Think about dating.

You really want to date this amazing lady, but truth be told she is has a better smile, she is taller, maybe even smarter than your average date. To get her, you need perception. She needs to think there is something she doesn’t know yet in you but is worth experimenting. Perception

Think about hiring.

You are yet to be Google, but you want Googlers to work for you. You can pay them double what they are making, you can give them 1/20 of your company, you can ask them really nicely to join you if you have the charisma. Maybe they will. Alternatively, you can use perception. You can help them see that it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to take a risk, maybe it’s them or someone else who is going to take the job, maybe someone they know and admire, and if he is considering maybe they should to. Perception

Think about raising money.

Jim Breyer tells Erick Schonfeld that he sees 10k media companies, but invest in 10. 0.1% is a rather depressing figure. Whether you believe Jim or not, to stand out, to make ‘a Jim’ think you’re a company he wants to put a buck in, your strategy cannot be go in and pitch a deck. He needs to look forward to meeting you, he needs to have multiple touch points with your company, with you, he needs you to create it for him, he is practically asking you to do it. To create Perception. Maybe others are already interested, maybe you’re the next Sergey, maybe you’re a moment from getting a client that will prevent him from being able to invest. Make the 0.1% cut. Perception.

Think about selling your company.

A good friend of mine sold his company for over $100M. In the process of selling the company, there was an offer on the table. The CEO had to travel (let’s call him the traveling-CEO), and just before he left ground the potential buyer sent an email asking to meet. The traveling-CEO left ground, never got to see the email, and unfortunately, the flight could not land and they circled above the airport for long hours. The buying company got stressed thinking there is a change of heart, and emailed again, essentially negotiating with themselves– “we’ll pay more. Meet us”. The travling-CEO landed. Sold and for more. Perception.

Think about competition.

Your competitors might strategize against you, try to block you out of the market. This is assuming you have a good competitor that actually has a strategy.  Trying different things is expensive though, especially as “changing strategies” is expensive. What if you could lead your competitor to think you’re about to do something, something they think they can expect you to do, but instead of making a left turn, you’re making a right turn while they invested so much resources to wait for you after the left corner. Void. Moot. Nada. Nobody is coming. Money lost, energy spent, strategize all over again. A board member at Taboola, Zvi Limon, who was senior in the consultancy industry, explains to me that it’s cheaper and faster to drive a slow car straight from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem than driving a super car from Tel Aviv to Eilat, make a round, and go to Jerusalem.

Perception.

Don’t sell out to the obvious path. It’s usually expensive, timely and risky. Stop to think. Take your time. Run different scenarios. It’s phenomenal what you can gain by actually not doing anything and think. Circle around the airport, you might sell your company for more money, get the date, raise good money and win competition.

Perception.

She is laughing at how a little boy that came from a family from Dimona (south of Israel) loved to negotiate, numbers and to socialize.

So stories tell … that

When I was 6 my parents brought me a Piano teacher so there is a chance I’ll be something when I grow up. After 2 lessons, I was so painfully suffering, I realized the only way to get out of it was to break my hand. So I did.

I was babysitting my little brother when I was 7 for money. Otherwise, no deal.

I was tutoring my own math teacher’s daughter for money. Otherwise, no deal.

When I was 10, I negotiated a deal with my mother where to educate me on how to appreciate their money – every time I wanted something we would split it 50/50. My parents were to put 50% of whatever it is I desired, and I would put the other 50%. On paper, as I was also involved, I could not have asked for things I didn’t really wanted, and if I did, my folks could act as a good VC  to support it (50% on my CAP Table !).

My grandmother, who is an amazing woman, at the age of 12 realized that it didn’t make sense to keep asking me “what did I want” for my birthday as I wanted things that were just out of range. Telescope, a computer, and computer games. Granted, I was a serious geek, but an expensive one.

Later I was fortunate to have met amazing people from all different realms that I learned a lot from, and in a very (very) diversified fashion.

