A Stranger Launched Their Product Without Asking — Then a Million Developers Showed Up

Why Developers Matter Now

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Daily Dev is this like a unique island of the internet where developers would go to as their window to discover what's happening out there to try out new things. The average engineer is using Daily Dev for 200 times a month on average. That's roughly six to seven times a day, which is a lot for any consumer platform, let alone for such a professional and very busy audience. One thing, it allows the community to participate in a collaborative effort to build a thing they really love. And the second thing is that it builds a lot of trust. When you think about developers, they are among the best bullshit detectors in the world.

Rajiv Parikh 0:42

Welcome to the Spark of Ages listeners. We have a really amazing episode today. We're gonna talk about something that usually you wouldn't want to talk about, which is about developers. And you're like, oh, why do I care about developers? Well, developers build the applications that change our world. Small things that they do or seemingly small things can affect millions of people in fair. Today we have Nimrod Kramer, whose company Daily Dev is a site that millions of developers go to for news, information, conversation, tips. What's striking about him is that the company was built out of a deep tech uh foray that just grew into this business. They built something that they weren't expecting to that just exploded. And what I think you're gonna enjoy about him is his focus on who this developer is. How do you build trust with them? How do you market to them, which is really coun completely counterintuitive. It is not the Simon Sennaq way. Then you learn about his background and how his how he became an entrepreneur from local courses to the Israeli military. Just a really fascinating, unique guy that is definitely worth listening to and learning about in terms of how he's changing the world. Welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. We're joined by Nimrod Kramer, the CEO and co-founder of Daily.dev, the content discovery and community platform on a mission to build the home page for every developer in the world to stay sharp on what's happening in tech. Co-founded by Ido Shamun and Sahi Matslikak. What started as a side project to solve his co-founder's news addiction has exploded into one of the largest destinations for software engineers. Based in Tel Aviv, Nimrod spends most of his time focused on go-to-market strategies, partnerships, and figuring out how to earn developer attention without breaking their trust. He has spent nearly a decade building startups, openly acknowledging that many of his early projects were glamorous failures before daily.dev achieved hypergrowth. Prior to his current success, he served as the co-founder and CEO of the Elegant Monkeys and a board member of Valega Chain Analytics, a crypto compliance company. Originally from Jerusalem, Nimrod's path to tech is uniquely untraditional. He earned his Bachelor of Laws from the Huber University and began his early career serving as a special projects officer and intelligence analyst in Israeli military intelligence. Some of the key takeaways you can expect from this episode how to build trust with developer and engineering talent, cutting through the synthetic noise and keeping curation human. And finally, where developer communities actually live. So Nimrod, welcome to the Spark of Ages.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Hey Rajiv, thank you for hosting me. Exciting times.

Rajiv Parikh 3:42

It's very exciting times. And I one of the reasons we wanted to really have this show or have this episode is the importance of the developer has been magnified during this AI and agentic era. While people can do a lot of vibe coding, a lot of capabilities have been built to really accelerate what developers can do. And so marketing to developers and helping them adopt your platform or any platform is much more important than before. So let me get to the first

The Accidental Product Hunt Launch

Rajiv Parikh 4:12

question. So Daily Dev, daily.dev actually started as a mistake. It's a personal tool your co-founder Ido built before he was a developer news addict trying to scratch his own itch. So take us back to that moment where you realize this internal tool had the spark to become the home page for millions of developers. When did you know you had a real business?

SPEAKER_01 4:31

All right, awesome. So it actually, as you said, it started by a mistake, some sort of like an internal joke during lunchtime and the previous startup that we co-founded together. And the pain point back then, we were doing we were building like a deep tech AI startup in a very particular niche. So we always had to stay at the bleeding edge of everything that happens within that niche. We just weren't allowed to miss any bit of information out there. But the problem was that content was spread across hundreds of different sources. There was a lot of low-quality stuff out there. So the very simple task, just see what's going on, became very frustrating. It consumed a lot of time and a lot of energy. And at some point, my co-founders were chatting. We said, like, you know, the funny thing about engineers is that they build for everyone, but they very rarely build for themselves. So we were chatting with Ido, and we told him, hey man, you know, just build something to aggregate all the news in one place and like work your magic around it and build a thing that will help you do that. Next thing we know, Tsake got married and they went on a honeymoon. When he was back, both Ido and I made him a surprise and we built that thing together. And it started as an internal tool. It was just us using that with our engineering team. At some point, a couple of friends heard about that. And then we're waking up one morning. It wasn't even a side project, it was just a thing, right? We were waking up one morning, we're refreshing the the app and it doesn't work, just doesn't load. We go on the analytics and we just see like a massive spike, as if someone DDoSed the the tried like basically attack the app, but we didn't understand like where it comes from. About an hour later, we see that someone launched us on Product Hunt, which for those of you listening and never heard about product hunt's like a place on the internet where you can launch new products. Nowadays, if someone would launch you without asking your permission, that would probably be borderline offensive.

