[00:00:00] Noam Bardin: 

‍

CEOs that come to Google usually fail. And they fail because they try to find where do they fit into the master plan. There is no master plan. 

‍

Don't even try to understand the logic of why a corporation does something. It's beyond your scope of understanding. Their only competition is really yourself.

‍

Community has to be the DNA of the company. It has to be ingrained in day one of the company, and everyone in the company needs to be part of it. 

‍

That was our big trauma. They stole our model with a better product. 

‍

When you're making 600 million dollars a year, why rock the boat? And I think what Google is seeing right now is the outcome of not rocking the boat. 

‍

You know people today go to Google and they go, “Oh, I'm a Googler.”

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You're not a Googler. You work at a corporation. We all say, “It's all about the people. You have to hire great people.” 

‍

And our country, we gave to a bunch of losers. 

‍

I left Google and all kinds of people were asking me why I left, whatever. I thought, let's put my thoughts down on paper. And literally the world exploded the next day.

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[00:00:48] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Welcome back to another episode of Invested. I am thrilled to have Noam Bardin with us. Welcome Noam. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Thank you. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Noam, most of you will know as the former CEO of Waze, but you'll find out after an hour of listening, mostly to him and less so to me, that he's a much richer person than just Waze. Now, the most interesting thing though, I think, is that you're like one of the few people in the world responsible for a product that is in the hands of like, billions of people. 

‍

[00:01:19] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Yes, that's a responsibility you get with a product like that, and the conspiracy theories you get. So people have all kinds of ideas about what Waze does to route people to different places and things like that.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Okay, tell me what's the best conspiracy theory. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

The best was that we route people according to advertisers to pass their location. I thought that was really a great idea. I should have thought of it myself, but definitely a conspiracy theory. 

‍

[00:01:40] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That's a conspiracy theory? What's another conspiracy theory?

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

That we route people to Route 6 in Israel or to paid tolls, to collect the toll on the highways, and so we prefer those versus service streets. 

‍

[00:01:53] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You know, both those conspiracy theories are about money. The best conspiracy theories aren't about money. Is there one that's not about money? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

No, no, I mean not really.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Money is the best conspiracy there is. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Money drives everything, yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Alright, so for those who don't know Noam, Noam is the Co-Founder and CEO of Waze, the revolutionary navigation app with the funny cartoonish, icons. We'll come back to that in a second. He's a former VP of Product Management at Google, after Google acquired Waze.

‍

He was the founder of Post News, which we're going to talk about in a second. Before we get there, Noam, tell me: What is your core value? 

‍

[00:02:33] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So I believe in transparency at the core. I believe that as long as you really are transparent, transparency means actually saying, with a risk of something wrong happening, being transparent and telling the truth, great things happen.

‍

As soon as you start sugarcoating things, as soon as you start telling people what they want to hear, et cetera, you're down a very dangerous path. 

‍

[00:02:52] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Alright, so tell us the story of how you got to Waze. 

‍

[00:02:55] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So Before Waze, I was running a company called Intercast Networks. We were doing HD content delivery. One of the biggest mistakes in my life was going to that company.

‍

And of course you learn the most from mistakes, right? And so I learned a tremendous amount from there, but the person who ran engineering for me was a very good friend of one of the founders of Waze. And so we kind of heard each other's stories as we were going along. They were going to raise money.

‍

They didn't raise money. We were going to raise money, et cetera. And one of the decisions on their A round was, they were going to bring on a new CEO. And so through that, through this kind of indirect relationship, I got to know the founders, we got to know each other, et cetera. And we kind of reached a point that we wanted to do this together, before we went to talk to the investors.

‍

I think that was one of the unique things about us, you know, usually bringing on an external CEO, I joined Waze about a year into the company founding. And when it was launched in Israel under the Waze brand, it worked. And usually this doesn't work, right? Bringing on an external CEO is like the biggest no no you could have.

‍

So a lot of people call me up to ask how to do it. I say, “Don't do it.” It doesn't work, right, statistically. But in our case, I think what was really unique is spending about three months together, the founders. And I remember Amir basically saying, “Look, I want you to feel like a founder, and we want to feel that you're a founder.”

‍

And we could talk a lot about what the founder mentality is. And only then we went to talk to the investors. So I was always part of the founding team, and never part of the investing team. 

‍

[00:04:23] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Why did you join a company that all it had done was help people find their way through illegal routes and fields in Israel?

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

So it's funny, when–

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Most people don't remember this, but there was like a big thing around Waze in the early days where It knew the routes that people were actually taking and not the roads paved by the government. 

‍

[00:04:41] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Right. There are a lot of funny stories about that. So it's funny, when we ended up shutting down Intercast, and it was obviously a very traumatic experience for me on many different levels.

‍

And I told myself, I am now going to go for the smallest component, like the classic Israeli startup. I'm doing a feature basically, and I'm going to sell it for 60 million to someone. Enough of this world changing stuff, enough of these big grand visions, none of that. And then Waze came along.

‍

And I really fell in love with the concept. And the concept to me about Waze that is really the community, the fact that, you know, the reason Waze could happen is because we built a map with volunteers, with a community of people and using GPS chips, which are beginning to be prevalent, and do some smart analytics.

‍

But the concept that we're going to go after this duopoly of Navtech and Tele Atlas, two companies that were valued at eight and a half billion dollars and four and a half billion dollars. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That nobody today even knows exists for the most part, by the way. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

So that's why, when we started, the whole world map–there were two maps of the world.

‍

There was Navteq and Tele Atlas. Navteq got bought by Nokia and Tele Atlas got bought by TomTom. And that was the duopoly. And so any kind of navigation product, the most expensive component was the licensing of the map. You could have bought a PND, a GPS device, you know, more expensive than the hardware, the marketing, the distribution, whatever it was, was the license to the map.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Scarce asset. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Being a monopoly is a good business. And so we basically came along and said, “We're going to do the same thing with a community, with volunteers.” And, you know, open source had already started, but it was kind of new, crowdsourcing was kind of new. But this idea that a bunch of crazy people are going to go up against these conglomerates with 4,000 employees that drove every road in the world, every two years, with these super sophisticated trucks, was just so exciting.

‍

And being able to build something in that different way opened up all these opportunities, where the biggest one was offering navigation for free. And that was our big marketing angle about why going direct to consumer, because obviously free is a very powerful engine. And we forget that at the time, this is 2009, navigation was a paid product. Navigation on mobile would cost you $10 a month, and we gave it away for free.

‍

And so all that together was such an exciting opportunity that I just couldn't say no to it.

‍

[00:06:58] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Did you ever read Chris Anderson's seminal piece–there's only two business models, basically free and not free? I mean, alongside, I think it's a Jim Barksdale's great line is, “There's only two kinds of business models, bundling and unbundling.”

‍

I think Chris Anderson really nailed it. There's either free or not free. And free was disruptive, but it relied like on a bunch of crazy Israelis driving routes and reporting things and, you know, telling us, “Hey, this, this is here, and there's an accident.” 

‍

[00:07:27] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So one of the first things we were working on was going global when I joined. But the more interesting thing is that free, that was the core of our marketing, our distribution model and the core of everything we're doing got shattered a year in, roughly, when Google came out with Navigator at the time and gave it away for free. And that was our big trauma.

‍

It was like, every company goes through some traumas, some don't survive them, but that was our biggest trauma. And we made terrible mistakes because of it. But the point was they stole our model with a better product at the time. And that was really kind of–free is great when you're the only one free.

‍

 Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

What mistakes did you make because of Google? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

So it was funny. Just to set the stage, we're talking about the end of 2009. We had just launched in the U.S. Things were going great, like 150 downloads a day or something like that. The way things really grow, not the way you read about them later on.

‍

And we had this board meeting, and we're in Israel, and I'm about to relocate to the Valley and we're about to, everything comes together. We have almost a term sheet from one of the top VCs in the Bay that I’d just come back with, and I'm talking about it. And they had done due diligence around Google, and came back and told us that Google is not building a map.

‍

No one is. That was the consensus, that was too expensive a thing. And while we're in the board meeting, someone sees on Twitter that Google just launched the navigator, and obviously the whole board meeting got derailed and everyone starts downloading it. And it was a great product, and so much ahead of where we were, and we just panicked.

‍

And so I decided not to relocate to the Bay. Obviously the VC that was giving us a term sheet didn't return our calls anymore. And we decided to actually move to look at Latin America, instead of the U.S., because we assumed that Google was going to go through the classic model, they would open it up for free, open up APIs, go, you know, UK, France, Germany, kind of following the advertising models the way they usually do.

‍

And so we said, “If we go through Latin America, we could actually have a foothold somewhere.” And that was it. Terrible mistake, probably lost a year of moving in the U.S. And it all stemmed from the fact that none of us had ever worked in these companies. And so, you know, when we look at them from the outside, like most people do, it's these unbelievably efficient master companies you could never compete with, et cetera, et cetera.

‍

And I always say to founders I talk to now, “Don't even try to understand the logic of why a corporation does something, because it's beyond your scope of understanding.” You think about products, distribution, et cetera. They think about promotion, the other VP, I'm going to get him,

I need headcount for this. I'm going to buy that. Like just, things that you can't imagine. It's not your scope. Your only competition is really yourself. Being able to distribute, build, get your product out there, get your customers happy. That's your competition. That's hard enough to compete with.

‍

Don't worry about anyone else. 

‍

[00:10:18] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

The great moral of that story is, don't let your board members use their phones or Twitter during a board meeting. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

That's in general a good idea. Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Board members have big ADD, especially when they're venture capitalists. 

‍

[00:10:31] Noam Bardin: 

‍

They have a lot of big things. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You want to share some of this?

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

I mean ego. I don't mean what you were thinking. 

