Yoni Rubin of MRGN: Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Launched My Business or Startup

An Interview With Doug Noll

In terms of fundraising, my background had been in public markets, which is an environment that entails substantially different criteria than the startup world. I was preparing for our first fundraise by creating an extremely long deck with all sorts of legalese, and it wasn’t until I pitched to a few investors who told me to cut my deck down to no more than 15 slides and do away with the legalese

Taking the risk to start a company is a feat few are fully equipped for. Any business owner knows that the first few years in business are anything but glamorous. Building a successful business takes time, lessons learned, and most importantly, enormous growth as a business owner. What works and what doesn’t when one starts a new business? What are the valuable lessons learned from the “University of Adversity”? As part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Yoni Rubin.

Yoni has spent 15 years as a tech COO and military commander. He has supported $250M in fundraising, via both public and private placements, has seen a company through an IPO to the OTC and an up-list to the New York Stock Exchange. Yoni is now the CEO of MRGN, the platform behind the next generation of business intelligence, he is a startup mentor and investor.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

When I first kicked off my career, I knew exactly what I wanted to do; work my way to being a Chief Operating Officer. I had no idea how to go about it, particularly while living in a country that did not take kindly to COOs telling CEOs how to run their businesses efficiently. I found my self having a tremendously diverse CV, which is great for business operations, but terrible for hiring managers that are looking for specific career paths. I battled this dichotomy for several years before landing a role that was directly related to business operations; Chief of Staff to the CEO of a company that was just about to go public. It was shear luck that got me there.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I was brought up in a lower-middle-class household and was not afforded too many luxuries in life. I’ve also spent my entire life hearing the word, “no”. Compound those two factors, along with an inferiority complex, and you’re left with one truly motivated person.

So, how are things going today? How did grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

I am incredibly fortunate to have gone down the path that I took by shear happenstance. I worked my way up the ladder, albeit in a swift and strategic manner, and I ma now the CEO of my own growing venture. I have a wonderful network of friends and colleagues that I have accumulated over the years, and some of the satisfying and proud moments of my life are when former employees reach to simply say hi and catch up.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I’ll remember this one forever. I had spent about two years at my first early-stage venture, and developed a terrific working relationship with the representative one of our of our VC backers who spent a good deal of time in the office. I thought so highly of our relationship that I expected her to recommend me blindly for my next role with a different company without asking her in advance. Not so much. I ended up losing out on a job because she didn’t appreciate being blindsided. Lesson learned.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

MRGN is the only end-to-end machine learning-based business intelligence solution for tech ventures and SMBs. Our ML methodology is not only proprietary, but can be applied to the mid-market and enterprise spaces as well, with full IP protection (forthcoming). Our methodology leverages APIs to multiple data sources, including big data, CRMs, task management systems and other publicly available data, in order to combine that data into digestible contextual intelligence about any given business on the MRGN platform. The Machine Learning engine then uses newly ingested information in order to continuously provide the business with adaptive intelligence. For example, the platform will be able to tell any business how its specific KPIs compare to industry benchmarks, where those KPIs are trending, how its hiring plan fits its growth plans, if its planning to pay new hires the correct market rates and much more.

Today’s BI tools stop at visualization, and MRGN picks up where they leave off by providing the meaning behind those charts and graphs. While our first application is within the SMB budgeting space, we intend on expanding to the broader BI space, and then to the enterprise market. For example, Microsoft’s Power BI, when coupled with MRGN, will be able to display data visualizations, and then explain to the user what the meaning of those visualizations are.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

Easy. There’s an old and still-current adage that 9 out of 10 new businesses fail within 18–24 months, which everyone immediately believes the cause to be the inability to raise capital or manage the business. In fact, it’s strictly a motivational metric. If you can wake up every day, look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you’re going to get through it, you’ll already be ahead of 90% of the pack after 18 months. Motivation is key.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

