Facebook won the social fight, and as of last week, firing on all cylinders, Facebook announced going after Google’s display advertising business.  Got to admire these guys, there is not a quarter that passes that they don’t announce something new, a new product, a new initiative, a new territory. Some of these announcements are exciting across the board to everybody, and some are exciting mainly to Facebook, but that’s fair – it’s business.

When Facebook bought Oculus for $2B it was because Mark saw the future, and it was virtual (e.g. investing in the future growth). But when Mark bought Instagram for $1B it wasn’t only to grow Facebook – but it was to make sure Facebook image business won’t die because of Instagram exploding growth (e.g downside protection).

Between Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook organic growth – Facebook won social.

But did they?

Introducing Snapchat

In April 2011, Evan Spiegel came up with Snapchat for the first time at Stanford, at first called Picaboo (you know, when you see something and it’s gone), to then 2 months after relaunch as Snapchat.

I must admit, it took me a LONG LONG time to get into Snapchat. And if you’re reading this, and you’re over 30, I know you feel the same. You’re either not using it, or thinking about all those times you tried it but it felt “too much is going on, swipe up, swipe sideways, colors, things come up.. help!” (right? admit it..).

Well, few weeks into Snapchat, I can tell you I was wrong – and you’re probably wrong too. Snapchat is not only an unbelievable platform, but I think that while Instagram was risking Facebook image business, Snapchat risk Facebook’s very core business of what Facebook is – communication between people. While younger audiences (under 20) don’t love Facebook because their parents are there, and use Snapchat mainly, I argue that overtime – most adult audiences will convert as well to Snapchat.

Facebook and Instagram encourage people to share – “who they want to be”, beautiful pictures, taken at the best moments.. it’s all perfect. Try to think of any friend of yours sharing an authentic post, like just normal, not perfect self on Facebook or Instagram. Won’t be easy for you to find. Heck, there are even amazing startups such as TalkSpace that were born to help our (social) generation to be just a little bit mentally healthier by allowing people to join a social platform that enables them to be themselves; due to this perfect-image we keep seeing all the time.

Trust me – the world isn’t perfect, even if it “looks” like one.

Snapchat is exactly the opposite of all of this, and 15 year old kids figured it out before us oldies did. Snapchat is not about who you want to be – but rather who you really are, constant flow of authentic, mostly video driven, content is uploaded to Snapchat on a daily basis to something called “my story”, a 24 hours window where your stories are lingering for people to consume, but then they are gone. Because they are gone after 24 hours, and it’s mainly video of yourself (versus text/image), people feel MUCH MORE liberated to share things about themselves, sharing their lives, talking about things, asking questions, knowing in 24 hours it won’t stay, so no need to “make it perfect”, it can just be “real”.

Would you ever upload a video to Facebook where you talk for 30 seconds about your day today? NEVER (what would people say about it??).

Would you ever upload a video of you saying something a bit silly, because you’re feeling silly? NEVER (what if your employer sees it in a week or a month)

Would you do these things on Snapchat, every day.

Google lost buying Facebook when it was small, then Instagram, then WhatsApp, Twitter went public… but there is one real winner out there. If they would agree to ever sell. Google worth $500B+, and let’s say they offered Snapchat 10% of Google, would it worth it? would Snapchat do it? Well if Snapchat will be the next Facebook, and Facebook market cap is $300B+, then it would be a pretty good deal. I would also guess that the day Google made the purchase, their value would go north of $50B as investors are “really into” Google getting into social. Then Google would the largest in search, maps, video, mail, ….. and social.

Gotta love Snapchat – “Not who you want to be, but rather who you really are”.

Two months ago, my dad and I were fortunate to be invited to speak at TEDx. We started working with executive producer, Osher Assouline, on the talk where the topic was The Hero’s Journey. I began our talk with a comparison between the journey of technology to that of music, and there we would transition the talk into our musical debut together on stage, performing a (re)arrangement of songs, that would tell the Hero’s Journey through 3 different heros.

We were lined up to go last. It was a Friday, my dad landed at noon, arrived at my apartment around 2pm, we met 2 great journalists from Israeli-Channel 2 (see article in hebrew) and at 5pm we were live rocking & rolling at TEDx Lower East Side.