‍

[00:10:38] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Present company included or excluded? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

We've never worked together, I don't know. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Okay, okay. Phew! But back to Google. When I got started in my career, you know, Google was called Microsoft. And everyone said, “Don't invest in things that compete with Microsoft.”

‍

And I said, “Yes, invest in things.” Just because I was stupid, I had never worked at Microsoft or anything like that. I actually never worked in a real company in my life. Yeah, I still haven’t. And, like, I think this notion of competition in general feels overrated. What do you think about it? 

‍

[00:11:14] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So, I think that startups think there's competition, but the competition doesn't think they are competition, right?

‍

It's kind of one way. You think you matter as a startup. You think that you matter, and people are doing this because of you, whatever. You don't matter. Nobody knows anything about you. You don't exist for the world, right? By the time you actually become competition, it's a different ball game. You know, you're in a different place.

‍

I’m talking specifically about early stage, right? So, you're basically–nobody cares about it. And that's a superpower. The fact that nobody cares about you means you're not constrained by anything. You can do whatever you want when you start. Think about competition. You start putting constraints on yourself. You start basically thinking, negotiating with yourself, “Oh, they're going to do this. I'm going to do that.” But they don't care about you. 

‍

They want to get promoted by that job. And that, you know, he actually wants to acquire a company so you can get the headcount for it for a different project. Like again, but you're thinking that it's all about you. And so to me, that's the most important thing is really, you want to look at other products to understand what they're doing, but you shouldn't think of them as competition.

‍

It's hard enough to do your own work. Don't worry about someone else's work. 

‍

[00:12:11] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

 I hate to fast forward now, and I'll come back to previous stages, but I feel like I need to ask you. So when you got to Google, were you able to stay focused, or were you worried about that promotion? 

‍

[00:12:24] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So it's funny. No one thought I would last in Google more than a few weeks.

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

Count on me too, by the way. I thought the same thing. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

I did myself as well. I gave myself three months. I said three months, I'm going to get fired. And I actually stayed seven years. And I had a pretty successful career at Google at the time. I was a very controversial figure there, big surprise.

‍

But I remember one thing after we got acquired. Dave, the corp dev person who had done the transaction, sits me down and says, “Listen, CEOs that come to Google usually fail. And they fail because they try to find, where do they fit into the master plan? There is no master plan. You go ahead and do what you think is right. And don't try to figure out how you fit in, and everything will work out.”

‍

I took that very seriously. And so we continued to build our plan as we had before, as if Google was not there. Now, when Google acquired us, we started talking to Google, so we had about 10 million active users, monthly active users.

‍

When I left there were 150 million, and today there are about 200 million. And so that kind of change within a corporation is kind of unthinkable in terms of that kind of scaling, especially since we got no support from Google. We got a lot of money from Google. We had no support. We had assumed we were getting all this traffic, and distribution, and integration, whatever.

‍

And the beginning, I banged my head against the wall trying to do that. And then you realize, it's not there. You're on your own. And we continued just to do our plan and execute on it. We were kept very independent. And that's one thing I fought very strongly for. And so we continued to have our own engineering, and marketing, and sales, everything integrated as one team.

‍

So we kept the spirit alive in that sense. By the way, one of the biggest risk factors in the acquisition was whether the community would continue to work with us after the acquisition. It's one thing to be part of, “We're going to go destroy these big conglomerates.” It’s something else when we are the conglomerate, you know, come help us.

‍

And again, I think it goes back to the fact that we kept the company separate. It was the same people that they knew, we kept coming to the meetups the same way, you know, Ehud would talk to them the same way. So it's like, there's something about that that we managed to do. Then obviously over time things change, but they change slowly and they allow us to get a certain scale.

‍

Had we tried to integrate into something, it wouldn't have happened. First of all, we wouldn't know where to integrate, but Waze would not have become what it is today.

‍

[00:14:30] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I want to go back to that community thing. So community based business models have become a thing over the last bunch of years, I think particularly as, you know, SEO gets tougher.

‍

Search engine marketing gets more expensive. Community is back, right? Notion is built on community. We have a company called RiseUp that's built on community, and there's, you know, numerous others. What are the best tips you would give to entrepreneurs about building community-based models and keeping the community engaged?

‍

[00:15:00] Noam Bardin:

‍

So first, one thing we see a lot is large companies trying to add a community. And that is the worst possible thing to happen. Community has to be the DNA of the company. It has to be ingrained in day one of the company and everyone in the company needs to be part of it. So at Waze, for example, every employee that joined Waze had two tasks.

‍

One, to come to Israel, and they came to Israel for at least a week to work here. Even if their business had nothing to do with–they were in Brazil, that had nothing to do with it–everyone had to come at least spend one week in Israel. And the second was they had to go to a meetup. A meetup with the community.

‍

And when you see an engineer who wasn't even thinking about it, go to a community meetup and talk to the people using the product, and get excited about what's going on there–it just changes their whole outlook. And those two things were very, very important in keeping that culture and that DNA. But it meant that I went to the meetups, and everyone else did. There wasn't any of this, ‘I'm the CEO. I will send people to…’ You have to. That's the example you're setting, right? 

‍

Where the CEO goes is what is where the company understands what is important to the company, but also to the people in the community. The fact that they could text me directly and ask me a question. And when they complained about something, I would respond to it.

‍

It doesn't mean this is my full time job, but that's the DNA. And of course, as the leader of the organization, what you do is what everyone's going to understand. And when I went every quarter, I went to a meetup, and obviously with larger meetups that we all went to, et cetera, it set the message.

‍

It's very risky to run a community at the same time. We had community members who had permission to delete the 101 highway. Now, the reason they worked with us is ‘cause they had that permission. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

I just wanted to delete the traffic on the 101 highway. Forget about the highway. 

‍

Noam Bardin:We always talked about a premium feature that would route everyone else a different way, so you would go, you know, that way.

[00:16:45] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

Now that's a good conspiracy theory. 

‍

[00:16:46] Noam Bardin: 

‍

I know. I know. Ideas, ideas. 

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[00:16:47] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who would pay nine figures for that feature 

‍

[00:16:56] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Here there aren't enough options, but in LA, you could actually do something very interesting, because there's so many different options.

‍

 Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Oh, tell us, what could you do in LA? 

‍

Noam Bardin:

‍

Of course we would never do it. 

‍

 Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

But what could you do in LA? 

‍

Noam Bardin:

‍

No, I'm saying you have more options, with the road grid. So you could create routes, individual and since our density is so high there, but anyway. Obviously we're never going to do it and never happened. Of course, now it's just a conspiracy theory, wouldn't happen. I'll send you the link later. 

‍

[00:17:23] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You know, if there happens to be, like, “weather,” right here on this one kilometer, one mile section, you know. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Things happen. What can you do?  

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

The weathermaker machine. 

‍

[00:17:32] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Anyways, I think the community, the essence is, it has to be the DNA of the company.

‍

It's a magical thing. It's not a scientific thing. It's art. It's not science. Obviously you can measure it in different ways, but it really is about individual people. It's not about roles. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

What is the magic? Tell me what happened in a community meetup. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

So the way this community is built is that basically anyone who uses the app gains permissions. That if you create a road for the first time, you gained permission to edit that road. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You are the king of the road. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

You’re the king of that road. And let's say I named the road after my girlfriend. And then there's an area manager who has a polygon, where they have higher rights, and they look at it and say, “This is not your girlfriend's road. This is the 101 highway in San Francisco.”

‍

So they would change it. Now they have a higher rank than you, so you can't undo what they did. So it ratchets up. They have a state manager above them who will look at all the big roads and be able to edit that, and then there's a country manager, and then we have global champs.

‍

The global champs are the ones that actually interface with the Waze. And there's a team at Waze that interfaces with them. So you have this hierarchy of people and it goes across a variety of things. It goes across countries, languages, roles. There are people that specialize in beta-testing products, people that specialize in our routing engine.

‍

There are all different types of roles that people take. And that's a lot of what makes Waze feel so local. You know, you go to Ecuador, people will think it's an Ecuadorian company. How could they know about that intersection somewhere? It's because someone in Ecuador, who's Ecuadorian, who lives there, knew that it happened and named it the right name that everybody uses, not what's written on the maps, you know?

‍

So that local component, you can't get away with anything but a community. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So what happened at those meetups though? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

So at the meetups, usually it would be the global champs. There'd be regional meetups, which–so the regional meetups, when I left, were managed locally on their own. So the top people who would work together online all the time in the forums would actually get together somewhere. We’d need some swag and, you know, and help support it. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Did you pay for the flights? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

When they would do their own thing, no. When we would do it–every two years we have a global champ meetup in Israel, and we fly in all the global champs around the world, and obviously we would pay for everything. It’s a fancy event. But the local meetups really are where we bring our senior engineers management, you know, and just random people from the company as well to meet with them.

‍

We go over product roadmaps, what's coming out. We get their feedback, which is very vocal, very aggressive. And I remember when we were starting out, we had this community person blow up at us. He says, “I took a day off work claiming I'm sick, so I could work on this thing, and your server was so slow, I couldn't do anything.”

‍

And on the one hand, you could get mad about why is our server so slow, but to me it was, “I took a sick day. pretending to be sick so you could work on the intersection that you wanted to build!” And that's the magic of the community. So these meetups really become the physical connection where you build these relationships forward between them, because they've met each other virtually, they meet physically between us. But it also is the message that you matter.

‍

We care enough to fly to the middle of nowhere to meet you, because you matter. And I remember that at the time, I'm not sure how it is now, but the number one person in all of the community lived in kind of a flyover state, what we'd call in the U.S., and during the day would stock inventory at Walmart.

