Einat Hoobian-Seybold

Marketing SHOULD be fun ✨ Aviv Canaani went from VP of Marketing to CRO at Datarails over four years. During that time, the company grew 10X and flipped from 95% outbound to 95% inbound. All while having fun with their audience So... How do you balance brand vs performance? Aviv's POV for you: Most B2B companies treat brand and performance as competing budget items. Aviv unified them under one revenue leader. When you own both marketing spend and sales outcomes, the incentives align. They saw THIS shift happen after the 2022 market crash. Outbound meetings held steady but close rates dropped. Inbound leads converted at much higher rates because those prospects already knew the brand and came in with intent. Brand building makes performance channels work better. But... Aviv's brand building looks nothing like traditional B2B Datarails runs ads featuring Kim Kardashian memes to sell FP&A software to CFOs. They create content with creators from Fiverr. They post jokes on LinkedIn. The head of growth came from mobile gaming, not enterprise software. The thesis is simple: You're selling to humans, not corporations CFOs scroll IG and watch funny videos just like everyone else. Playing it safe is the biggest risk because safe content gets ignored. The key is balance. Datarails pairs scroll stopping content with deep thought leadership. They run a podcast called FP&A Today with over 500,000 downloads. They share data driven insights and interview finance leaders. They give their audience BOTH entertainment and substance. Just like Tiesto. Aviv's team includes people from B2C backgrounds for that exact reason. They produce high volumes of video content, test what works, and feed the algorithms. His prediction for the next phase is that marketing becomes even more human. He's already seeing more sponsored posts from people rather than company pages. Customers talking about products. CEOs and CMOs building personal brands. AKA... Be more human. Have fun with your audience This is the way ✌️ P.S. Make sure you give Aviv a follow!

393

‏12‏ ‏תגובות‏

Operations vs Strategy - which is more important? My answer has always been operations. Strategy is simply a smart operational process to figure out the right strategy. When we started the Israel Tech Mission nearly 1.5 years ago our focus was on action, operations and impact. And see impact to date: https://lnkd.in/e95Z92wZ

148

‏20‏ ‏תגובות‏

Our posts about ivrit.ai are usually (surprise surprise) written in Hebrew. Today, we're making an exception to accomodate our global viewers as we share our experience with the ElevenLabs' scribe-v1 Speech-to-Text model. As most of you know, we maintain a Hebrew Transcription leaderboard on Huggingface (link in first comment). This was needed as fleurs and common-voice are low-quality datasets with regards to Hebrew. When ElevenLabs launched scribe_v1, we were eager to try it out. The initial results were a mixed bag: some benchmarks where scribe_v1 provides best-in-class results, others where it fumbles significantly. Our analysis mostly hints at issues with long-form transcriptions, where it simply "drops" large parts of the text after 1-2 minutes. We had a quick discussion about this with ElevenLabs support, but the end result is still subpar performance on Hebrew transcription, and we suspect this may be true for other low-resource languages. We think scribe_v1's technology is best-in-class, and are hoping to work together with the ElevenLabs team to fix this. So, if anyone at EL wants to chime in and make this happen (Mati Staniszewski Piotr Dabkowski :)), please reach out to us. We believe this might make scribe_v1 much better at not just Hebrew, so it might be worth your time. Our benchmarks are open, we're a non-profit, and in the last few weeks we open-sourced >5000 hours of speech with high-quality transcriptions. If anyone here has friends at EL and wants to help, please tag them! Kinneret Misgav, PhD Yoad Snapir Yanir Marmor

95

‏1‏ ‏תגובה‏

One of the things I spoke about today at Wix HQ barely made sense for some Reichman University MBA students and to be honest in the past it did not make sense to me too... why do VC-backed startups always lose money? 👇🏻 Seriously, ask yourself as you know nothing, why is the basic expectation of a VC backed startup is to lose money? The short guess: Because startups have too Longer guess? You can't cause market disruption with a startup without resources, and money is a resource BUT... it got me thinking... the losing money game has changed drastically and things make more sense to me now Losing Money in 2025 is now smarter than losing money in 2013-2019 In the past, "growth at all costs" was the anthem of the startup world. Founders were burning cash to chase vanity metrics—topline revenue, user acquisition, or even market share—with little thought to profitability or efficiency. It worked because the funding faucet was wide open. If you showed hockey-stick growth, another round of capital was almost guaranteed. But 2025 is a different game. And losing money today is not the same as it was in 2013-2019. Here’s why: 1. The Market is Ruthless About Efficiency In 2019, VCs celebrated growth without asking hard questions about gross margins or CAC payback. Today, every investor wants to see an efficient growth engine before writing a check. Burning cash isn’t inherently bad, but if your LTV:CAC ratio isn’t compelling or you’re overbuilding your team, you’re dead in the water. Losing money now has to be strategic: spend on things that build durable competitive advantage, not on bloated teams or unscalable tactics. 2. Capital is More Expensive Cheap money is gone. Interest rates are high, and every dollar you raise comes with pressure to stretch it further. This means founders must justify every dollar spent. Losing money in 2025 has to be deliberate—a calculated risk for long-term gains. Think investing in R&D, brand equity, or operational moats—not throwing cash at unsustainable growth. 3. The Stakes Are Higher In 2019, startups could afford to experiment endlessly. Today, survival depends on clarity. Losing money is acceptable only when tied to a roadmap that leads to profitability. Founders now operate under a microscope, and metrics like free cash flow and contribution margin have replaced the blind worship of ARR. Here’s the New Paradigm for Smart Losses: 1. Focus on Profitability Pathways: Lose money now to win in the long term, but with a clear plan to make your unit economics work. 2. Build Systems, Not Just Numbers: Losing money on scalable infrastructure (automation, product upgrades, operational efficiencies) will pay dividends later. 3. Bet on Quality Demand: Spend on demand generation that drives high-value, high-retention customers—not just chasing vanity metrics. So... does losing make sense to me today? More than in the past, that is for sure! Does losing money make sense to you? If so, until when?

44

‏7‏ ‏תגובות‏

Founders often ask: Is it worth moving your startup to the U.S.? Here’s the short answer: Yes, if you're serious about becoming a unicorn. Let’s look at the facts. Over 50 Israeli-founded unicorns are now headquartered in the U.S. That’s more than in Israel itself. These companies include Wiz, HoneyBook, Papaya Global, and others. They didn’t just move — they exploded after relocating. Why? Because the U.S. offers scale that no other ecosystem can match. Bigger checks. Faster follow-ons. More aggressive valuations. It’s not just Israel. Startups from India and the UK also dramatically increase their unicorn odds after relocating. In 2024, 58% of global unicorns were based in the U.S. And 70% of them had at least one immigrant founder. So the message is clear: If you’re building something big, the U.S. is still the best launchpad. It’s tough to move. But staying might be tougher in the long run. What’s holding you back?

131

‏140‏ ‏תגובות‏

It’s been a standout first half for Israeli tech, and the numbers speak for themselves. Startup Nation Central’s upcoming H1 2025 report, built on data from our Finder platform, highlights the strongest performance in three years: 💸 $9.3B in private capital raised, the highest since 2021 🔁 $39.2B in M&A activity, led by Google’s $32B acquisition of Wiz 📈 Median round size up 28%, as investors make bigger, more focused bets ⚪365 rounds, down 10% compared to the second half of 2024 🌍 Global investors participated in 69% of all rounds Full report coming soon! Read the full preview here:👉 https://okt.to/RgBIbe #IsraeliTech #StartupNation #TechTrends #ImpatientInnovation

45

‏1‏ ‏תגובה‏