1. What is a daily habit you love doing?
Detouring through Park Hayarkon after escorting my kids to kindergarten in the morning. The green and blue of the trees and river, the kayak rowers and ducks, the joggers and the Tai-Chi give me an injection of calmness and focus.
2. What piece of advice would you give yourself when you started? What advice would you ignore?
Always remember the founders’ bias. It affects everything. The way everybody else perceives your endeavor is different than yours. When you get used to asking yourself how the person on the other side perceives the interaction, you increase the chances for a positive outcome.
The advice I’d ignore would be most of the advice you get from outsiders. Advice and experience are crucial, but that’s one of the most important things to be selective about. People give advice because they care, and I appreciate it, but there are many different ways to succeed, and my version is “find the right advisors for you, take any other advice with a ton of salt, and make the big decisions with the right partners”.
3. What piece of content (book/podcast/Ted Talk) is your favorite or has influenced your life?
TED talk by Amy Cuddy about body language. The talk itself is great, but I like to take it in a larger context. It helps perceive the amount of control we have over every aspect of our lives.
Also, call it corny, but this tribute to Kobe Bryant inspires me every time I hear it.
4. What is the most valuable investment (time, money or energy etc.) that you’ve ever made?
Any investment of time in the people in my team is worth it. Our success will always be a joint one. Finding the time in the middle of a full workday to sit and catch up on the outside world with a team member is what makes us not only a group of people working for the same cause but a team.
★ Adi Azaria, CEO of Workiz, also tells us his passion for growing people in his team. Read his answers here.
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.
“You have one body”. It brings me focus. We have limited resources, limited time.
6. What helps you stay motivated on good and hard days?
My company’s goal, which is super positive. Helping people reach their goals and enjoy the process is a worthy cause. Experience is also crucial here. Having gone through multiple ups and downs over the last few years, I developed the ability to deal with any event, good or bad.
7. What are you passionate about other than managing your own company?
My family – I have an amazing wife and kids, every moment with them is a blessing. I also love being in nature and being active. I’ve trekked all around the world and been active all my life, so whenever and wherever I have a chance to walk a trail or even a new neighborhood – I take it.
★ Oren Buskila, Co-founder of Innoviz, also tells us how he combines his family quality time with nature. Read his answers here.
8. What have you recently thrown away or released from your life that made a positive impact and why?
My rifle. I invested 20 years of my life in this Olympic shooting sport. Won and lost enough, learned a lot, and accumulated experiences. For a few years after quitting the team to focus on my family and startup I kept the rifle, aiming to return one day. Recently, as I improved focus, I took the symbolic step of releasing that dream. As I progress in life I achieve some of my dreams and come short on others, but I’m always growing and finding my next targets and dreams.
9. Share a failure you have experienced and what you learned from it.
In RSPCT I made a few mistakes of acting against my intuition – one on a bad hire, the other on an outsourcing decision. I love the concept behind intuition, which to me at least, is the essence of experience. At RSPCT we take pride in our decision making, trying to bring in the right people for each important decision, and putting our intuitions against cold facts and reasoning. These were cases where, for some reason, we decided to act against intuition, and it cost us.
10. If you could have anyone in the world answer these questions who would it be and why?
It would be a person who had successfully innovated in his field, from the farthest culture from me. Maybe a Mongolian, an Indonesian, African, or New Zealander.I think anyone who answers this, from anywhere, may offer some useful insights and may be fun to read. It would be nice to get some unique answers or to see that even very different people share the same thoughts.