I’ve embedded the video, and the script of the talk if you’d like to read/watch. Hope you enjoy.

My dad. Me. TEDx. 12 minutes.

Talk script – The Hero’s Journey 

Really excited to be here today

I just picked up my dad from the airport.

But before I tell you about my dad and I and the reason we’re here, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the reason why all-of-us are here.

We all share a sense of curiosity, an appreciation for ideas worth spreading. That’s what TED stands for. And that’s why we’re both so excited to be on this stage.

The other reason we’re even more excited is that it’s the first time I’m on stage with my father. My dad has been on stage my whole life, almost his whole life.

I grew up watching my dad building himself up to become the world renown guitar player that he is.

I started a company which now serves 100M people very day.

Funny enough, everything I needed to know in order to run a successful tech company I learned watching my dad building his own music career. Only very recently, I’ve learned these lessons have a name. It’s called The Hero’s Journey.

The Hero’s Journey is a paradigm, a blueprint of all journeys worth taking

For me, the main lesson of the hero’s journey is the importance of the actual journey.

What you going to watch is a video/audio composition, highlighting a 12 step journey of 3 very different heroes.

As you watch this, I hope it will help you to discovery:

– That all heroes got scared at one point as they faced their “Call To Adventure”

– And all heroes needed a mentor, perhaps it’s time for you to seek one or become one

– And lastly, that the only true reward is making an impact in the lift of others

These lessons have changed both our lives. We hope they can impact yours.

Enjoy!

It All Started With A Few Owls

It was July of 2007 when we formed a company, and later received our first VC money. Tomer Afek who worked at Evergreen Ventures at the time, introduced me to Erez Shachar, who together decided to invest. Tomer later introduced me to Lior Golan who became our CTO.

I started Taboola because right after graduating from nearly 7 years of army service, all I wanted to do was to watch TV and focus on doing nothing. Problem was that while there were about 200 channels, instead of feeling that there was a lot for me to watch, I felt like there was nothing on TV. I then changed my mind, realizing that content was no longer king, not without a proper kingdom – an audience.

With a big startup mentality, working in a tiny room with no windows at our angle investors’ offices to be able to avoid rent, to giving our mathematical algorithms names as if they were each an Owl, names such as Contextual-Cathy, Behavioral-Bob, or Social-Shelly, and all the way to leaving everything behind and moving to NY on May 23^rd of 2009 after a board member called me up and said, “it’s time, you’re moving”. It was all of that and more that had us hard at work, connecting people with content they like and never knew existed.

I’ll never forget Erez’s face when Pilberg and Yaniv presented for the first time why “Behavioral Bob” was better than traditional Collaborative Filtering techniques; seriously there was a picture of an Owl on a slide titled “Bob” and we knew how to explain why it made sense. Nevertheless, whatever was said in that room made Erez put $1.5M into it, and we were as excited as a bunch of geeks could ever be.

Community Supported Our Vision

We got some amazing support from the community over the years, both from Israeli papers, as well as in the US with writers like Ryan Lawler who covered us at Contentinople, Gigaom, and now at Techcrunch, or Daisy Whitney, Liz Gannes, Peter Kafka, Andy Plesser, Will Richmond, Om Malik, Mark Robertson, Brian Morrissey, David Kaplan, and many others.

Why…Not How

We got peoples’ support not only because they enjoyed our recommendations on some of the most innovative sites in the world, and not because we were provocative on panels, and also not because the CEO was a known business guy. People believed in what we believed in as a company, relating to “why” we’re doing what we’re doing, and not “how” we do it.

You see, in many ways, our vision was to design a scalable Search Engine but in reverse, having information finding you instead of you knowing how to find it. Something every person in the world could enjoy and use because we are all consumers of knowledge, we read, we watch, and glance at content we like – if we can discover it.

Taboola changed a lot in the past 6 years since we started it, but our vision never changed – #ContentYouMayLike.

Thanks everybody, and may we discover content we love.

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That’s scary.

Founders will do literally anything before letting their company go dead-pool. They won’t sleep, eat, they won’t take salary, they’ll buy the team food from their own money, they’ll move back to their parents, they’ll fly anywhere a client may be, they’ll be convincing, personal, emotional, real.

Investors would expect founders to do at least that and work relatively insanely hard before calling them to tell them their money is out.