Rajiv Parikh 6:31

Someone actually put it up there and just as if it was a product, as if they're a part of your team. I mean, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

It's just like a guy from the UK. We never heard of him, he never reached out, he just decided like put it on the site, and there were thousands of people that decided to try out the product. And this is when we've seen the initial spark. This is when we've seen, all right, there's something here, but we still didn't care that much. We've seen their usage, we've seen the retention, we've seen the engagement. And we worked on it mostly at nights, here and there. There were some feature requests, some bugs, etc. At some point, and maybe we can stop there and and and see where it takes us, but at some point we've seen that it hits so much scale that we just don't have the capacity to support the community with everything

Open Source As A Trust Engine

SPEAKER_01 7:17

they want. So Ido came up with the idea of just open sourcing the code and letting developers, which they are also the users of this platform, to build the platform with us.

Rajiv Parikh 7:26

So you had other people paint your fence, basically.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yes, it's just it was just an unbelievably brilliant move because it does two things. One thing, it allows the community to participate in a collaborative effort to build a thing they really love. And the second thing is that it builds a lot of trust. When you think about developers, they are among the best bullshit detectors in the world.

Rajiv Parikh 7:51

Well, I mean, more than anything else, they are dealing in reality. Like they have to build something that actually functions. For those types of folks, marketing copy doesn't land at all. Like open source is the thing that really helps people. Like my own team feels that way. Like when we develop internally, there's almost this mistrust of software unless they get to actually see how it works because they've been told many things before and it just hasn't worked out.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

100%. We we say that all the time internally, that developer marketing is anything but marketing. And I think by the way, that was a huge part in our secret sauce for achieving that hypergrowth and getting so many engineers to adopt Daily Dev as their core homepage, their core workflow of staying up to date.

Rajiv Parikh 8:37

Going back a second, like you saw this massive spike, and how long after that massive spike, before you open sourced it, did you say, you know what, I'm gonna drop the work I'm doing on this amazing deep tech deep tech work, which is what you probably sold yourselves on starting this for, and say, no, I'm gonna focus on this as a business. Like how much time?

SPEAKER_01 8:56

I think it was about 18 months. And by the end of those 18 months, we basically sold all the IP of that company to one of our strategic partners in Japan. We've we were working mostly in the Japanese market with large multinational enterprises, which is a story on its own. And this is where I got most of my, let's put it like business and relationship building skills because doing business in Japan.

Rajiv Parikh 9:20

It's a whole different game.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

It's it's just like it's its own profession.

Rajiv Parikh 9:24

And relationships really matter there.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

So it's literally everything.

Rajiv Parikh 9:28

So 18 months in, you said, okay, I've sold all my other IP, I got this, I got this daily.dev running, and I'm gonna turn that into a business.

Bootstrapping And Monetizing Early

Rajiv Parikh 9:36

And so you at that point, did you then say, hey, I gotta start monetizing, or were you just more concerned about giving features to giving what your community wanted?

SPEAKER_01 9:46

So at this point, we said, All right, if we are to do it, we're going to invest the most important resource that no one would ever be able to give us back, which is our time. So we gotta make sure that it's gonna be worth our time. And the biggest question was first, will it will this project be able to sustain the three of us? So we started bootstrapping Daily Dev. And yes, we focused on monetization very early on. And for a good reason, we were having a decently sized community, which is well sought after, you know, it's like very well segmented audience that a lot of companies really need. And we're talking in again, we're talking about 2020, 2021, when most of the tech ecosystem was in a growth at all cost mindset, right? You remember that boom, a lot of mania.

Rajiv Parikh 10:34

It was absolute mania, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yeah. So we that that was that was like a really good timing for us because like if there was attention to buy, there there were a lot of buyers out there. And we basically started to monetize, and within the even before the first 12 months, we've reached more than a million dollars in revenue, just the three of us, which is which is a good start, right? You don't have a lot of expenses.

Rajiv Parikh 10:56

That's a great AR. I don't know if you call it ARR because it's it's not ARR because it's like ad. Yeah, it's not ad revenue, but it's really good, it's great revenue and a sign of growth if people because you have the usage numbers to back it up, right? These are CPMs, or it's uh you know, cost per impression, or maybe cost per placement. You're getting a whole bunch of revenue from that.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Exactly. Yeah, and and and some advertisers they see success and then they become repaid to advertise, so it is recurring to some extent, but it's not the classic sort of SaaS model. And yeah, and we we've started growing faster and faster, and we were able to monetize and then reinvest that money into all sorts of you know growth initiatives.

