Los Angeles.
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Tully Evangelis
Tully has nearly 20 years of claims experience working for several international insurance carriers before transitioning to Risk Management for two large general contractors. Before joining Shepherd, he was the Regional Risk Manager for Shawmut Design & Construction.
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Sam Sheridan
Sam was a software engineer at Ridgeline, where he built financial reporting software for enterprise asset managers. Before that, he went to UC Santa Barbara, where he double majored in Applied Mathematics and Statistics & Data Science.
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Hudson
Hudson
Head of Barketing
Hudson brings over 8+ years of barking to Shepherd. He is results-driven, especially when it comes to making dog friends and getting treats. He has extensive experience in chasing squirrels and is excited to bring this resilience and commitment to help the Shepherd team grow.
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