From my first neighbor Lee Geva who became my first real friend since I was 5 or so (who also introduced me later on to my very first crush Adva Ofir, she was the only girl with boobs at the time; I must have been 11 : – )), to the top night-life-business guy in Tel-Aviv Nisan Larido who I figured was the most charismatic person I’ve met who’ve also mastered making people around him feel good about themselves for who they are. Something I didn’t see again up until today ..to top basketball player Ido Shay who we played together in a team for 6 years, and also taught me about eating Humus…to people that showed me why loving life is what it is all about Nir Porat…. to Ofir Perets who become my 2^nd brother over Officers Academy where I was able to get him out of the field and do some paper work in the AC (so he liked me), To Monis and Yoav who we started our first ‘venture’ together 24Go.com, something about text messages. It wasn’t live more than a few moments but we enjoyed it … to the guy who got me in a business meeting and had me speak in English for the first time Shay Goldberg.. to Ruthy Goldberg who aside from being such a great friend starting the army years, and the smartest lady I knew, was also in charge of me becoming remotely close to graduating Math and Computer Science under-grade … to Romeo my loved dog for 15 years, to Pilberg (AKA 800) who introduced me to inhuman brain and what it can really do (he is the first guy to use 90% of his brain versus the rest of us)… to Danny Tocatly who gave me the biggest opportunity of all – to do Taboola when I was 26, and is what entrepreneurs refer to as “angel” (he also introduced me to Epicure 2, before that I smoked $2 cigars)… To Lior Golan, the guy who sold a company for 145 million dollars, rested for a year, met me for burger in Tel-Aviv, had me pay of course, and then decided to take a gamble on me and join as Taboola CTO… the guy can’t hold his liquor unfortunately but he is a great guy… To Itzik Ben Bassat who was my first blind-date in NY when I moved in through an intro from Mr. Resnick, a good Sequoia VC friend. Itzik showed me you can actually do work 15 hours a day, have a life, be a family person, and enjoy the city…to Victoria Monsul who I’ve met in a very odd way, but became the lady I love waking up next to every day here in NY in our west village apartment. She is amazing.

I’m sure I’m missing wonderful people, but it was nice to go down the memory lane for a second after 30 years.

So after 30 people what do I think I know?

Aside from me being rather obnoxious as a kid dealing with how to earn a penny —  It’s all about the people you spend your time with that really matters in my humble 30 years experience opinion.

From the people you call friends, your family, to the lady you share your day with, to the people you’re building the biggest recommendation engine on the planet who I call Taboolars. People make it different. At least for me.

Thanks for the birthday wishes guys.

In Israel, I’m already 30, here in NY we’re 7 hours away.

Oh god it’s true, I’m 30.

I personally start every day at 6am, I’m at the office at 7:30am, and I later open my West Village apartment doors around 8:30pm to check emails on the sofa with a nice cigar. If I had to guess I would say that I’m not even coming close in terms of hours-per-day compared to bankers working in my building. 15-17 hours a day is not a big deal if you’re a NYker, and if you work less than that you must be either already very wealthy or very poor.

There is one thing that you have to be able to do.

Manage your time.

Who gets your phone time, who gets your face time, will you go to the gym (I don’t), will you meet your spouse for dinner, who cooks it?, family, friends, dog, and the list goes on. You just don’t have time.

Saying that, there is another big thing that represents NY city. Collaboration at the highest level. While people are extremely busy, people help each other, make introductions, invest their time, their money if they have it, share their mistakes, meetups, wix lounges, you name it. Mind you, this is on top of everybody’s utter busy day (again, if they are not very wealthy or very poor).

I was fortunate to spend some time with Adam Rothenberg, and David Tisch, founders of TechStars thanks to an intro by a good friend here in the city Amit Avner (founder/ceo at Taykey.com). If you didn’t hear of Techstars and the lineup of great companies working there you must be living in a box in the past year. Adam and David introduced me to a few companies, all were extremely great, big passion and dedication that just charges you up. Kudos to all Techstars companies.

It started when I showed the list of companies to my girlfriend, as we all know who wears the pants in this house — and I asked her – “so what do you think”. She pointed at this one company saying – “wow, seems really cool. And I like their logo a lot”.

And then came Contently.com.

Monday 1:05pm, I set down with founder Joe Coleman. He gave me his pitch, very direct, confident, detailed, and passionate. In a line – Contently is changing the way premium content gets written by top notch writers — and — distributed back into websites blogs, and sites. Think GettyImages for top content but better.

I won’t say more at this point, and you can check their site for whatever the folks at Contently are willing to say at this point. However, I will say that Joe doesn’t make the impression he and his team need a lot of help to get this company to rock, definitely not my help. However, I was fortunate to be invited by Joe to be their TechStars mentor. Joe, thanks.

I know nothing about writing, but I know a lot about distribution and sponsoring of content (cc @taboola) we do that more than quarter billion times a day around the web. I hope I can help and bring some of my humble experience into the company and the founders, and at the end of the day as Miygal told Daniel (Karate Kid, 1984) – “No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher. Teacher say, student do”.

Good luck Contently in the upcoming DEMO day, I will do everything I can on my little end to help you rock

TeeMeW got @victoriamonsul and I there. We actually disagreed, and here is the story.