Why Growth Has No Playbook

SPEAKER_01 11:34

I think maybe the the most important insight from back then, which still accompanies us today, is that there are no playbooks. There are really no playbooks. Unlike no playbooks, there are no playbooks.

Rajiv Parikh 11:44

What do you mean by no playbooks? Everyone always talks about their playbook. One of my best friends, CEO, Jim Cascade, he even publishes his playbooks. So why do you say no playbook?

SPEAKER_01 11:54

I'll tell you, if there's something that we've seen with Daily Dev, and when you talk to other founders, you you often hear that as well. They wouldn't always admit that publicly, but there's a lot of reverse engineering, the storytelling of a lot of success in the tech ecosystem. So oftentimes you would see a company that it looks like as if they exploded overnight. Obviously, it's not overnight. There's been a lot of different trial and error before that. And then, you know, there's there's a certain true story to what actually happened, and then there's the engineered story, which is easier to tell, which is easier to digest for audiences, et cetera. And a lot of the times when you look at the actual numbers and you talk to the people, you see that the growth is very rarely this like classic hockey stick, especially in B2C platforms. It's it's oftentimes more of like some linear growth step change, linear growth step change, et cetera.

Rajiv Parikh 12:44

It'll go for a while, then it really pops, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Yes, and then it could plateau, and then you would need to somehow ignite that and get and get the ball rolling again. And what we've seen is that with every stage of our growth, we almost had to reinvent the distribution strategy and the type of activities that will help us unlock the next milestone.

Rajiv Parikh 13:03

So name one of those. Like what's a point where you hit, and then you said, Oh, I gotta unlock the next one.

The Swag Strategy For Influence

SPEAKER_01 13:08

All right. So one of the first things that we've done when we bootstrapped, we said, All right, we want to grow, we we understand there's a good product here. So the main bottleneck is that we need people to hear about that. But we didn't have a lot of share of voice or influence on social media. So we try a little bit to do stuff on Reddit. We've seen, all right, that's toxic, it's like very difficult to penetrate. We left that aside. We just felt it's it's not for us. And then we went on to Twitter. Back then it was Twitter before it became X. And we thought it would be really cool if there will be some influencers talking about us. But then when you actually try to do that and you don't have a lot of marketing budget, there's all sorts of constraints that force you to become creative. So we tried to think of what success looks like and work backwards. And the way we did it, we say, all right, there's a lot of different influencers in the developer space, in the tech space in general. There are a lot of companies with budget that constantly contact them, asking them for different collaborations. So if we go through that door, first of all, we don't have the money to afford it, and B, it's just gonna be like everyone else. So we try to force ourselves to think of how we're gonna become friends with these people. Because if you become friends with them, then you can do a lot of different stuff on a friendly basis. And we've tried a bunch of stuff, and eventually what worked is that we realized a lot of these influencers are educators, right? They're educating developers on what's going on, on different technologies on how to code, et cetera. What we did, I just started DMing people, telling them that there is a gift that we want to give them in gratitude for all the contribution they're doing for the global developer community. And I explicitly said that we expect nothing in return. Now, the thing I knew is that this swag box that we're gonna send them is gonna look very cool and it's gonna deserve an unboxing video. Now, these people, you know, this is what they do for a living. So if they get something cool, they will do an unboxing video.

Rajiv Parikh 14:54

I've had a whole episode on gifting by with the CEO of Sendoso. So I'm I'm with you on that.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

All right, so I'll give you the twists in a second. Bear with me. So I'm DMing these people, telling them, hey, you know, we have something for you, we expect nothing in return. They say yes, they give us the address, we ship it to them. Then 95% of them are doing unboxing videos and sending me a thank you message. And that's the point where I realized all right, I need to push down the funnel to become their friends. I need to do something extra. So I use that opportunity to tell them, hey, we happen to have a bunch of other swag boxes. Would you like to endorse someone else that you believe deserves the box? And that creates a second win moment because they would endorse that person. We would create a group chat for the three of us, basically saying, Hey, Rajiv, you know, that person endorsed you for that box. So that's such, you know, it's such a lovely and very rare moment that you get to do. And that ignited kind of like the second very positive interaction that allowed me basically to leverage and say, hey, I'd love to just jump on a virtual coffee chat and get to know you. And then we exchange phone numbers, iMessage, WhatsApp, starting to chat. And this is how we knew almost all of the influencers on Twitter. And that propelled our growth beyond imagination because every launch they were retweeting, amplifying, just because they thought it's cool. What would you estimate the impact of it at? The impact back then, we the thing that moved the needle for us was tens of thousands of users, and it definitely helped us achieve that.

