As I was graduating from my nearly 7 years of army service, I had experienced the best 2 weeks of my life – as two things happened:
(1) I had a chance to do nothing but watching TV and reading the papers morning to night, after a long time of working rather crazy
(2) I founded Taboola
I started Taboola for the simple reason of being home, and not “finding anything to watch on TV”. However, It was this “finding” behavior that made me realize that I was doing something wrong. It didn’t make sense to try to find something on TV, as how could I define something to “find” if I didn’t know of it yet.
We went out on this journey, a bunch of friends, and passionate people to crack the code around how to best connect people that created content, with people that may like it.
4 years since I’ve moved to NY, and we’re now serving over 2 Billion recommendations every day, to nearly 250M people a month. Metrics that we used to measure on an annual basis we now measure on a daily basis, and it seems like we face a real opportunity and challenge to connect every person in the world that produces content, people that want to voice themselves, to tell a story — with an engaged audience that cares to listen.
To be lucky is to work on big enough of a problem, one that you are passionate about, and with people you look up to. To me, that journey started about 5+ years ago, and 4 years ago when I moved to NY.
Lastly, as I was blogging about how 4 years ago I moved to NY to start Taboola-NY, a colleague of mine sent me this morning a link to a TED video of Sergey Brin talks about Google and his vision when he started it 15 years ago. I thought “You May Like”:
“My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all.
You would just have information come to you as you needed it. As this is now 15 years later sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision…”
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