I had the pleasure of chatting with some founders I find awesome and I noticed that there is a topic that many think about so I thought I’ll blog about it.

Question: should early stage companies try to get demand for their product by partnering with bigger companies that already have existing footprint with their target cliental.

My 2 cents: I think it’s a mistake.

I think that the most important thing, operationally, beyond the team, when a company is founded is to seek product market fit as soon as you can, and not compromise. Realize that seeking product fit can happen in a month, a year, few years or never.

Example

Let’s say I start a company that can project Ads into the sky, and use that untapped real estate to generate ad revenue. So as I’m eating a Salad at Tel-Aviv beach, I’ll see a projected image of Hilton hotels in case I want to consider that. Should I pitch Hilton myself or should I tag team with someone that has all the Hiltons of the world already signed up?

Option 1: Tag Team with someone to get you Hilton

This can really go in two ways. You may fail landing that partnership, you won’t learn a lot about your market as there may be politics that prevent that partnership from happening, and overtime you’ll risk drying your bank account. A different option is that you’ll actually succeed, they’ll give you a lot of business/ads to project into the sky, and you would then generate revenue. The challenge here is that you’ll never really know if Hilton is happy with your product, or masked from knowing they even run on your Sky-Ad-Network. If Hilton never cared to check out if the results are good, it could be that your product is good and all is well, even if one day Hilton would check the results.

However, what happens if after a year, two or three Hilton finds out that your supply (e.g. “the sky”) is not working for them and the partnership you’ve landed, getting you all the Hiltons ends. Big risk.

Option 2: Pitching Hilton

This can also go in two options, but in here, I think both are constructive to the main goal, which is seeking product market fit. One way this can go is that Hilton will never become a client and you’ll spend years pitching them. However this is actually great, because what’s better for a founder to know that a client is not interested, it’s an important feedback and good time to adjust the product. The other way is that Hilton is actually signing up after a year of pitching and then they’ll tell you loud and clear – we are happy or not, and that feedback is gold.

Overall, while I do think that demand-side partnerships can be exciting for matured companies that are already post their market fit phase, I think for early companies it is risky and should be avoided.

I’ll finish by saying that I think failing is really ok, and better fail as fast as you can and move on, adjust the product and go back fighting over shortcuts that may look lucrative today but can become risky over time.

Don’t let others know your own clients better than you do.

My 28 year old brother graduated few days ago, June 21^st 2013. He is now officially a doctor, graduating with Summa Cum Laude honor. 

Due to supply & demand issues in Israel, with regards to medical schools (as in many people for some reason want to become doctors in Israel, but there are not enough classes for students to study locally) he had to make a decision 6 years ago to stay in Israel or leave. His options were to invest a few years in optimizing his grades from “A+ to A++” so he could study in Israel, or move to Debrecen Hungary, and study w/o any wait in an international school.

He chose Debrecen.

Debrecen

By way of introduction for my readers, I want to give you a glimpse into what it is like to live in Debrecen and study medicine there. Once you land in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, it takes 3 hours to drive to Debrecen, where you can find a handful of restaurant and bars, one shopping mall, insanely warm weather in the summer and the opposite extreme in the winter, the majority of the apartments have no AC nor do they have good isolation from the cold, the teachers speak limited English and the students are forced to reveal their ability to study on their own by reading advanced medicine texts 14 hours a day, plus weekends included for 6 years. Poor economy, inconvenient weather, language barriers, limited family support, and advanced texts that allow you to learn if you’re able to overcome these uncomfortable obstacles. That’s Debrecen.

What happens if you ever graduate out of Debrecen? You’re probably more ready than any other student in the world, because if you could graduate under these conditions – you can fix people.