Rajiv Parikh 16:24

That's amazing. That's an awesome example. So, what's the metric you care about?

Measuring Real Value With Custom Metrics

Rajiv Parikh 16:28

So, a lot of times, like you recently ran a hackathon focused on developer identity, right? So, what metric did you see in your dashboard that made you realize that daily dev was becoming the digital identity layer for developers?

SPEAKER_01 16:41

We've tried all sorts of like classic off-the-shelf metrics, but we what we've learned at some point at in a very high scale is that you really need to build your own custom metric. That the most important part of it would be that this metric has to animate the value user has received, right? So you want a metric that when it happens, you know for very high degree of certainty that that person found joy and delight in your product. In our case, it's called, we call it like S S Mao, S Wow, and S DAO. And S stands for significant. There's a bunch, there's like a series of events that can happen on the platform, which are very nuanced to what we're doing. But it could be things like, you know, someone read a post and upvoted that, for instance. So they indicated was valuable for them. Oh, they searched something and found what they wanted. So that would be significant.

Rajiv Parikh 17:33

S Mao, what are they again? S?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

It's like S as significant and Mao was in monthly active user.

Rajiv Parikh 17:38

Okay, monthly active user.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah. Monthly or weekly or daily active user. We're we're looking at different segments in different lenses. Obviously, we're trying to optimize the daily active users. We're a consumer platform, so we care about usage and frequency, and we're quite good at that. The average engineer is using daily dev for 200 times a month on average. That's roughly six to seven times a day, which is a lot for any consumer platform, let alone for such a professional and very busy audience.

Rajiv Parikh 18:05

So, I mean, if you think about those metrics even further, so there's a time where you were bootstrapped. You said that you don't necessarily have a playbook, but do you feel like you have a repeatable go-to-market play, I guess? Or are you orchestrating something that is repeatable?

SPEAKER_01 18:20

I think, yeah, what repeatable here is the is the network effects, right? So when you're small and you're insignificant in terms of like market share and size, it's very difficult to demonstrate network effects where people would invite other people basically to the platform in order to get more value. So with every step of the way, we had to unlock. So there's this story about the Twitter influencers. There's another one of how we did our own very unique referral program. I can talk about that as well. But then at some point, we've realized all right, we have a critical mass of engineers that are using the platform, but they're mostly using it on a single player basis.

Squads Create A Multiplayer Network

SPEAKER_01 18:56

They would log on to Daily Dev in order to see what's new, to stay up to date, to read all the latest news from out there. And we said, what if we create a multiplayer experience? What happens if we let them do it together? And this is where we came up with an idea called squads, which is basically sub-communities inside Daily Dev. So every engineer on the platform would be able to spin up a group. You can think of it like a subreddit, basically. It can be public, it can be private, there's a lot of different features there. And they'd be able to share knowledge with one another. And by now, there's like more than 100,000 groups, 100,000 squads on the platform for different uh geos and different seniority and different technologies and like there's a lot of different nuances there. And that really allowed many of our users to go very niche and very specific, and that obviously attracts other people that care about those specifics.

Rajiv Parikh 19:47

Is there something special you're doing inside of there beyond letting those folks converse? Are you curating it? Is there some algorithmic approach that you're highlighting those that are high quality, or are you doing something special in terms of maybe pulling from one group and sending it to the next?

SPEAKER_01 20:02

It's like a social curation group.

Rajiv Parikh 20:04

Are they kind of upvoting? They're upvoting each other.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Is that yes? They can submit links, first of all. So they if if there's a group around, let's say, React, some sort of a framework for developers, then they like each member would be able to then post on the group. It can be an external link or their own kind of like insight or question or poll or whatever. And then other developers would be able to engage with that. And obviously, when you're part of a group, then we're notifying you when there's new activity there. So there's a lot of different engagement loops that allows us to create activity inside those groups. And in addition to that, there's like the main feed, which every developer gets that has a combination of stuff that are genuinely just interesting for that individual, but also content that comes from those subcommunities, from those quads.