It started when we talked about cheekd.com (founder Lori Cheekd is even a neighbor of ours in NY), a service that helps you reach out to someone you don’t know and hand them a card with a pre-generated random number so they can reach out to you afterwards online. Nice, and Lori got covered on the NYTimes and other cool publications for her venture.

TeeMew can do that, but potentially even better.

No need to physically ‘reach out’ and hand anything to anyone.

I could be sitting on a subway, on a bus, in a conference, in a bar, or just walking the streets, and get a nice indication of who is around me, what they are doing in life, and if it makes sense for us to connect. Socially or professionally.

Granted, I’m not sure how it would work in the sense that I think everybody around me would need to have the app installed, so that would be an interesting challenge to cross for the founders at TeeMeW, but aside from that – very cool.

Reaching out to strangers can be awkward, and TeeMeW just might be the eHarmony of offline.

Good luck to the folks at TeeMeW, and good luck crossing those barriers having people installing the app, and TeeMeW-alizing with each other.

Their video has the coolness of Angry birds kind of thing, so here goes. Enjoy, and feel free to comment below if you’ve used anyone of these services.

I don’t fully disagree with what Fred and Chris have to say about maintaining relationship with VCs overtime so that when the time is right there is a already a certain level of comfort and trust to start working together.

However, I’m partially disagreeing and I think it is a risk, at least to some entrepreneurs. This is why “catching up” with VCs is risky.

If entrepreneurs were to be encouraged to meet VCs all the time, by nature, some information had to be transferred. A good VC will actually focus on listening, and an even better VC will know if what they hear makes sense, and how it evolves over time, getting an idea of the founder capability to execute, build, succeed, etc.

Example:

– You started a company in Jan, and you are building a team and let’s say you’re funded (no need for more).

– You met a VC in Feb to “catch up”. And you chose to say that you are building a team these days, and you are targeting to hire 3 people. On paper, harmless piece of info, you didn’t even discuss what is the product about.

– In May you met again to catch up, and let’s say you hired one person. Why? For all the reasons things not always go as you want. VC asks – “so how is the recruiting going”. You have to say something, and explains what happened.

This information doesn’t have to be “make or break”, and I’m not suggesting that this VC will not work with you because you might have a problem recruiting. If that is the only reason, maybe this is not a VC you want to work with in anycase.

It’s just that it is an unnecessary piece of information that if you’ve met the VC when you actually wanted to meet, let’s say 7 months before money is out, you might be more ready, controlling the information going out.

Casual talks don’t really exist (one of you is not taking it casually), and any piece of information that was transferred unintentionally is a piece in the puzzle. That puzzle is your company, and it is your image.

Not everything needs to be said, and unless you will meet a VC and will be silent, everything you say >= 0 (0 would be not to take the meeting if you don’t need it). I don’t suggest you ever lie, as trust is key but controlling information is important.

I think that Fred is very right that whenever you start meeting VCs, make sure there is enough time for both of you to get to know each other. But ‘continuous’ sounds to me like it should happen in a continuous way with no specific reason. That’s risky.

Now, when things are exploding, or if you are super hyped to begin with – none of this matters.

My recommendation is build in iteration, and do what is needed in your mind. If it is not needed, don’t do it.

When a girl in a bar tells you – “you look really cute”, you thank her, you feel nice about yourself, and when you go home there is no reason to tell your wife in a casual way that a sexy girl gave you a compliment. Your wife knows you look good, and reminding her that using a 3^rd party reference is redundant, not needed and can only make you feel good. Not her (someone is always not taking these casual talks casually)

When you build a company or scheduling your day, every meeting, every call, every hire, every statement needs to be logical and with some goal.

If you’re not sure – don’t do it.

We started with high-level updates / questions that happen in meetings of that nature.

How much time is your business being around, how many employees, how is the revenue, how much money did you raise so far, what’s next, etc.

You know – the usual CEO conversations.

Aside from the fact that this guy is young, running an amazing company, and has this humble tone that is a major asset when you’re in the midst of all this CEO-ing, he then said something that seriously caught my attention.

He explained to me why in this crazy life that he is living, with so much uncertainty, the main reason he could start this business, and then keep his sanity his not his investors, not his co-founders, not his top employees, not his friends, not his advisory-board, not his mother or father, not his siblings, not online-material, not lectures, not his professor from school.

His wife.

“My wife is more important than my top investors” he says.

He tells me that much like soccer players, the president, or any leader of anything – if you don’t have an intense support system at home you’re toasted. Why?  Because when you’re drained, pitching to investors, selling to customers, twitting to marketers, recruiting executives, helping to solve bottle-necks, product-ing – and then going home, you better see a big, fat, nice, supportive, happy, honest — smile. That’s it.