‍

But at night, he'd come home, he'd open his shirt, have a big S, and he was the bigshot. Engineers all over the world would be asking his opinion. He would make decisions on everything. This person had not only meaning, but had power over it. Today, 200 million people are driving on the software that he sees as his. And that's really the essence of a community.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

They are his. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

They are. They are. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

He's the ultimate editor. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

It really is. And it creates that–that's the magic that I call the community. It's, you've got to come together. You've got to, the community can [00:21:20] sense when you're fake, right? In general, people can, right? If you start lying on a consumer app, you're dead in the water.

‍

People immediately can spot a fake. Everyone's looking for authenticity, and authenticity is very hard to fake. But it's very easy when you actually are authentic. And so that was the important thing. And also depends on the type of people you hire, the culture in the company–everything has to go around this authenticity and transparency that they're expecting.

‍

And, you know, if you can keep that up, people will go with you anywhere. And we were always shocked how far you could go with the community. There's like, I have never reached a point of something that community can't do. Like, just as an extreme thing, we had one of our engineers came up with this idea of building beacons so that you could have underground routing in tunnels, you know, the big dig in Boston, et cetera.

‍

And he built this product, and we had some companies build it, and basically community members meet with the local road authority in the middle of the night, with their white hats and the yellow shirts. And they go and they stick these beacons up on the highway, stop the traffic, and they stick them on the ceiling, and they configure it and with his laptop, and he's configuring it– it's a volunteer.

‍

When there's a set of flooding anywhere in the world, we have a team that's dedicated to crisis, and suddenly the community members will interface with local  and state police, FEMA, et cetera, open up highways, close highways, mark where there's flooding, where is there fuel, where is there food–all these things happen organically, together, right?

‍

We have to provide the platform for it, but at the end of the day, this is people helping their own community. 

‍

[00:22:50] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I want to come back to this, but in the early days of Waze, there was a question: Could you scale it without paying the people? 

‍

[00:23:01] Noam Bardin: 

‍

First of all, you should never pay community members. If you're paying community members, you're lying to yourself.

‍

It's not community. And the problem is if you pay anything, then immediately the person begins calculating, okay, so I got $10, but I've worked three hours. So I'm making $3.3 an hour. That's a discussion that doesn't happen in community. In community, the discussion is, you know, I'm done, I need more things to do.

‍

Why don't you build this feature so I can now configure these things to make the service better? That's a community discussion. And so we had a few very important rules. One is that we don't hire from the community. So the community is not a path to go to for employment at Waze. And second is, we don't pay for the community.

‍

You do it, you come because you want to be part of the community. People always ask, “Why do people do this? Why do they spend hours doing this?” I always ask the other way. I flip that question to, “Well, what's the alternative?” You know, most people come home, they sit in front of the TV, turn off their brain, and just, or today on their phone, right, they go to a social network and waste five hours on TikTok, right? That's what they do. 

‍

Here are people that actually have meaning. They're impacting the lives of millions of people around them, they're making them better. They're interfacing with people all over the world they would never have met.

‍

They're building skills. Like, volunteering is kind of the essence of humans. Humans are community animals, right? That's how we started. So all these, you know, cities are a new thing for us. All this being alone is a new thing. And so it's actually the natural state, and you see the people that get into this really find a meaning that I think is much more powerful than watching some TikToks.

‍

[00:24:29] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

You know, cartography was always an expert field. And it was a solo field, by the way, for the most part. So and so was an explorer and would go out there, and be a cartographer and do it. And then obviously Navtech was obviously a similar thing. Here comes these amateurs–not just for the amateurs, they've got this cartoonish interface, for such a serious thing called cartography.  I'll tell you, by the way, for myself, the first time I saw Waze and I saw one of those bubbly things, I said, “Should I rely on this?” Like, it must be giving you pause that UX, that UI, you know.

‍

[00:25:07] Noam Bardin:

‍

So it's interesting. Every company is a unique company and has its own thing. We had two camps in the company. One camp was the people who came from the traditional cellular business. And these were the people that were, we called them the BlackBerry people, who thought we should build for BlackBerry. They wanted the UI to be like an F15 cockpit with lots of dials and knobs. They wanted, a simple thing, to have search be, “Choose country, then city, then road,” right?

‍

And so that was kind of one group. And the other group were the social group. They were the iPhone people. iPhone was relatively new. They were thinking about social features in the community. They wanted the UI to be friendly and fun. And the search bar is a one bar that you type in, and we have to figure it out.

‍

Huge battles between these groups. Everything was a yelling match, and obviously Israelis are very polite, so everything's, you know, very quiet and civilized. Crazy tension, but–

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Passionate community. 

‍

Noam Bardin:

‍

Passionate, yeah, passionate is the word for crazy yelling at each other. But, that tension is what built the product.

‍

You know, our nemesis was Foursquare. Like at the time we were starting, Foursquare was starting, and they were the cool kids. They were on the front page, the man of the year, person of the year at times, you know, all the cool kids were using them. And obviously our engineers, like every good engineer is like, “I could build this in the weekend. What is this thing?” 

‍

While we're struggling away with these hard problems. And we actually reached a point where we're thinking of just taking our social features and removing the navigation feature. Just being the social gaming company. And what we did that they didn't is, we managed to take all that cool, fun stuff that we did and turn it into actual value. To the point that today, most people don't know there's a community behind Waze, right?

‍

And that's really the success. The fact that, you know, you start something cool to get over the hump, it created value to the point that my mother will use it, and again, she doesn't really care about everything behind it. And that's what Foursquare didn't do. They stayed at the cool, couldn't make that leap. And obviously, you know, we ended up differently. 

‍

[00:27:09] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

But the cartoonish interface, like that was thoughtful? That was just–

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

That was very thoughtful. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Like, we started this way, so we continued that way? 

‍

[00:27:15] Noam Bardin:

‍

No, no. So what are the, the, the. I mean, I actually put it a little bit as a gender thing. Most product people, historically have been men, especially in the navigation space.

‍

And so that F15 pilot kind of cockpit view of the world really drives them. Yael Elish that ran a product at Waze and comes from the social side, whatever, looked at it very differently. And she looked at how to make it fun.

‍

Now the word fun is a very difficult word to have in navigation and other things. But you know, when you look at Google maps, that's not a fun product. That's a utility. It works great. You can use it or not use it. But you don't love it or hate it. You don't have an emotional connection to it. You don't say “It screwed me over,” or, you know, “It's wonderful. I love it.” But that's what you get with Waze.

‍

And that cartoonish interface was part of that kind of viewer. I remember when I was thinking about joining Waze for the first time, I showed my wife the application, we're driving and she looked at all those Wazers and said, “Wow, that's so cute. I don't feel alone.” Now, as a man, I never thought about that, but I mean, actually, for her driving at night alone, it’s, kind of, a little bit of scary experience.

‍

So there's something about that friendliness that Yael created, that approachableness, but also that not taking yourself too seriously. Our products sucked in the beginning, like we would not get you where you going until we tell you to jump off the bridge onto the highway, you know, things like that. And so not taking yourself too seriously is part of what the UI was on there.

‍

That became our brand in many ways. 

‍

[00:28:45] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So just to wrap up this phase, I want to ask a question. So ultimately think about it, Waze gets sold to Google. There's a bidding war. It's been told in other places, you don't listen to this podcast, for what happened with Facebook, what happened with Google, uh, et cetera.

‍

It gets sold to Google who has a competing map product. And like you said, it's like the Dobbs and Niles version, the more serious version. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

The grown up version. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

The grown up version of Waze. Waze grows to a couple hundred plus million users. At the same time Google Maps is probably more successful in the number of users.

‍

[00:29:19] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Well, it depends on the metric you're using. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Go ahead. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Because Google Maps does a lot of things. It does walking and transit. All these different things. When you look specifically at driving– 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

This is where I wanted to get to, good. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Which is ours. The company started out with kind of generic metrics, and as they grow, they begin learning more about their business to reach a point of actually having the metric that really describes their business.

‍

And to us, the understanding was it's what we call driven kilometers. It's the amount of total kilometers in a day, week, month that everyone on Waze drove. And that correlates to how much data we're collecting. It correlates in the advertising world to revenue. It correlates to actual usage. It really is the ubermetric for us.

‍

So when you look at that, and you compared it to Google Maps, at the time on iOS, we did more than them. And on Android, where they're pre-installed, they did more than us, but not dramatically more. So when it comes to driving, we're more or less head to head in terms of the amount of kilometers people drive every month with each product.

‍

[00:30:13] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

But my assumption was, though, that it was even more than that. It wasn't just driven kilometers, but Waze is basically your commuting app, at least in the early days. Like, this is how you get home, this is how you get to work. And Google was kind of more kind of, I gotta go to some new place, I gotta figure it out.

‍

Is that correct? 

‍

[00:30:27] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So this was the philosophical kind of thesis behind Waze, right? When we started out, the iPhone was just coming in. Mobile internet was still very expensive. Most phones did not have GPS in them. I mean, it was a different world. You had to jailbreak your iPhone to install Waze in the beginning.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I did that. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

And so our thesis was that, once internet becomes unlimited and free, and everyone has a UI, you know, on their phone and whatever, people will use navigation every day when they drive. It's not going to be a product for when I go to Paris, I don't know where I am. I want to find a place.

‍

It's going to be this situational awareness of what's around me, every day. And when you think about the way people use Waze, it's that. People will say, “I can't get into my car and drive anywhere. I'm driving to the supermarket. I have to use Waze,” right? 

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That's my wife, by the way, not me. Go ahead. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Well, she's right and you're wrong. But that was the goal. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Not only about that, but most things probably. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

But that was the goal. The goal really was to create a product that you would use every day. And that's why being fun was part of it. Because it's not just about the efficiency. ‘Cause most of the time, we don't have anything to tell you beyond your instincts.

