ICON Insiders — Bridging Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley
Why I am excited about ICON Insiders — and you should be, too
Remember that great keynote delivered by that famous CEO? The one that really inspired you and left you pondering grand ideas — even though it did not include a single practical, actionable tip? How about that time another great founder led a small, hands-on workshop, and participants shared business challenges and received tips they could implement the next day? Too bad there were only 10 seats at the table.
ICON Insiders is introducing a new event format to address this challenge. Adi Tatarko, co-founder & CEO of Houzz, and a longtime friend of ICON, will join us along with 14 additional Silicon Valley experts for an ICON Insiders event that will be simultaneously inspirational, practical and intimate.
Adi will kick off the day by sharing her entrepreneurial journey. Founders will then join two group sessions. Topics will include Growth, Sales & Marketing, Product, Funding, Culture, Getting Started in the US, and more. We will cap each session at 10 participants in order to keep sessions highly relevant and practical.
Chen Amit, founder & CEO of Tipalti, which processes $4B through its platform and Alon Huri, co founder & CTO of Next Insurance will both lead discussions on growth. Eran Shir, who led Yahoo!’s Creative Innovation Center after they acquired his startup and is now the founder & CEO of Nexar, will discuss how to build a strong corporate culture. Eden Shochat, equal partner at Aleph will highlight blunders in investment decks founders should avoid, Nir Blumberger, partner in Accel Partners and previously at Facebook M&A team will prepare founders for their last deal — M&A. Amit Knaani, co- founder of Hibob, Micha Kaufman, founder & CEO of Fiverr, Amir Glatt, co founder & CTO of Duda and Gil Hirsch, who founded face.com before becoming a Facebook executive, will each lead product sessions (check www.iconsv.org/insiders for the full list).
The second half of the event will be devoted to bringing the day’s insights together and provide an opportunity to hear from Adi on how she approached the same issues at Houzz.
But it’s not just the new ICON Insiders format I’m excited about. I’m excited to be bringing Silicon Valley thinking back home to Israel. ICON is based and most active in Silicon Valley. We offer guidance and support to Israeli founders when they come to the U.S. This time we are bringing Silicon Valley to Israel. All of the ICON Insiders speakers possess vast experience in Silicon Valley. Adi, our keynote speaker, created and scaled her company in SIlicon Valley. Today Houzz has more than 1800 employees and 40 million monthly users. Some of our speakers, like Zohar Levkovitz, founder of Amboee, have recently moved back to Israel after spending years in Silicon Valley, while others still operate full-time in Silicon Valley, like Effi Fuks Leichtag, director of product at Yelp, Oren Kaniel, Co Founder & CEO at Appsflyer, Omer Rabin, head of customer success at Walkme and Oz Alon, co founder & CEO at Honeybook.
The founders invited to this event are at the right stage of growth to consider crossing the ocean to start doing business in the U.S. We used funding (or sales/user base) as an indication for this readiness. This also allowed us to make sure that everyone participating in the small group discussions comes from a startup operating at around the same stage. This should dramatically increase the amount of relevant learning each participant can gain from the event. That said, we will be excited to share key insights with the community at large.
I am so excited to be offering our content to the Israeli ecosystem and bridge Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley.
We look forward to seeing you there.