A smile, suggesting “everything is just alright”.

He then added – if you’re not with a supportive girlfriend or wife, your likelyhood to succeed as an enterpernuer is slimmer.

I asked him if I can blog about it, and he said “yes”. So here it is !

I though I’ll share my humble opinion.

Assumption #1: most people can excel

Going back a few steps, I don’t really believe in “stupid people” and I don’t really believe in people not being capable to succeed. On paper, I actually think most people can do really well, and very small amount of people can do remarkably well. In reality, the majority are doing ok and less.

The reason is because unfortunately I don’t think most companies set a high standard of what it takes to be ‘a star’, and most people don’t spend enough time thinking how to stand out. Taking both of those into consideration, most people can take advantage of that – and by definition excel.

It’s very similar to students that chose the courses where they know they can be #1 in the class and graduate Cum Laude. They are not really better on an absolute scale, but they are better at organizing how to shuffle things to make it look like it.

On paper – they are ‘geniuses’. They will be the ones with a good resume, the ones that can get an MBA (whatever that might mean), the ones that will get a meeting, and the ones that will potentially get a better starting point. However, they are not better than you; they just excel within the environment they reside.

Assumption #2: extreme acts drive extreme results (which we all need)

I believe in extreme things to achieve extreme results. I’m going to write up some tips:

1. Be busy. Whatever you do, you should be up and out around 8am, and be home not before 9/10pm. Whatever you do – you have no time, you’re out early, and you’re back late. You are busy. Now it’s a matter of how to fill your time. To the extreme, at first — do nothing, but do it out and do not be available.

2. For a few years, give up your social life. Remember that when you’re successful most people will “forgive you”, ladies will follow you, and guy-friends would love to hear your stories of how it was. This is really important. Your time is where your funnel begins, and you want to start by making it really available to fill with things that can break that glass ceiling you might be facing. Comparing this to online-websites, optimizing the homepage and increasing homepage CTRs can be really successful as usually 50% of the traffic starts there. So increasing 1% to 2% might increase your site traffic meaningfully even though it’s just one percent. If you have to meet people, do it really late, have people realize that while you really want to meet them, you can’t but you’re willing to make an effort around 11:30pm for a quick 45min while you are really tired. Why? Trust me.

3. Be provocative. Most people are very safe, hence don’t move the needle. We’re aiming at cracking the ice here so you can’t be always safe. Say what you think, write a blog about it, socialize about your provocative thoughts, and speak about them. It’s ok, assuming you are not 100% wrong, it’s better be remembered and get 2^nd meeting than get a  “who are you again”.

Examples:

• 2Pac was young, early in the game in his music and told Biggie what he thought of his wife. It got him on national TV and made him mainstream.
• Dennis Rodman was a good basketball player; honestly he wasn’t the best, but he was rumored to have relationship with Madonna and when he guarded Shaq he always poked him which drove Shaq insane and got everybody hyped about Rodman.
• I was with Ran Harnevo, good friend of mine, on a panel last week at Bloomberg. Everybody were really smart but Ran was the one asking the audience if Hulu is not really a failure as he compared the cost of producing their content versus their half a billion in revenue. It cost much more to product so how good of a business is it really. True, or not – it’s the main question I remember from the panel.

4. When you’re having fun, have a lot of it. Every once in a while, you’ll do something you find fun. It might be drinking a glass of wine with your girlfriend, or catching up with your family, listen to a nice song on Pandora or even walking your dog. Whatever you do that in your world is considered fun, really enjoy it, stretch it, bring the volume up, dance to that song, be extreme, love it, love those moments. They will act as your battery for a longer term.

This is part1. Enjoy.

I was a loyal client of RIM for many years, I was loving every minute of it. The keypad, the two thumbs clicking, the sound, I even liked the “old school” screen and feel. It felt like the Bloomberg terminal, not pretentious and really cutting to the chase, providing you the value you needed. And I’m a very needy customer when it comes to my mobile device. I want it fast and stable.

Well, that’s at least what I thought I had wanted. In reality, I started to want more.

Like a married man who didn’t get a good hug from his wife in a while, I started for the first time in my life “noticing my surroundings”: larger screens, faster hardware, application marketplace and more. I started to be confused. What is it that I really need as a mobile consumer.