‍

Your instincts are right. Most of the time, right? That's why they're instincts. But that one time when something changed is where we're going to earn our keep. But we have, you have to keep the app on every time. And so all these kind of fun components that we add in really had to do with that, with that everyday driving.

‍

And we used to call it everyday driving versus search, in that sense. We very much looked at Google as search in the real world, and ourselves as that kind of everyday application that you use to drive. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Do you regret having sold Waze? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

So regret's a big word. A billion, or 150 million acquisition. It was the biggest thing, definitely in Israel.

‍

It was the biggest app sale at the time. But when we kind of realized we're going towards an acquisition, Amir, Ehud and I sat down and kind of talked about what we want. And we had kind of different opinions. A lot of it's my fault, but you know, they were sitting in Israel, dealing with the servers crashing, can't hire enough engineers, this person wants a raise, you know. I was sitting in Silicon Valley being the cool kid on stage everywhere. 

‍

Everybody wants to talk to you, you know, et cetera. And so there was a mismatch there and, you know, they basically were in the position of, we're kind of tired. If we have an opportunity, let's take it.

‍

And I was in the position of, let's go on. And so we decided, let's build a model, right? How can we deal with this? And basically what we said was, we were planning to raise a round at 750 million at the time, which was again, at the time, a tremendous amount of money. We wanted to raise 750. And we said, if we get an offer below 750, we're not going to take it. We're gonna raise the money and continue. We agreed. So if we get an offer above a billion, we're going to take it. And obviously the term unicorn hadn't been invented yet. It was a little bit after our acquisition. 

‍

Those were the good old days when the term hadn't been invented yet. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And when a billion was a lot of money.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Also a billion was not like it is today. Today everything's a billion. We said above a billion we'll sell, because it's a billion dollars. You know, that was the mythical thing, right? The mythical company was a billion dollar company.  And if it's in the middle between 750 or a billion, it really depends who the acquirer is, because we're gonna have to go work there.

‍

And just to understand how the world has changed, at the time we thought that if Facebook offered, we would take 750. And if Microsoft offered, we'd have to see at least a billion. Cause, and how the world has changed since then. So that was kind of the model that we went into this. We also agreed that if we waited two years, we could double the offer.

‍

So that was the assumption. And the guys still wanted to sell. They said, “Frankly, whether we sell it for a billion or for 2 billion, it doesn't really matter for our standard of living and for the exit, et cetera.” But another two years of the stress, whatever, we didn't want that. And so that's how we went into this.

‍

And obviously it worked very well. Personally, I regret it enough that I actually tried to resell Waze out of Google. And I actually brought a five billion offer to Sundar, and he basically said, “Five billion is not going to move the needle for me.” And that's when I realized that, okay, this is it. We're staying at Google for now.

‍

And this is again is a different view you have on these corporations. You know, you view the world differently. That's one of the things I'm really happy about the time I spent at Google. But I got to sit at the table, when a company of Google's scale was making some really big decisions and just see the way it thinks.

‍

And it is just completely different than a startup. Startups can't imagine the constraints. And that's why I keep going back to, don't try to think about what they would do. You're not going to be able to ever figure it out.

‍

[00:34:56] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Ehud Levy told me to ask me to ask you about the challenges of integrating with the founding team.

‍

I want to ask you a different question, which is, you mentioned on the exit, this kind of a dichotomy between the founders that were in Israel and you who were in Silicon Valley. Is there anything you could have done differently at the entry point to this founding team that would have impacted the discussion at the end point?

‍

[00:35:21] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Well, I think the discussion at the end point was different. It was, what I could have done differently is convince the guys to come to the Bay more often, not just for work meetings, but to actually go to understand how successful we were. Understand what was going on, the extent of the excitement of it.

‍

Look at the end of the day, if Waze had been founded in Silicon Valley–it probably would have happened for a lot of different reasons–but at the same time, you know, a lot of things would have happened differently, and the guys would have seen what was happening there. And we probably wouldn't have sold at that point. And that's one of the challenges that we have with Israel. 

‍

[00:35:57] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Well, I'll argue that, I wonder where the community could have gotten started there. It took some really crazy people early on for some of the stuff. 

‍

[00:36:04] Noam Bardin:

‍

I was going to say, it wouldn't have started, it wouldn't have been able to. The funny thing is two years before we were founded or a year before we founded, there was a company called Dash, and they were trying to do exactly the same thing we were doing, but they had to build hardware because there was no iPhone, right? And, you know, they burned 70 million dollars and shut down. That year and the cutting of the iPhone, right? These kind of pivotal moments when things change, really what matters.

‍

If we had started Waze three years later, it wouldn't matter. Wouldn't have happened. Two years. 

‍

[00:36:30] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Proliferation of GPS, the advent of the touchscreen, the ability to kind of take this thing and put it up in your car against the thing. 

‍

[00:36:38] Noam Bardin:

‍

And have it early enough that Apple Maps wasn't out yet. Google was just getting started, you know, so timing is such an important component. I think it's often overlooked when you think about startups, but the most important thing is that point where everything changes. Today, it's AI, you know, it was cloud. It was like these moments where everything can, everything that we knew in the past isn't relevant.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You have to be ready. You have to be there before it changes. 

‍

Noam Bardin:

‍

Now, obviously you don't–you have to at the change, because if you come too early from the change, you're dead as well. So there's so many constraints that go in there. And so it's very hard to actually, if you try to time the market, it's never going to work.

‍

There's those moments–and I remember coming out of a meeting with Navtech’s CEO, and literally I was laughed out of the room. “Really? You guys, it's a bunch of volunteers, are going to compete with us? With 4,000 people and 2,000 trucks,” and whatever it is. 

‍

Now I'm a kind of vindictive person, I have to admit. And so one of the things I really loved is finally when Navtech got sold to Microsoft, or I think it was Microsoft, or it was for less than, I think it was 900 million. And so, you know, that kind of made that laughter sound better. 

‍

[00:37:46] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That was so good. Right? You'd love that. What did you do to celebrate Navtech's acquisition?

‍

[00:37:51] Noam Bardin: 

‍

But that's the innovator's dilemma, right? When you're the incumbent, you cannot see the world differently. This is the world you see. And that's why startups, at those moments, can make these dramatic changes. Today with AI, anyone in a large company can't imagine what's going to happen to them, right?

‍

They just can't. But 10 years from now, they're going to be gone. 

‍

[00:38:16] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

What present did you buy yourself because of Navtech's lower valuation?

‍

[00:38:16] Noam Bardin: 

‍

That's enough for me. I don't need presents. That was the present. 

‍

[00:38:19] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That was enough. So I want to, for a second, also just kind of highlight something you said about two minutes ago, because I want to come back to it.

‍

I'll put it in my own words. You said that Israelis, because they grew up in a small country, can't imagine how big something can be. 

‍

[00:38:38] Noam Bardin: 

‍

I think it's one of our challenges. When you meet a Chinese entrepreneur or an American entrepreneur, the smallest unit of measurement they can think of is a hundred million.

‍

It doesn't matter. You're measuring dollars, servers, people, it's whatever it is, right? They think in a different scale. When you come from a company like Finland, a country like Finland or Israel, or in a small Lithuania, you know, these small countries, you think in thousands and tens of thousands. And it's, at the same time, you can only think export.

‍

Because you have no market, right? So there are pros and cons. You think global from day one, but you think small. And this is one of the challenges small countries have, is really building that kind of belief that you can do this at the scale. While an American was born into this idea that, of course you can do it.

‍

Google is the minimum, right? You start a startup and it becomes a, you know, a two trillion company. That's how it works, you know? And so we don't have an example of that in Israel, the two trillion dollar or one trillion or, you know, a hundred billion dollar companies that were started. We will, but we don't have them yet. And so it's hard to imagine that kind of thing. 

‍

[00:39:32] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Yeah, I grew up in New York City. So I found that when I moved here, everything felt smaller. And at the same time, one of the first times I took my kids kind of walking around Manhattan, they’d look at me and say, “This building is just so big!” And I think there is a difference between the smallness that you describe and how that influences this where the glass ceiling is above, and how you break through it, versus someone who goes up in a significantly larger country, which we're going to come back to in a second. 

‍

But in order to get there–so you left Google, and you penned a flame, a letter. What's the right way to describe it? Tell everyone what you did, what the letter said, basically. 

‍

[00:40:10] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So I left Google, and all kinds of people were asking me why I left, whatever. And I thought, let's put my thoughts down on paper. And I never had any idea what was going to happen.

‍

If I had, I would have ended it differently. I would have thought about what I'm saying, whatever, but I just wrote what I thought, and published it, and literally the world exploded the next day. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Because what did the letter say? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

So basically I was commenting about the culture at Google and the mismatch of culture with a startup. And a lot of people read it the wrong way, but the way I looked at it–I naively felt that I wanted to make an impact on Google coming in. You know, we startup people think we can do everything, and we can change everything. And I thought I was going to make this big impact on Google.

‍

And I went out and basically fought some windmills around that, and realized at the end that it really is kind of the nature of the beast. It's not something that's fixable. That's what it is. That's your nature. A corporation has a certain nature to it. And, you know, today when, just a side note, a lot of entrepreneurs talk to me, they've just sold their company to the corporation and then they read my note, and they're like, wow, this is really something.

‍

And what I tell them is, “What you need to do is to get out as fast as possible. What you're doing is actually damaging your team. When you're trying to fight to keep it separate, trying to preserve your values and your culture. You've sold your company. It's not yours. Now you've got to–the faster you come to terms with that, the better it's going to be for your team, for the acquiring company, et cetera.”

