I love the startup ecosystem, and I’m proud to be part of it. But there are definitely a few parts of it that I resent. When I founded Oribi, it was important for me to not only identify those parts, but also, more importantly, to figure out what I was going to do about it.

The first thing I decided to change is the superficial and “cheap” ways in which companies buy their employees: pizza, beer, a stocked refrigerator, ice cream, fancy parties, massages. I feel that all of that is a legacy companies carry from 15 years ago, without really knowing why.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve interviewed over 300 candidates for different positions. Developers, marketers, designers, product managers. I’ve heard from 300 different people on why they decided to move on, to take a bold step and seek out their next challenge. What I’ve found is that it’s almost always about personal and professional development. About not getting stuck.

One of my favorite things about being an entrepreneur is that every year the center of gravity of the company changes and so does my focus. So every year or so I change hats, from marketing to product, from sales to management. The last year has definitely been ‘the year of the product’. I changed lots of my current product management perspectives and finally said goodbye to some methods that should have been long gone.

Why using personas and interviewing users can lead your product to fail?

One of the main frog leaps I had in marketing was understanding that people are complex. Much more than we can predict. There’s no way we can actually place them in boxes.

Marketers love spending days (and nights) sharpening the messaging, picking the right words to tell the story of the product. The basic assumption is that people want a product which will help them to do X. The reality is that people act from much deeper motives – and it’s usually not just what they need.

In marketing, you don’t really have to understand what makes people tick. There are A/B tests and the ability to run multiple experiments, even with limited resources.  

One of the most significant decisions in developing a company’s culture relates to the division of office space. Office planning is an issue I’m passionate about. One of the reasons is probably my background as an architect, but the main reason I find it so important is that I’ve seen the huge difference it makes and how a different space generates a different culture.

Open space, division into offices, team-based division, mixed offices, a small or a big kitchen – each one of these decisions will probably affect the way the company functions.

The myth of ‘the CEO who sits in the open space’, and what is an open meeting room

This June, Oribi completed its first investment round. I’m very excited to update you that I’ve raised $5.4 million from an investor ‘dream team’: Haim Sadger from Sequoia Capital (the world’s leading venture capital fund, with whom I’ve already had the privilege of working with once), Rona Segev from TLV Partners and Zohar Gilon. I’m extremely grateful that this great team believes in me and in our product.

Every day, a few articles are published in the press about some startup’s financing round, with all the ‘usual’ details – how much money was raised, who the investors are, what does the company do, and who’s on the team. In this post, I chose to share the events behind the scenes – the investor deck I used, why the product has changed since the last time I wrote about it, how I chose which investors to contact, why did I choose to work with several investors and how I felt during the financing round.

So, what are we developing?

A few months back, I talked about a Facebook-ads analytics oriented product. This has changed a lot since then, although in retrospect, I only went back to my roots.  Advice I often give entrepreneurs who make their first steps, is that the most important thing is simply to start, rather than wait months or years for the perfect idea or the right partner; Just start building a product, and while being ‘hand on’ you’ll learn the market much better, being able to improve (or pivot) it in the right direction. This advice was also helpful for me.

When I founded a new startup, it was clear to me that I wanted to build a B2B company, but with a simple and approachable product that will completely change the way companies work. In the past, I mentioned being inspired by companies such as Zenpayroll, Zendesk, Stripe, and Slack, which started out in highly competitive markets but managed to become market leaders by creating a simple product. The primary reason why they’ve been such a source of inspiration is that they’ve managed to make a solution accessible to the entire market, rather than only enterprise companies. I think that the current world of BI/analytics presents an amazing opportunity – think of the effort required to monitor basic data about product/website usage. There are currently dozens of successful, enterprise-oriented companies, with highly complex solutions requiring integrations and code annotations. Simpler tools, such as MixPanel or Google Analytics require ongoing support from developers to add events and develop scenarios you would like to monitor. I’ve started working on Facebook analytics, rather than general analytics, because it was important for me to build a profitable company as quickly as possible, and I felt that the combination of a real need in this field and a major budget could make the company profitable fast. We launched a beta version in early February, and quickly reached a few hundred companies who used the product, and then several thousands. By working with customers, I came to understand that I’m capable of creating a tool that would change the way people work with data. The customers gave me the confidence to chase my major dream: a real industry game-changer.

So, this is the product we’ve been developing:

Here are two important principles in managing a startup company:

• Building a high-quality product with value in the shortest time possible, in order to bring it to the market ASAP.
• Prioritizing the use of existing tools rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

These two principles seem to contradict our decision at Oribi to develop quite a few internal tools.

So why did we decide to invest in developing tools that are not an integral part of our main product?

One topic I plan to address extensively in this blog is the work-life balance. I believe that startups which part of their culture is to work into the night on a daily basis, do not necessarily progress any faster than ‘calm’ startups (on the contrary – they almost never do). I believe that a constant pressure in startups is mainly indicative of a lack of focus and suggests that working methods are not effective enough. This is one of the main issues I’ve been focusing on recently – how to work smarter and more efficient.

A choice I’ve made, which has already been proven successful, is that any project which requires less than a week to develop, and which ‘compensates’ for the time invested after two-three months, is launched.

This is a list of five tools developed in the past few weeks, which required between two days and one week (of one developer) and immediately saved hours of cumbersome manual work.   

Kob – Slack Integration with our DB

Handling many DB queries doesn’t only take too much time but is also a barrier for the non-R&D team members (product, marketing, CS) for accessing important data easily. For example, when processing questions from users or trying to understand a problem reported by a user, we had to run various queries in order to understand how many times the user has signed in to Oribi, how many accounts they have, etc. We did make a list of repeating queries, but the process of logging in to the DB and synchronizing the queries between team members was time-consuming. Another thing that had made this process so unproductive was the DB’s inaccessibility from a mobile phone, which in some cases delayed replies to users or finding bugs. Kob (all Oribi’s internal projects are named after antelope species) is a Slack channel querying the DB. The first, most basic question we set for Kob was:

Who is [user name]?

This enables us to immediately access all the information required to provide support from any device. Other planned questions relate to events on a certain day (what happened on 1.7.16), user lists according to different parameters, etc. We are ‘talking’ with Kob dozens of times each day, and it also makes life much easier for less tech-oriented team members, who can easily access the information without having to learn how to work with the DB.

Development time: two days.