Practice Wins Theory – Make It Work, Then Make It Better

My little brother, you absolutely made the right decision. If Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t left Harvard, or if Steve Jobs didn’t decide to take a practical course in illustration we would not be Facebook-ing, or Apple-ing today. In the 21^st century in particular, in this economy, being a professional earlier rather than later, being able to contribute to a place of business, matters. For lack of a better comparison, if an employer could hire a person who has mastered Photoshop after going through a SkillShare 11 week course and worked in some places, or alternatively hire a person who finished Pratt after 4 years and didn’t experience enough – it’s likely they would choose the person with 11 weeks experience. The first may cost $10k at SkillShare, and the latter costs $250k, but employers need people who can join the work force, and hit the ground running, in this case creating mock-ups the day they join. This is not to bash high education, but to emphasize the importance of being practical, and appreciating your biggest asset in life – time. Even if you disagree with me, and you think you’re as good as but not better than other students, in the end — you became a doctor 2-3 years before people that spent the time optimizing grades to get accepted to Tel-Aviv. By the time other students graduate you would have already treated hundreds of people, and be well on your way to be a specialist in something your heart desires. Saving lives.

Our president said last week – leaders turn crises into opportunities

By choosing to not defer your study by few a years due to a supply & demand issue, you landed a painful but rewarding educational experience; you graduated in one of the most challenging environments in the world to study medicine, with high honors, you’re a doctor 2-3 years earlier over others, and you’re likely to know more than they do as you had to teach yourself day in and day out. Most people can’t. This is not to say you’ll be a better doctor, granted, you still need to prove yourself – but you’re off to a better start in the 21^st century. You’ve taken crises, supply & demand issues, and turned them into an opportunity, getting a head start as a younger and honored doctor.

Real life

I’m proud of you brother. I’m proud of you because of the decision you’ve made 6 years ago, and because it’s hard for me to grasp 6 years of studying so hard, reading so much, missing people you love, feeling too hot, feeling too cold, feeling too far…just feeling too much. But you bloody did it!

I’m also proud of you because after spending this past graduation-weekend with you, I’ve seen what you were able to create against all odds beyond graduating with honors — real friendships. Trust me, friendships you’ve earned in distant Debrecen will go a long way in your life, and perhaps you’ll find that in real-life, real-friendships can matter even more than they did in the past 6 years. 

You’re going back to Israel next week to start your real life as a doctor, wow. Fixing people, people in pain, people that have very little to give back for your help, some that will never say thank you… but you still swore to help them for the rest of your life. Additionally, your school thought you deserve a Summa Cum Laude, which in early times was a designation for the best of warriors coming back from the battle, protecting their people.

I’m proud of you brother. You’ve finished your version of “the road not taken” in Debrecen and in flying colors. You’re now coming back to start your real life here in Tel Aviv, Israel, including paychecks, rent, bills, the whole nine yards.

Any hospital that will get to hire you will be a lucky one in my biased and humble opinion, as I know first hand how hard it is to hire people that have the drive you’ve got. I wish you great luck on this new journey. Enjoy it and keep promoting the same values that got you to be where you are today. 

I’m proud.

Yours truly, your big brother.

Adam

I had the chance of having some more conversations about “startups” lately, and I thought I’ll blog about it more. Some thoughts below:

Everything starts from the top, CEO and the management team

As the CEO of the company or a senior exec, beyond being responsible for deliverables you need to deliver; you’re also responsible for setting the potential/horizon of your team to grow. How far could they go, how they react when things happen, what do they consider success, what really make them happy at work and more.

Why? Because they look at you, and what you do matters even if you think it’s just a small thing nobody noticed. Things like how you dress, how you speak, how you compete, do you stop to think, can you say “I’m not sure”, who you hire,

Still I didn’t like the transition. At all.

I really liked my tiny older room, it was familiar to me, I had a small 15 inch TV with this VCR embedded in it, and I had my computer where I played Command & Conquer all night (and won : – )), my friends were already used to come by my place after school, it was close to the basketball court where I played, and I loved taking my dog Romeo out next to my building and have a good time, just the two of us.

In reality, it was much better, and was part of growing up. At first, I really disliked it but overtime it made so much sense. My friends loved crashing at the new place that now had room for more than half a person, my dad got this amazing baby grand piano by Yamaha that I played all the time, I could start celebrate my birthday in my own house which became this annual event people were looking for, and funny enough my next door neighbor just joined the army, in charge of recruiting for the unit I ended up joining, spending 7 years there.

I’m far from telling you something you don’t know. Yet still, I bet you that 7 out of 10 times you’ll defend a change coming at you as a first reaction, most of us would.

While some of it may feel obvious, there is one lesson to be taken from the understanding that most people will at first defend a change, and that is  – the power of setting expectations.