‍

I fought very, very hard to keep Waze independent. I also tried very hard to change things at Google, and losing on all those battles. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

What was your description of the culture of Google? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

It's complicated. I think Google is an extreme case of a corporation, because it has literally unlimited amounts of money coming from a very small team in the company, a small percentage–

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

The ads business. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

The ads business, search ads, that's where the money comes in at the end of the day, and everyone else can live this imaginary life that they matter. And frankly, they don't, from a financial perspective.

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

The greatest business model of all time funds all of these great ventures. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Of course, they would argue they're not a monopoly, and they're not dumping, and all these kinds of arguments. Bottom line is, we all know what's going on, right? They have this great monopoly, best monopoly ever, creating tremendous profits. They're using that to build all kinds of stuff, giving away for free, that nobody else can compete with. 

‍

The problem, from a culture perspective–what happens is that people begin believing in what they're saying. So this idea of OKRs, right? I make up some goals, which are not connected to sales, because there's no money.

‍

So there's no real external impetus. And I believe that until money transfers hands, nothing happened. So at that point, we're all just talking and loving each other, right? And then when you try to sell something is when you discover what your product's really worth, right? And so you can make up these OKRs and obviously hit 80 percent of them because you made them up, right?

‍

And feel really good about yourself doing it. And at the same time, it creates this culture of exceptionalism–without being exceptional. And it's kind of a lie that everybody lives in. Now at Google, another example is that the currency is promotion. Everyone's focused on promotion, and so it means that if you're an engineer, and to get promoted, you need to show technical complexity–you're going to take the simplest task and turn it into a machine learning model, make it as complex as you can, so you can get promoted. 

‍

There really is no connection, or maybe a better way to put it is the connection to the product. The magic about a startup is that everyone's aligned.

‍

The investors, the employees, the founders, the customers, the partners–the product does well, everyone does well. And that's why Waze is the name of Waze, and the name of the product, right? And Google was like that, right? Google was a search engine, and it was also the name of the company. But when you become a corporation, the alignment becomes to the corporation, not to the product.

‍

So I work at Google and on Google Maps, and then I can work on Drive, and I can work on hardware. I can go work in Waymo. So my alignment is to Google, not to the product. And that creates this kind of mismatch, suddenly, of incentives, and of alignments. I wanna do what's right for Google now, what's right for my Google career–not what's right for the product or for the users. 

‍

Because two years now, I'm gonna be working on something else. And that's a superpower on one hand for startups, and also a weakness in startups, right? That they're, you know, they're so focused on the product in many ways that a lot of scaling functions don't happen.

‍

Corporations become corporations for a reason. And I think the skillset of being good at a corporation is not transferable to a startup, and the other way around. These are different animals. And as soon as you understand that and realize you've sold your company, and it's not yours anymore, and it's not going to continue to operate the same way, the sooner it's done, the better it's going to be for everyone.

‍

[00:45:00] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So if you opened a new company today, would you have OKRs and KPIs? Or do you think this kind of methodology from Google has taken over the world in an unjustifiable way? 

‍

[00:45:09] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So I think what's happened is, as always, the buzzwords take over. And people forget what the buzzwords are there. You have to have clear understanding of what your strategy is, your vision is, what your mission is, what your strategy is, where your tactics are.

‍

You have to have a clear way to measure this. Some things need to change very rapidly, like your tactics. Some things need to never change, like your vision. So call it whatever you want, right? The problem is if you're just following the methodology and you're not understanding really what's behind the numbers, and the numbers don't really matter–like when we started out Waze, our big metric was downloads. You know, those were the days of downloads. It was very hard to measure anything else at the time on mobile. So we measured downloads. After a while, we realized that downloads don't really represent anything that's happening because we're churning through users.

‍

And so driven kilometers slowly became the metric. And once we had the right metric, everything made sense, right? And suddenly we could track these things. But if you're just building these OKRs because you need to, it's like, a lot of entrepreneurs build their strategy for the board. It's, yeah, we need to show the board a strategy, so let's build a strategy deck.

‍

And I used to be like that as well. 

‍

[00:46:08] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You didn’t realize what knuckleheads these board members are, and investors are, and say, it’s not even worth it. 

‍

[00:46:15] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Well, it’s worth it because it's a force and function to create it. So it's not completely worthless. I mean, some of my best friends are board members. But the point is that strategy is a tool for you, the leader.

‍

And if you understand that and begin using that, it's a superpower. It's a tool for saying no, right? Your goal is to say no to 95 percent of the great ideas your great team comes up with. And if you don't have a model for how you're saying no, then it's just emotional. It's because, you know, you like the person, you don't like the person, whatever it is.

‍

Strategy is a huge component of things that I've learned, but it doesn't matter what you call it, you call it OKRs, whatever it is, right? What matters is that it really is what you're managing the company for and with. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

What's an OKR for a board member or a venture guy? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

What would their OKR be?

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

The first would be, do no damage. 

‍

 Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Okay. Right. What's the KPI for that? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

The KPI is not having any damage. 

‍

[00:47:06] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Minimizing the amount of hours, minimizing the number of minutes spoken at a board meeting by an investor, yeah? 

‍

[00:47:10] Noam Bardin: 

‍

It's very interesting. Obviously, some investors, board members are amazing. And like, John Malloy was on my board. Really just changed my life in many ways, and me as a manager–

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

John Malloy? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

John Malloy from Bluerun. 

‍

[00:47:22] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Bluerun Ventures, by the way, was a venture arm of Nokia originally. It said Nokia ended up buying one of these companies and turning it into here. And then here's what it is. 

‍

[00:47:31] Noam Bardin: 

‍

He spun out and he ended up funding Waze, which actually destroyed, it was part of the destruction of Navtech.

‍

[00:47:36] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So Navtech went, by the way, to Microsoft, to Nokia. I think if I remember correctly, and then it became here, and–

[00:47:44] Noam Bardin: 

‍

But the thing that he brought to the table was the fact he was one of the early investors in PayPal, and so he saw what it really was building a billion dollar company, you know, in reality, not reading about it on TechCrunch.

‍

Now the reality is it's messy, and nobody knows what they're doing, and people are fighting with each other. You know, humans are terrible things, right? We put a lot of humans together. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I think most of them are good, I just want to say that. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Well, I think most of them are terrible. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

All right. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

They say a pessimist is an optimist with experience. But the point is, everything's a mess. You're always sure the other company– 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That we agree. Everything's a mess. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

You're always sure the other company is the super efficient company that's running well. It's an amazing business model and just, you're the only one that's a mess. Everyone's a mess. You just don't know them, right?

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Every family's got stuff. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

But having seen it from the inside meant that he could appreciate what I was going through and give me feedback that made sense to what was happening. And to me, that's the biggest value you get from an investor, right? It's what in that partnership, what types of deals have they seen?

What in terms of success? Failures, everyone's seen a lot of, that's no problem. But have they seen the success, the reality of success? And the reality is not what people remember, right? What you remember afterwards is obviously what a great, you know, super person I was. You don't remember the terrible things you did along the way and the mistakes and the luck and all that.

‍

But if you were there as an investor, obviously as an employer, as a founder, et cetera, you just see the world differently. And to me, that's the biggest value, the biggest OKR I would want from an investor is that they've seen success before. And so their instincts matter. 

‍

[00:49:21] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

OK, so, you joined Waze basically as a co-founder.

‍

[00:49:28] Noam Bardin: 

‍

I mean, technically I wasn't a co-founder because I came a year later. 

‍

[00:49:29] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I met them before you joined. I said, “You need someone who can run this business.” And then you came and it was too late. By the way, they called you a co-founder, which I think was critical. 

‍

[00:49:37] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Yeah, I know. When I did due diligence on the company, I went to talk to investors that did not invest, right? That was like the most important thing. And consistently I heard similar things, right? Nobody can change a CEO along the way, blah, blah, blah. But to me, that was the most important thing to understand–that everyone really liked the team, the product, everything that was going on, and I was going to be the make it or break it kind of a thing. And it worked well. Huge risk, by the way. Odds of it working are very low.  

‍

[00:50:04] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

You go to 200 million kilometers grown, 200 million users, whatever the number is, a large number. You're at Google for seven years. You write a flame on the way out the door and all hell breaks loose. I encourage anyone listening to this to go read–

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

It's on my LinkedIn, if you're looking for it. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

That's exactly what I want to get to. And Noam decides to embrace this, I guess, maelstrom. Well, why'd you embrace it? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

In what sense? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

Like you just, you stood up and it was like, “All hell is breaking loose.” 

‍

[00:50:35] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So I'll tell the story. I believe strongly that everybody knows what's going on in the company. That doesn't mean that's what they say, right? There's all these stories that people tell themselves. But at the bottom, especially. Like you can tell the company that we're doing great, but the engineer that sits on the database actually looks at what's going on there, knows that it's not going great.

‍

And so that's how kind of corporate culture begins to get destroyed, when you start telling a story. So fast forward, Larry asked me to give a presentation at the next VP meeting–I was just promoted to VP–and about what I think about Google's mobile product.

‍

This is 2014. And their products were not great. And I was like, okay, I've survived here already six months. Now's the time to get fired. Right? Okay. This is–now it's going to happen. And I got up in front of all the VPs of Google, about 160 then or 180, and basically gave a 20 minute presentation about how shitty the products were.

‍

And as you can already understand, as I'm describing it is exactly how I presented it. I explained why, obviously the mobile, each product has to do one thing really well, can't do multiple things. Like there was logic to what I was saying. I wasn't just shitting on things. But basically it was shitty.

‍

I ended it expecting to be fired. And 160 VPs got up and clapped. Because it was the first time someone said what everybody knew, right? And to me, that is really what kind of where corporate culture comes together. If you're saying on stage something that's different from what people are seeing in the database, you've destroyed the culture, right?

