Built By: Elad Shoushan

Over the course of his lifetime Elad Shoushan has had multiple careers. He’s been a professional basketball player, a soldier in the Israeli army and a software engineer at the likes of Intel and General Electric. His expertise lies in developing scalable products, including a digital X-ray viewing solution during his tenure at GE.

Born and raised in Israel, Elad got his first taste of North America as an exchange student in Canada while he was working on a bachelor’s degree. Still, he didn’t make it to the US until he decided to attend the MIT Sloan School of Management in the fall of 2012.

Elad was always intrigued by technology as a way to solve problems and make people’s lives easier. Entrepreneurial inspiration came while he was preparing for the GMAT and found himself challenged to get his desired score. An early adopter of the iPhone, Elad was accustomed to using technology to get things done, and found it hard to study the old-fashioned way, which allowed little flexibility for people constantly on the go. In 2013 he founded Ready4 to develop an app that would allow students to trade books for smartphones, and study at their own pace and convenience.

Now, Ready4 is helping over a million students in 195 countries prepare for more than five different exams. Elad attributes adoption to the company’s focus on building the best online learning tool in the mobile market, which caused users to find the app on their own. As of this year, Ready4 has raised $11 million and has 25 full-time employees, evenly split between the US and Israel. It aspires to become the biggest mobile player in the education space.

Even though the Israeli tech scene is rather robust, Elad explains chose to locate his venture in the US because it provides access to a bigger market that allows companies to iterate and scale more easily, increasing the odds of success. Or, as Elad puts it, “to build a great consumer product, you need to understand the users and feel their pain, which includes being where they are.”

Elad describes entrepreneurship as a constant “battle,” with multiple ups and downs. He recognizes that while starting a company is always tough, doing so as an immigrant is even harder. He believes that the ability to adjust is essential to both immigrants and entrepreneurs, and advises fellow founders to “fail fast and get better at failing fast”, so they can steer themselves on the right path. “If you think about direction too much, you’ll never get to the final destination. Don’t be afraid to take risks,” he adds.

Written by: Leia Ruseva of Ellis Project

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