When trying to get something done, it’s amazing how important it is to set the grounds for success versus going into it cold-turkey. You may end up pursuing the very same process of getting what you’re trying to get, but the way you went into the process can completely change the outcome. For example:

(1) Version 1 [honesty]: “I know we told you we can fix your house for $10k, however, I have some good news, and bad news. The bad, we will not be able to do everything for $10k as you wanted. The good is that for $11k, we can get most of what you really cared about done”

Client is thinking: well, it is not what i wanted but at least they are honest, and i don’t think it makes sense to break the deal as i do get most of what i wanted for a little extra pay.

(2) Version 2[cold-turkey]: “I know we told you we can fix your house for $10k, however, we now understand that we can do most of it for $11k”

Client is thinking: what the heck, they already told me they can do it for $10k, how can i trust them, i don’t like this last minute change, not doing it.

If we know that people first reaction is to defend changes, even if they are good to them, allowing them to walk into the experience with better expectations is likely to help them consider these changes. Otherwise, they may defend them as a first reaction. 

It’s natural and common to fall short by skipping few steps that can help set us expectations . We all do it because in our mind we already “told the story” so many times; and we forget that the other side is not in our head, hearing about it for the first time. The Power of setting expectations.

Hope that’s helpful, good luck !

Here goes, I broke it down to sections: Life. Odd. KISS. Porn.

Life.

If you think about everything people need to deal with on a daily basis w/o really paying attention that we do it – it is kind of crazy. We work 8-16 hours a day, sometimes we don’t work at all looking into new jobs, we have friends, closer friends, family, even closer family members (those that we actually want to see), colleagues, a boss, meetings we need to take, places we need to go, places we want to go, our own finance that we need to manage, our health, anxieties, experiences we want to collect, manage our fears of ‘who we might become when we grow up’, a “look” we want to own, dreams we want to live, and the list goes on, and on.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff for us to manage. 

Odd

So how could it be, how can 7 billion people around the world multi-thread so many tasks up in the air, some more, some less, but nevertheless how come we keep our sanity in tact (or are we?) and how do we know when something doesn’t work so we can stop trying and take it off the list. That’s the goal after-all no? Who doesn’t dream about emptying their inbox. Maybe that’s what we need to do in real life then, keep tasks that still have a chance to happen and “move to archive” things that are not working. How do we do it, what is it inside us that so naturally helping us to make those endless decisions every day? How is it that we know that this investment is bad for us, and that apartment is good for us, or this is a horrible sandwich and we shouldn’t touch it, or that today we should stay extra hours at work, and that person is not so fun, or that it’s been a while since we talked to our grand parents, and how come we make those decisions at times in less than a second. Intuition?

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

“I have no idea how, so that’s my contribution to the discussion : – )”, I told my friend asking me how it’s all done, and how do people naturally manage priorities of dozens of tasks w/o ever pausing to do so.

And indeed, I don’t really know how people do that, but I do think we all have this unique sense of “does it matter/not” that help us make very quick decisions almost w/o thinking about it. Those decisions come from a real intuition, which is not always explainable.

For example, in the Israeli army, soldiers don’t look back for approval before they fire which is uncommon among other armies in the world. So how is it ok for a soldier to spot a situation, realize it’s risky in less than a second, trigger a bullet and fire?

Porn.

Boom. I think that this all concept is based on delegated trust and intuition. Whether it’s through other people which means we trust others to do things good-enough to the point we can move on and not manage it on our list of tasks // or it can also be internal decision-making process that we all have . Meaning, most of us, when we enter a situation, or when we look at something we need to do — whether we wanted to do it or not, we have this natural spark of “matters/not” and what we think we should do. This intuition is not always the right thing, but it always means something. That’s how soldiers can make decisions w/o asking for approval at times, and perhaps that’s why while people have 50-100 tasks running in tandem, they can quickly look at the top ones that they think matter and move on.  That decision making process often time defines who we are as friends, colleagues, managers, family members…. as those are the de-facto decisions we end up making, and people around us get to see. 

As United States Supreme Court Justice Potter said, and maybe he was right, saying “I Know It’s Porn When I see It”. We just know how to do it. Listen to your intuition, it must mean something. 

Life. Odd. KISS. Porn.