1. What is a daily habit you love doing?
Running. I try to run almost every day, but usually, I run 4-5 days a week, 20-25km each day. During this period, while we are all at home, I sadly run in circles and still try to reach 10k a day.
2. What piece of advice would you give yourself when you started? What advice would you ignore?
In order to succeed you need to be all in, understand everything from the top funnel, middle funnel, and bottom-funnel. Yes, understand business and technology. People and cash flow. Common advice to ignore: learn from other people’s success. True learning is done from failures.
3. What piece of content (book/podcast/Ted Talk) is your favorite or has influenced your life?
Wow, so many. I listen to 2.5 hours of podcasts daily. My advice is to mix topics: technical, business, general knowledge, stories etc. Firstly, you won’t get bored and second, you never know where inspiration will come from. One of my favorite podcasts is ‘Freakonomics’, they do a very good job highlighting the human psyche and behavior. Another great podcast is an Israeli one about managing products called ‘Product Management – The Directors Version’ – I love how professional it is.
4. What is the most valuable investment (time, money or energy etc.) that you’ve ever made?
Time with my boys. Hands down. Also, traveling to customers.
Time, in general, is valuable, I lived in the agile world with the agile manifesto since 2002 (also signed it 2005) and since then passed through many iterations in small and large companies. Since then I learned true agility has to be everywhere. Your vision should be the lighthouse you follow, the rest should be immediately viable.
5. Is there a quote, mantra or message you live your life by and that you resonate with? It can be someone else's as well.
Just do it. Too much is spent on thinking about what will work, what one day would be amazing, what do we do if a thousand things go wrong or go right. All of it doesn’t matter – first get where you need to go, then figure it out. Live the life of the MVP.
6. What helps you stay motivated on good and hard days?
Mix my dreams. Some are work-related, some are personal (running, climbing), some family. When one of them is hard, the other lifts you. Other than that, learn to live day by day and plan year by year.
7. What are you passionate about other than managing your own company?
Innovation, change, and culture. Ah, did I say running and raising my boys? 🙂
I also learned that you have to live a balanced life. Make sure you have an external balancing power (or two) outside the passion that is your startup. For me, it’s family and sports – but passion is a force that makes you stronger and fills you with energy. I strongly believe it’s all psychological – you make a difference, you live your life – you can face any challenge.
8. What have you recently thrown away or released from your life that made a positive impact and why?
I try to throw things every week. It’s such a release. I find special happiness is throwing away code or features.
9. Share a failure you have experienced and what you learned from it.
Not Investing enough in relationships with people. I’m very practical and don’t care about politics, but the world is full of it. Gotta live it if you want to play the game.
10. If you could have anyone in the world answer these questions who would it be and why?
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos – hopefully if I can get real answers – I think they dream huge and wonder how they execute so well too.
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