I am a product designer and an entrepreneur, with a specific passion for both sides of the printed word – reading, and publishing. My high school yearbook said that one day I’ll be a newspaper publisher, and that turned out to be a pretty perfect prediction.
Over the past 20 years I have started 4 companies in the online ad/publishing space, all pioneering new parts of the industry as we know it today. I have received 10 patents on a bunch of the key innovations of this space over the years.
At Ad4ever, which I co-founded in 1998, we invented some of the world’s first rich-media and ad serving technologies for the internet. Ad4ever was acquired by Atlas, and later became the rich-media ad technology within Microsoft’s ad platform.
At Quigo, which I co-founded in 2000, we pioneered the Contextual Advertising space, alongside another startup called Applied Semantics which was founded by Gil Elbaz and was later acquired by Google to become Google AdSense. Both companies separately invented all the fundamentals of Contextual Advertising which became the multi-billion industry it is today. Quigo was acquired by AOL in 2007 for nearly $400M.
At Outbrain, which I co-founded with Ori Lahav in 2007, we invented the market for content recommendations, including sponsored recommendations which are today the multi-billion industry known as Native Advertising. Outbrain has pioneered all of the key innovations in this industry. Today we employ over 700 people around the world in 15 offices, and continue to lead the content recommendation/discovery market. To date we’ve generated for publishers well over $1.5B in direct revenue, and much more than that indirectly through our technologies. As of the end of 2018, Outbrain has acquired 6 companies.
In addition to companies I have founded, I was also on the board of HopStop, a pioneer in public transportation mapping technology, which was acquired by Apple and became part of Apple Maps.
I’ve raised over $200M for my companies, and more importantly – returned much more than that to my investors.
Currently, I’m the CEO of Outbrain. I don’t do any other boards, formal advisories*, angel investments, etc, as I dedicate all of my time and resources to building the best content recommendation company in the world – Outbrain.
Besides this blog, you can find me also on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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*Except for being on the Advisory Board of the fantastic Zell Entrepreneurship Program at The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel
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