‍

And so being the person saying that, it was an important thing to me. And that's why embracing it when I came out–that everything I said in the doc, I said multiple times internally before. You know, the easiest thing to do is come to an organization and shit on it. ‘Cause as we said before, every organization is screwed up.

‍

And so after, as I went and I kind of built what would became the cross-platform growth team, being growth as a discipline and imparting, I did a bunch of stuff to try and change the problems that I saw, not just to complain about them. And that's where I really saw the inner workings of the company.

‍

Cause that originally, you know, Waze was a separate thing, their thing. I got into the nuts and bolts of the big product units at Google. And that's where I kind of gave up and handed the team over to someone else. But the point is, I said all that internally, I said multiple times to everyone from Sundar and Ruth and Urs and everyone, and you know. 

‍

There's no need to do anything when there's money coming in piles and piles. When you're making 600 million a year, why rock the boat, right? And I think what Google is seeing right now is the outcome of not rocking the boat and what OpenAI is doing to them right now, my gut is it's going to get much worse, much faster.

‍

Because don't forget that advertising contracts are 30 day contracts. Things can change overnight. And so I do think that this is the product of ignoring the real problems for the last 10 years. And by the way, when I wrote that note, you know, I would say 70 percent of people at Google applauded me, but especially the early stage people. The people that were there actually building the company. 

‍

People today go to Google and are like, “Oh, I'm a Googler.” You're not Googler. You work at a corporation. Googler was someone who worked 24 hours a day in the beginning, building a search engine to compete with Yahoo that nobody thought possible, or built an email client that like–there were these pivotal moments of people, small numbers of people, these amazing things.

‍

Today, you're one of the few hundred thousand people, you know, optimizing some clicks. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, right? But those people that were there, they're the ones who reached out to me who are still at Google or left Goole or whatever, who said “You nailed it. You know, someone had to say it, I'm glad that you said it.” And that again, goes back to that–eerybody knows what happens. You might not talk about it, but everybody knows. 

‍

[00:54:18] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

My friend Bill Gurley, my partner at Benchmark has, I think, been focused on this topic that you're focused on right now for a while also, which is–can openAI upend Google and upend the greatest business model ever, but because they've kind of lost their way and search can get replaced by this open AI or the chatbot interface, which is foundationally different.

‍

What do you think? Where do you land on that? 

‍

[00:54:40] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So first of all, I use Perplexity  or chatGPT maybe 80 percent more than I use Google today. And the only reason I use Google more is because they're built into the Safari browser on my phone. As soon as–we can talk about that monopoly–but as soon as Perplexity goes in there, it's done for me. I have yet to run into a query that they can't answer better than Google. 

‍

[00:55:00] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

The other benefit, by the way, of Perplexity over ChatGPT? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Depends for what. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Is it's much shorter. You can actually get a short answer. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

A short answer, but also the links are right there. Cause a lot of times you're looking for something, right? I mean, the problem–

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

This morning, by the way, I got the sources from ChatGPT. They've started doing that. 

‍

[00:55:16] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Yeah, they've started doing that. So it doesn't matter what you use there. It's a fundamentally different thing. Yeah. The basic difference is the business model. Now, because they don't have this hundred or 200 billion business on it, they can afford to charge.

‍

And if they make 5 billion off it, it's a great business. And that's a classic innovators dilemma. But all of this was obvious 10 years ago. And the fact that Google does not, it has a peacetime team that's used to being ahead just because of the monopoly that keeps running things, you know, and we suddenly get a competitive–I would never have guessed this is what's going to bring down Google. Especially because Google invented machine learning and what we call AI today, whatever, that was invented by Google. I remember Sundar getting up on the stage, that must've been 2015 or something, saying, “We are now,” or 2016, “We are now an AI first company.” The mobile-first company was the buzzword. “Now we're going to be an AI first company.”

‍

What does that mean? If anyone had actually said, “Okay, that's a great tagline. What does it mean? What do we want to do? How are we going to leverage AI? Not just the backend feature for our product, but what does it mean for the consumer?” They would be open AI today. But of course they couldn't take that risk. That was their business model. To me, it's exciting to see this happening. In general, I think it's the most–

‍

[00:56:30] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Transformational. 

‍

[00:56:32] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Transformational. Crazy. And people that have been around technology, it doesn't really work, right? We pretend it does. And for a long time, we pretend, this is just shocking and the pace that it's moving.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Shocking. 

‍

I think if you're building a startup today and you're not part of the AI revolution, it doesn't mean that you're building an AI product, right? But that the AI is fundamental to what you're doing–you're missing out, because all the rules have been broken. Now, very few companies have actually integrated. So we're not seeing the output of AI yet. What we're seeing is the potential. And so now's the time to reimagine things, and go ahead and build them and destroy businesses that have been around for 200 years, because the whole world's changing, being reordered. No one knows what's going to happen. So your opinion is just as good as anyone  else's.

‍

[00:57:11] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

Funny story from this morning. I was in synagogue this morning. They took out two Torahs and took out the wrong order. And it's not a hard question in Jewish law what to do with this, but some guy standing there whipped out his phone and said to ChatGPT, “What's the ruling if you take out the first Torah on Hanukkah, and Rosh Chodesh, in the wrong order, what you do? 

And there it was, right there. 

‍

[00:57:34] Noam Bardin:

‍

By the way, I've heard about that. I was in miluim with a bunch of religious people, and they were saying that that's become your Gemara buddy. It’s  just so much better, you know, and just amazing what it’s doing. 

‍

[00:57:46] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

 It really is amazing.

‍

So in five years, is Google worth more money than it is today? Or less money? 

‍

[00:57:52] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Obviously more. 

‍

[00:57:52] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Obviously more.  

‍

[00:57:53] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Yeah. But that doesn't mean that they're going to be a leader anymore. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Got it. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Because of the inertia. IBM is still around and AOL is still around. Yeah.

‍

[00:58:01] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

But IBM, you know, is kind of vast. The market cap is vast, but we think Google is gonna be worth more on the whole. 

‍

[00:58:06] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Yeah. Because businesses don't disappear overnight. Advertise knowledge to go somewhere, whatever, but will most people use Google for most of their searches? I think that's going to change dramatically. 

‍

[00:58:17] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And the monopoly broke, by the way, not because the regulator got involved, but because new technology, and you mentioned Safari is a monopoly, et cetera. And I want to move to a different monopoly and take a really hard pivot right now.

‍

I think it's valuable. So you leave Google, you send the flame, it's now on your LinkedIn I think you are–what's the right way to say this–WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. There's a Yiddish expression, vus is zafin lung is zafin sung, what's on the lung is on the tongue. You say what you think and you think what you say, and you're a straight shooter, I think.

‍

And there, you leave, you, that's why I think, 

‍

[00:58:54] Noam Bardin: I agree with you, for better or for worse. 

‍

[00:58:56] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

You think we don't add so much value, but I think you're a straight shooter. Took you a second there. And there you are, you left Google, you're in New York for the most part, I think living in New York, correct?

‍

And October 7th happens, and you're in New York.  

‍

[00:59:15] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So I moved to the States–first of all, my whole life, my businesses have been split between Israel and the States. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

And you were born where? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

I was born in the U.S. but my parents moved to Israel when I was six months old. So it was traumatic. I had to say goodbye to all my friends and everything, but basically I grew up in Israel. So if I speak Hebrew, I'll be short tempered, obnoxious, like every other Israeli. But I can have this American accent because of it. 

‍

[00:59:36] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

This is a very warm society, I don't know why you say that. I’m being serious. 

‍

[00:59:38] Noam Bardin: 

‍

That's what you say if you grew up with us. I won't forget that. Dana Eisner was the first kind of American we hired, and she's amazing. She ran the U.S. for us and she was pivotal for the company's success. But she comes to Israel for her first time as the new kind of VP of America. And we have a meeting with the team, and it very quickly devolves into yelling and area. And we split the Hebrew, of course, and people yelling, throwing things at each other, whatever.

‍

And she's shocked. She just can't believe what's going on. And she turns to me, “I don't understand, what are the arguments, what are the positions?” And I was like, “Oh no, they're actually agreeing with each other,” right? And that's the thing, we forget how aggressive our culture is, and there's a lot of good about it.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Passionate. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Passionate, sorry. 

‍

[01:00:20] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Emotional. I have this line when I recruit American executives to Israeli companies, I have this line where I say–which I believe to be true by the way also–which is, in America, if somebody's yelling at you at work, you need to be really worried. In Israel if they're not yelling at you, you need to be worried.

‍

[01:00:38] Noam Bardin: 

‍

It’s good. So I've been looking for a while, and I've been very frustrated with Israel in a lot of different ways. I know when the judicial reform came out and my friends were kind of shocked, I was not shocked at all. It was obvious if you look at what's going on in the world. By the way, everything happening in Israel is happening all over the world.

‍

Different intensity, slightly different language, but basically it's the same, right? We're at the end of the liberal democratic order. I believe social media networks are the fuel for this destruction, moving away from facts and logic, moving to my opinion matters more than your facts.

‍

You know, the whole kind of world that we're in. And I just didn't see a future liberal, a democratic future for Israel. And to me, to live in an ethnocentric religious state is not something I want to do. And then a bunch of other stories I told myself. And the 7th–I went to sleep on the 6th, and there's some missiles flying, you know, we have the missiles all the time, it's no big deal.

‍

I woke up on the 7th in the morning, I opened my phone, and I see the videos, and I was like–

‍

[01:01:39] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

The 7th in the morning in New York, which is like 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock in the afternoon in Israel on October 7th. 