At that time of confusion, I still had many berry-friends, and there was another one big hook RIM was able to create which actually always surprised me. BBM (Blackberry Messenger). I never understood how could products like Skype, GTalk never made my BBM redundant, but they never did. BBM was dead simple and working amazingly well. I loved it, I talked to people around the world using BBM, sending them pictures, getting notifications when they type, I could see if they had received my messages, I loved it. I’m afraid to say that while I had serious intentions to leave Blackberry 1.5 years ago, the BBM kept me in for another year at least. A true “barrier to entry” (or maybe barrier to exit)

One day, I was going to jersey, and I had an hour to kill to catch the train. I saw a Verizon store, I walked in, and I told the sales guy – “My good man, show me the best Android you have in your possession”. Making spontaneous, irrational decision, I purchased the Motorola Droid Pro (a blend between Blackberry and Iphone).

Amazing. So Amazing. Wow. Exciting. Refreshing. Fast. Big. Connected. Stable. It was me, it was the new me. I became an Android user and enthusiast, and it became hard to convince me otherwise or look aside anymore.

Been cheerful and all, one thing I really missed was… well BBM. I really wanted to bbm my friends, and my family and I couldn’t. Why? Because RIM held their BBM walled gardened, not opening it up for non Blackberry users. On paper – smart, that’s their “barrier”.

In real life, if you ever started a company, raised money, and pitched an idea to anyone you know one thing will never-ever change. Void never remains. If there is a real need, someone will fill it in.

It could be that many tried to fill that void, but I happen to installed WhatsApp and I think it’s simple and brilliant. What they did that Skype/GTalk didn’t do is made it so simple/stupid that it actually worked. Instead of WhatsApp pretending they give a shit and tried to create a ‘WhatsApp community’ they just automatically synchronized with your real-life contact list cellular numbers. If “Vicus” is a friend of mine, and she is on my address book, I obviously have her cell number saved. Your account ID with WhatsApp is your real phone number. By doing that, if Viscus and I both have the WhatsApp we’ll automatically see each other on the WhatsApp contact list. No need to add people, no need to “create a community” (yada, yada). Finally, SMART move. Honestly, there is too much social BS going on, so I was encouraged to see this.

WhatsApp offers all the features you know from BBM, and instantly they became the global, multi platform – new – “BBM”.

Who is the loser? RIM. It was their invention and idea, and their amazing implementation, only in this case someone else is going to take the glory.

We’ve all seen it too many times. If RIM is smart, they will change their ways, become “open-er”, and buy WhatsApp before someone else does (Nokie, Android, Skype…). Rim is best positioned to make the move, however somehow I don’t think they will. There is a serious change of heart to be done there to do it, and I’m afraid WhatsApp will be someone else’s win.

Before doing this, I spent many years in the Israeli army, 7 years to be specific. That’s a long time. That’s where I originally met many Taboolars, and probably some of the smartest people I’ve met in my life. For instance, Alon Pilberg who is a member of our algorithm team, got perfect SAT score w/o ever studying, and finished his undergrad in computer science and mathematics in 2 years when he was 20. I personally saw once a professor trying to challenge him, and when Alon responded, that professor never talked to him ever again. I won’t be surprised if he quit his job. You don’t want to challenge Alon thinking you know what you’re talking about and he doesn’t. You just don’t do that.

From the above, you can understand that in tandem me being in the army I was studying computer science and mathematics. However, I never finished. I have 6 courses to the finish line. On paper, I’m stupid.

Yes, I had some little moments of on-paper-pride, for instance – last year I was chosen to be one of the younger promising business guys in Israel, or even cooler, a TV station I won’t mention their channel-number offered me last week to shoot a few episodes on me, being a desired bachelor (First, I’m taken, and honestly rating would be poor so I saved them from failure). I’m also proud Evergreen VC invested in us more than $10M in the past 3.5 years.  And personally, I’m also proud to be a columnist for some leading media publications such as my column on MediaPost.

So on-paper, I had little moment of feeling cool. However, my mom … oh my mom – she could never go to a barber shop, get a haircut and tell the lady-friends, Shoshana ,Rebecca and Dalya (made up names) that — she ever saw me graduate from a university. I just never did.

Punch paragraph comes now.

I just got invited & scheduled to speak at MIT Sloan School for this year graduates. Now how cool is that. First, it’s one of the most sexy institutions in the whole world. Second, I’ll be speaking to an audience of people that are smarter than me. This is btw my hiring methodology, I’ve never hired a person that I didn’t think is much better than I am at least in one major thing.  Ideally in more than just one thing. So this is very cool.

My mom may be in NY when it happens and join me. I can see this happen, “hi all, first I’m excited as it’s the closest I’ve ever step foot in a university. Second, it’s my mom’s first time seeing me in one … “

Doing things on paper is good. However, actually living is better (and will make your mom proud).