My personal network of colleagues, friends and family have been integral to my success, at various points along the way, but the one constant companion has always been motivation. No matter how many cowboys lead the horse to the trough, if the horse isn’t motivated to sustain itself, the help of the cowboys remains moot. No matter where you are in your career, you need to motivate yourself to get to the next stage of it. Do your best not to blame others, learn from failure and set goals. Nobody and nothing will ever be as supportive as good ole fashion motivation.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Firstly, the tangible piece is that my success has led to increased compensation, which has afforded me the ability to donate to certain causes that I believe in. Secondly, I mentor other venture founders in an effort to share some of the learnings from my career. Being in the startup space requires finding out-of-the-box solutions for complex problems, and those solutions could be helpful to others. Mentoring helps me share those lessons.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first launched my business” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

1 . In terms of fundraising, my background had been in public markets, which is an environment that entails substantially different criteria than the startup world. I was preparing for our first fundraise by creating an extremely long deck with all sorts of legalese, and it wasn’t until I pitched to a few investors who told me to cut my deck down to no more than 15 slides and do away with the legalese.

2 . Our business plan at MRGN consisted of a progressive approach to fundraising. We would build out our prototype (AKA MVP), raise capital on the basis of exhibiting that our concept was buildable, and then raise larger amounts of capital as we launched and grew. It turns out that the investor market no longer invests in concepts like they did years ago, but rather in traction. So, we built on top of our prototype, ran a beta program, restarted the fundraising process and found great success.

3 . While I’ve spent my career managing offshore software engineering teams, they were always being recruited to plug into existing teams that already found their grooves. I realized that starting off with an offshore team, without having that cohesion in place already, was not a recipe for success. In, hindsight, I wish that I had pursued a search for a technical cofounder instead.

4 . We had invested a lot of time and effort into laying the foundation for our advertising efforts. Given that advertising leads to lead-generation, we launched and onboarded a hoard of customers that came through said advertisements. We quickly found out that we failed to prepare one important piece of the puzzle; our marketing automation. These users were registering for accounts on our site, but we weren’t following up with them in any automated fashion, also known as retargeting. Thankfully, rectifying it only took a few days.

5 . When we first got started, we wanted to solve our own pain points around our small businesses having to build and maintain budget models in spreadsheets. After speaking to prospective users, we found that such a tool would not provide them with much return on their investment, and that they weren’t willing to pay for it. Luckily, we had bigger plans, which we quickly accelerated. We always saw an opportunity to not only build those budget models in a turkey fashion, but to also interpret them for the users by leveraging machine learning. Hence, the next generation of business intelligence was born.

Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?

I learned a fantastic lesson, as a child, about how to navigate the highs and lows of life, in general. I hadn’t experienced much anxiety in my life until I started the business. Although, since I was about nine years old, I’ve always had these mini anxiety attacks pertaining to something relatively immaterial. As I allowed the anxiety to take over, the knot in my stomach would get tighter and tighter. One day, as I felt one of these mini attacks coming on, I simply told myself, “nope, not now”. I distracted myself from thoughts that had led to the anxiety, and within seconds, the physiological manifestation of the anxiety would disappear. There’s nothing wrong with talking to yourself, or being your own cheerleader. Try not to let the stress and anxiety of business management penetrate to your core; leave them at the surface, and tackle them pragmatically.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I live my life by several values, of which I believe the most important one to be is not to intentionally affect others in a negative manner. I don’t want to be a bottleneck, I don’t want to inconvenience anyone, and I surely don’t want to hurt anyone. One of the most important traits of a successful entrepreneur is a high level of emotional intelligence, which I think a lesson in is lacking tremendously in the education system, from elementary school through to higher learning institutions. If we could kick off a movement around humans worldwide getting in touch with their emotional maturity and intelligence, I believe that would bridge a lot of gaps that lead to conflicts, both big and small.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I’m a very traditional (aka “old”) social media user, so you won’t find me on Instagram or TikTok. The best places to follow me are on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’m happy to connect!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.