‍

[01:01:43] Noam Bardin: 

‍

And I was like, okay, this is not business as usual. And I get on the first flight, I actually managed to get on the last United flight, I kind of got on the last El Al flight, and got to Israel. And I landed on the 8th and called up a buddy of mine, Yair Golan, who today runs the Democratic Party, but we went to school together. And he was a hero on the 7th. He went on his own to save all these people down there. He was the S’gan Ramatcall.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Second in command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Exactly. And I tell him, “Okay, I'm here. What do we do?” He says, “Come on. I'm going from north to south tomorrow.” So six in the morning, he gives me some uniform. I put on the uniform, pretend to be a soldier. And we drive to the south. And we went through everything. We saw the Nova, we saw Sderot, we went to the kibbutzim, we met with the people on the side, and just the bodies were everywhere, and there was something about the biblical level of barbarity that was going on there, that to me was this wake up call on many different levels.

‍

I mean, suddenly all this, everything we're doing in tech on the kind of practical level of what matters just seemed like, insignificant. And, you know, suddenly being Jewish was back in style or not, or antisemitism was back in style, however you want to call it. Seeing it, just seeing the cars and everything, it just suddenly flipped in me.

‍

And at that point I kind of decided I'm coming back to Israel. I went to the army, did a bunch of stuff, but the point was that I believe that the only change happens is through massive shocks. Google did not need to change search. They will not change it, because there was no shock. OpenAI now is their shock, and they'll do something.

‍

Same thing with Israel. I believe that this is the shock that's going to kind of change our society. It seems bleak and impossible now where it is, but when you zoom out a little bit, next election I believe will be completely different here. I don't believe the pessimists and seeing what these, what Israelis did in the first three months of the war, I was involved in some of the stuff, but just this bunch of random people basically building a complete civil society,civil service, running the country by independent volunteers, putting together these AI systems to track the hostages in like a few days, collaborating–that's something that doesn't exist anywhere.

‍

It's something unique about this country, this ability to do things. So I believe that once we, if we start dealing with our real problems, we can blow through them. The problem is we're dealing with imaginary problems. We make up problems that we can deal with, but if we actually focus on the real problems, it can happen.

‍

And I think if this shock–I believe the shock will change things. If it doesn't change things, at the same time, okay, so then we really know that this is it. But I'm very optimistic. 

‍

[01:04:38] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I actually am too. I referred to this as the re-founding of the state. I wasn’t around in ‘48. I guess you weren't either.

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

Thank you. Would have been worse if you had said you were, right? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

You know, I mentioned in my city, we have a guy, we celebrated his 96th birthday this weekend, you know, at 6:30 a.m. with some schnapps, or shots of whiskey, at 6:30 in the morning. He is 96. Just think–it’s 2024, he has a certificate from David Ben Gurion for his service during the War of Independence that he's taken out and shown us.

‍

It's like–there are still people around who remember, though it's not us. Anyway, this is a re-founding moment. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

As my kids say, I'm not old, I'm vintage. I’m like, is the point the vintage or the point of old? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg:

‍

It's a re-founding moment of the state right now. And I've observed, like you have, there's this podcast with me and Eldan Yaniv about two and a half years ago, I wrote an article for Hashiloach, maybe 2016. But what Israel is going for in this era of declining liberal democracy is the most resilient and vital civilian population on the planet. It's an era, and this is really what I want to hit on as a technology CEO, where government simply cannot keep up with people. Like what you described is, you know, the civilians worked on WhatsApps, and dash cams and AI and the government's working on, you know, on fax machines and Windows 95 right now.

‍

And so you've seen this like at Google, what you call the corporation versus the startup. Israel, which is the startup nation, which is named after its startups, is actually the wrong way to think about it. The right way to think about it is the millions and millions of civilians in this country who are very, very capable people act like a startup all the time, whereas the government is like this ossified corporation.

‍

How does that conflict happen or get resolved? Or what happens here?

‍

[01:06:23] Noam Bardin: 

‍

So you know, we were talking about scale-up nation lately, right, and say, yeah, we're actually going to build large companies here. I think we kind of ahead of ourselves in terms of where reality was, but we're definitely moving in that direction. And we have more and more people in Israel who have worked in large corporations, understand the pros and cons and the structure, but the government is still built like Israel thought a corporation was 30 years ago, right? 

‍

It's still built in the oldest possible way of thinking of a corporation. And all that has to be replaced. Now, incrementally, it's very difficult to do these things. You need to blow them up, right? Things need to be disrupted. And I think what we're seeing now is a disruption of the current government structure, and I'm involved in several groups that are trying to rethink, assuming a government comes in and wants to deal with the real problems–what is the right government structure? 

‍

And there's so many things that when you actually get into the details, you realize how quickly this could happen. There are people here with such energy, whatever, if you only just point them in the right direction or allow them to do their thing, we can, this country will be, I mean, Singapore will look like Gaza compared to us.

‍

I mean, it really is. There's no reason that won't happen. 

‍

Hopefully not like Gaza. 

‍

Okay. We'll stay out of that one. But definitely what could happen here is not proportional to any other country in the world. And that's the thing. We keep thinking, we would be next to America. How would it be.  America needs to be looking at us as to how to, what a modern society should be.

‍

But our biggest enemy is ourselves as well. And just like think about corporations, they're in it. Especially large corporations are basically monopolies. They don't have competition. I mean, the regulator is the only competitor, but their competition is themselves. Their ability to actually make the hard decisions that they know are important for the long run, but might actually impact the stock price in the short term, right?

‍

That takes leadership. And that, that's what we're lacking here. I think the whole world is lacking leadership in that. But you see also in corporations, you see what Satya did versus Balmer, right? That really is leadership. It's to come and say, you know what? We're not going to build a phone. We're never going to build a phone.

‍

It's too late. Let's put Word on the iPhone. We're not going to continue to sell operating systems. We're going to sell cloud services, and we're going to take a hit in the short term, but in the long–like it seems obvious now. And at the time it also wasn't rocket science, same thing here.

‍

It's not about rocket science, it's about making the right decisions, even if they're painful, that we all know we need to make. And what I find exciting about this period of time is most of Israel's problems were obvious 30, 40 years ago. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

100%, right? 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

But we had excuses, right? Let's always, nobody wants to make the hard decisions, so let's not make them, right?

‍

We're now hitting the wall where we have no choice but to make the decisions. We saw that from a military perspective, we see that with the ultra-orthodox, both military side and the economic side, right? We see that in so many areas where we have to make this decision we didn't want to make.

‍

And I think there is a coalition of parties right now who are willing to put aside some of their animosity of each other and work together. 

‍

[01:09:20] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Satya had a board. In politics there are voters, at least in democracies, not a board. My friend Eugene Kandel likes to say that the KPI for a member of Knesset or a member of parliament is to get reelected just to get more votes.

‍

[01:09:38] Noam Bardin: 

‍

Well, it's actually no. It's to be a friend of the number one person who's getting reelected. That's the way it is in Israel right now. In Israel right now, most of the, of the parliament in general, nobody votes for them. You vote for a party. Right. So all you know is the number one person in the party.

‍

Everyone else are freeloaders basically. 

‍

[01:09:50] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And so therefore, you know, the KPI basically is how you kiss up to the party leader. So what boldness comes from that though? Like it's not like controversial, Satya had  a board. He could be bold because he didn't have to kiss up to anyone. He didn't make a turnaround.

‍

That's not the case with most politicians. 

‍

[01:10:05] Noam Bardin: 

‍

I would argue that most people don't really have a board, right? Most boards are just rubber stamps that put together by the CEO to make sure they're rubber stamps, which is a problem in general about corporate governance, but when you think about politics, I personally believe very strongly in authenticity.

‍

And I think just like people can smell bullshit everywhere, you know, they smell bullshit in politics as well. And the lack of leadership that we have is really a platform for leadership to emerge and it's a global problem by the way, globally, our generation, it's our fault, right? You and I, capable people, went to make money to have interesting challenges, work with interesting people, eat sushi, you know, have a, wear jeans to work, whatever it is.

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Hey, I ate sushi before I went into high tech, before it was in. 

‍

Noam Bardin: 

‍

But I say, we went to do all these things and we left the government to people we would never hire for our companies. We basically said, take the keys to the country, go do whatever you want. Now we all say, it's all about the people, you have to hire great people, great people.

‍

And our country, we gave to a bunch of losers. 

‍

[01:11:05] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I mean, come on. There were some intelligent people that went into politics. There were some entrepreneurs that went into politics but didn’t make it. 

‍

[01:11:14] Noam Bardin: 

‍

I mean, we think on the whole, right? You think on the whole, we do not have the best of Israel or the best of America, or the best of Brazil running the country. 

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[01:11:20] Michael Eisenberg: 

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The best of America is turning up now, I'll argue, in a big way. There's a lot of very serious appointees being appointed. . 

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[01:11:26] Noam Bardin: 

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And there are also a lot of clowns. 

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[01:11:28] Michael Eisenberg: 

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You know, life is like that. 

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[01:11:30] Noam Bardin: 

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So I have to say, overall, we have yet to see the new wave of leadership come out. And I think that the world is reaching that point where we swing different directions. I believe we're looking for authenticity and for people that can actually deliver, but more than that, people that are just transparent and not political in the negative sense. 

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[01:11:50] Michael Eisenberg: 

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I'm so glad you said that. So you've been super authentic and super transparent, I'd argue, I mean, many things. What would you do to increase transparency without, so to speak, putting the strategic elements of the country at danger? I think this is a key thing. Our transparency is really important to getting accountability and politics have become less accountable, not more accountable.

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What would you do?

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[01:12:16] Noam Bardin: 

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So I don't have a simple answer. It's, I don't think anyone has, we don't have an example in the world today of a well functioning Western liberal democracy. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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New York City. It was under Michael Bloomberg I’d argue. He was super transparent. 

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[01:12:28] Noam Bardin: 

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And again, it's not. It's not a country. We have a fundamental problem right now as humans, as society, right, as civilization, that we're going back to superstitions, back to opinions, back to monopolies, moving away from competition and rationality and science. Everything that the kind of enlightenment started, we're now going back to the dark ages in many ways in our thinking, right?

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Religion is back in with politics, right? The source, I would claim, of most of the problems of the world has been when religion and politics were together. Religion should be at home, it shouldn't be in your government. But we're going back to that all over the world, and that's a dog whistle for people everywhere.

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So, it's a fundamental problem, right? We need to emerge, we need to go back to the basics. Basics of, you know, science, logic, civil rights, individual rights, getting the government out of your life. You know, all these kinds of things, which we've forgotten. Now, we're gonna remember it the hard way. 

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[01:13:20] Michael Eisenberg: 

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You know, liberal democracy is only around for a small amount of history. Maybe it doesn't make it. 

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[01:13:24] Noam Bardin:

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And that's the big question. The big question is, you know, basically the world we know since the Second World War is an imaginary world. As you said, for the last 10,000 years of civilization, the last 80 years have been this anomaly. Where we kind of said, you know, let's not just kill each other.

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Let's try and solve things a different way. But the question, are we going back to the mean? And basically back to this barbaric, realpolitik world of power. Or are we changing and moving in a different direction? Or will we change and continue to evolve in the right direction? It's not clear where it's going.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Will you go into politics? 

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Noam Bardin:

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So, definitely not politics. I was thinking of going into the public sector. For a variety of reasons, it doesn't look like it's going to happen in the near term. And so actually thinking of maybe going over to the dark side, 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Becoming a useless board member?

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Noam Bardin:

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Exactly, exactly. Beginning to think about that. I mean, Israel, the high tech sector is 40 percent of our exports, 20 percent of our GDP. There is no other–Israel is basically a startup factory with a military, right? That's basically what we are. Everything else is a rounding error. And I believe that our kind of startup, or the change we need to do is we need to scale up our startups.

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So we're talking about, I was talking with someone who is in the public sector, but how do you measure the sector? And they were talking very much about the exits of the company, the amount of money raised, et cetera. I said, “No, we need to measure by the revenue. These companies are making, if these companies can build products that in spite of everything around the world, people buy them from us, that is our strongest geopolitical force.”

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Now, you know, we like to think of ourselves as part of the Western world and all this kind of shared values, whatever. Shared values are gone, right? We're moving to a realpolitik world. The Middle East is gone. Oil is basically over, right? I mean, we've got, we're in the tail of oil, right? And so frankly, America is out of the Middle East.

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And we can all say the nice words, bottom line, America is a corporation, doesn't need the oil anymore. It's gone somewhere else. So how do we stay relevant to the Western world? And I believe that the only way we can do that is we need to have a technological base in Israel that other countries need, not want, not think it's important, not because the Holocaust–because they need our technology.

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That's our natural resource, right? And they need it. And to do that, we need to think larger, not just selling the companies, actually building and selling products that are unique, that the world's dependent on. And I think that's the change to me, when I think about the next 10 years in Israel.

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That's the change that will bring us back to being a leader in the Western world. And as I said, to building the country to where it needs to be. But at the same time, without that, we don't really have an alternative business to run. 

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[01:15:59] Michael Eisenberg: 

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Before I get to a few rapid fire questions, I have one last question.

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You said that if Israel lost 50,000 engineers, it would be over. I want to ask that on two sides. Every country around the world, Portugal, Canada, United States, are trying to get Israeli talent. Some of them are being pretty effective. 

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Noam Bardin:

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It's working. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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So what would you do to recruit talent to Israel? And what do we need to do to make sure we don't lose 50,000 engineers?

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[01:16:28] Noam Bardin: So first of all, I've had this discussion with a lot of people and I've actually revised the number to about 10,000. That's kind of what people have kind of pushed me on. Look, there's, you know, there's kind of the product issue and there's the marketing issue. The product issue is we need to change the government and people need to feel valued, right?

We have the most productive people in the world being told that they're traitors, that we don’t need them here, et cetera, while they are doing, you know, 200 days of reserve duty a year and while they're running their companies and while they're trying–so that, I think, that to me is kind of the core product problem that the product needs to be better for people to want to stay on the marketing side.

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I think there are a few things. One, I think we need to have H1B type visas. We need to bring in more resources and I think we need to provide incentives for companies to bring back people from abroad. I think companies will know how to bring the people much better than kind of government process or government organization.

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Let's provide tax incentives, whatever it is for companies to do that. By the way, I think the only way we rebuild the north is by providing H1B visas north of Haifa. Overnight, every tech company will build a center there. They'll bring all our offshore employees that are in the Ukraine and in Poland, whatever.

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We'll bring them there and literally overnight, we're going to have, North is going to be the most productive part of Israel. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Interesting. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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So many things we can do if we try to deal with our real problems and not with just getting into soundbites. 

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[01:17:50] Michael Eisenberg: 

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All right. Rapid fire questions. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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Go for it. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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You talked about the challenge to Western liberal democracy all over the world. Does the welfare state make it or does it collapse?

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[01:18:01] Noam Bardin: 

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Well, the welfare state has to evolve. We have no choice. The risks on the individual are getting higher and higher and higher. I like the model that in, in kind of Northern European countries where the company is not responsible for the individual, the country is.

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So the company can fire people quickly, can hire people quickly, can be competitive, but the country takes responsibility for its citizens. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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I'll take the other side. I think the welfare state's in big trouble. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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I get it. The current model of, we're just going to pay out, whatever, we're not going to do anything.

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That's obviously, but I'll tell you what scares me even more. Throughout history, the elites have needed the common people to work in the fields, work at the factories, fight their wars. With automation and AI, we're moving to a first time in human history where the elites are not going to need the common people because they're going to have robots to do all this.

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What does that do to our world when you can not, you don't need to provide something to them? Talking about the welfare state, I mean, there's potential for much worse things. 

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[01:18:57] Michael Eisenberg: 

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I think that's a fair comment. What is a KPI for a board member's ego? What is the KPI? 

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Noam Bardin:

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Well, the KPI is how big is the ego? 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Like what's the indicator of how big the ego is?

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[01:19:08] Noam Bardin:

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I think the amount of time talking in a board meeting versus listening in a board meeting is a great, simple KPI to track. 

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[01:19:18] Michael Eisenberg: 

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Who's someone in our space or orbit you'd like to say something nice about, and highlight? 

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[01:19:25] Noam Bardin: 

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Something that they're doing? It's not an individual person. I would say when you meet with more or less anyone in the tech space in Israel, I'm constantly blown away by what we take for granted.

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In terms of the minimum, everyone just assumes they have to volunteer and things. They have to go to the army, they've got to help each other out. It's like, there's that kind of a basic assumption, which really is, to me, the essence of Israel. And I think that's undervalued internally because we all kind of think that way.

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That's not the way the world works. It's very unique to us. It's very unique to Silicon Valley. These are two places where you can literally call up anyone and say, “I want to have a meeting,” and there's a good chance that they'll actually meet with you without you being, you know, Steve Jobs. 

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[01:20:06] Michael Eisenberg:

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No disrespect to Silicon Valley, but I think what’s true in tech and Silicon Valley is true in every part of life in this country. 

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Noam Bardin:

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That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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Tell me something I can't find out about you on Google. 

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[01:20:17] Noam Bardin:

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I hate eggplants. Eggplants are the worst. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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Hey! We share that. 

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Noam Bardin:

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Oh, and it's crazy that the Middle East people think it's a good thing. They're also wrong. It burns my tongue. It's just terrible. It's like, if you have to give food a different flavor to make it work, then go to a different flavor–go to a different food. So like, I stay in restaurants, I say I'm allergic to eggplant, just to make sure. 

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[01:20:37] Michael Eisenberg: 

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Same. It burns my tongue, to be fair. 

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[01:20:41] Noam Bardin:

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Well, I just don't like it, but yeah. Okay. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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What strongly held opinion did you change in the last year or 15 months? 

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[01:20:47] Noam Bardin: 

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I think that Israel can change. I assumed going back that Israel was too far gone.

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And unfortunately I think it's going to take, it will take or is taking a trauma like we've gone through on the 7th to actually change things. And unfortunately that's the whole world. I believe Ukraine is going to be the most powerful country in Europe 20 years from now.

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They're going to have the best economy. It's the war creator, a national sense of identity. They've digitized their whole government to create the startup sector in the military. They've done everything that they would never have done without the war, which is going to have dividends for it.

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Unfortunately, I think it's the same thing with us, same thing with Google. OpenAI is either going to kill them or make them super strong. There's nothing in the middle. It's not going to be okay. And, um, and the, the, the need for a trauma to make change is also what I, what I'm optimistic about. We've already paid for the trauma.

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Now let's make the change. 

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[01:21:38] Michael Eisenberg: 

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I think those are good words to end on. I do find it fascinating that we can mention Ukraine, Israel, and Google in the same sentence. I think it says something about these big companies like Meta and Google and Microsoft. These are States at the end of the day. So Noam, thank you for doing this.

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Thank you for the straight talk. Thank you for the directness. And if you're listening to Invested, please rate us five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Join our community on YouTube. You can put comments in there. Any feedback for Noam and me, please write it there. And you can learn more about Noam by following him on LinkedIn.

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That is N O A M B A R D I N. Again, thanks Noam, really appreciate it. See you next time on Invested. 

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Noam Bardin: 

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Thank you very much for having me.

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