Rajiv Parikh 20:50

That's awesome. So you have this self-created that group feels like it's organic, you're helping them, they can express themselves, but they also are voting themselves. You mentioned earlier the fact that the company's built your reputation on the fact that developers have an incredibly sensitive bullshit detector,

Beating AI Noise With Curation

Rajiv Parikh 21:07

right? So as a generative AI floods the internet with synthetic, perfectly optimized thought leadership articles, how is Daily Dev adapting your curation algorithms to ensure you're not serving up noise or allowing people to express noise? What's your strategy to maintain human trust?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

So that is our entire product. Like this is what we're doing probably better than anyone else right now in the developer community. In other industries, there could be other solutions. But there's many, many layers to it. Let me just touch it briefly because we and we can double-click on each one. So, first and foremost, there's human curation and there's human moderation. On top of that, there is community moderation. So every user can report any kind of post and any kind of activity they see on the platform. And one of the things they can report is exactly for these kind of like low quality efforts. On top of that, there's algorithmic moderation that tries to Auto-detect AI and remove that before any human even sees that. And all these things play out together quite well in harmony that allows us to filter things out. But if all gateways break, there's one thing which I think this is what made Daily Dev such a superior discovery platform, which is that we're using the wisdom of the crowd. So imagine that's a place where there's so many engineers that visit concurrently. We see what they engage and how they engage with different posts. And that very quickly gives us the signal whether that individual post deserves more attention, more distribution, or less distribution. So the core concept would be that there's a new post that goes on the platform. We would pick, or it's automatically, right? So algorithmically curated, we would pick a very small focus group that our system believes they might be interested in that content. We're going to put that in front of them. If they engage with that in a meaningful way and they give us back the signal that, all right, that was meaningful, then we'll proliferate the content to a slightly larger group of interest. If they continue to engage with that, we'll proliferate more and more and more. On one hand, it gives every piece of content the opportunity to get organic exposure. On the other hand, it sets a lot of guardrails for content to become viral. And that's been quite efficient.

Meaningful Time Versus Time Spent

Rajiv Parikh 23:21

That's amazing. So now let's shift a little bit over to folks who are trying to recruit these software engineers, right? Or developers. And that's a powerful way to monetize, right? So Daily Dev is scaling to a media scale platform. And you've mentioned there are vanity metrics. You're urging recruiters to stop tracking email open rates because they're just bots a lot of times. So as CEO, what traditional SaaS growth metrics that used to obsess over are those that you've had to actively unlearn because it was driving the wrong behavior for developer-first community?

SPEAKER_01 23:54

I think that one of the most controversial metrics is how much time is spent on your site. Because there's a very delicate balance here. On one hand, yes, you want to get these people's attention. By the way, regardless of whether you're a media company or not, like every product wants their customers to spend more time on the platform. On the other hand, developers have an expectation to get from like zero to hello world moment, like from zero to value very quickly. And those two motions don't live well with one another. So on one hand, you want them to spend more time. On the other hand, you want them to get the shortest time to value possible, right? And balancing that is not so easy. I feel that what we have learned is that actually we want to optimize not for more time spent, but more meaningful time spent, or less general time spent as long as we see them doing significant activity on the platform. Because what what you want them eventually, you don't want them lurking, you don't want them frustrated, looking for value. You want them to get value. And developers have this like insane amount of intellectual curiosity that if you give them something, it doesn't mean that they'll drop. It actually means that they will go even deeper and even deeper and even deeper. So, Nimrod, so how do you measure that?

Rajiv Parikh 25:12

How do you measure what is a meaningful time spent?

SPEAKER_01 25:14

It depends on the context of the product. So if you ask how we do that on daily dev, eventually we want to help them to stay up to date. And the way for us to do it is to serve different pieces of content for different people. So there are some people that are more interested in you know broader tech news. There are some people who are more interested in releases and change logs, and they're using a bunch of tools. They want to know, you know, what's the latest feature. So everyone has their own uh version of staying up to date. And we've built a platform that serves that exact need. And the way we look at it is pretty much how much content they've consumed and then what kind of positive indication we got in return.

Rajiv Parikh 25:53

Meaning, like, do they come back? Do they keep returning? Instead of looking at just a pure time spent on site and making that your metric, it may be some metric that combines that I keep coming back and getting content, but I'm not living there forever, right? Because that's not your point. Because it'll it'll eventually hurt you.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah, yeah. So the obviously, like when you look, when you zoom out a little bit, retention is everything. Like every business, even if it's a restaurant that doesn't have repeating customers, is gonna go bankrupt at some point. You cannot be a business where people will just visit you once and then churn. That never ever works in the history of business. I never heard of an example, which is why sometimes you see that massive like virality of a company and all of a sudden acquisition becomes very cheap for them. And that is awesome. And I wish that for a lot of founders. But if the company and the product is not mature enough to absorb that and the product is not ready with the right retention in place, then that might actually be detrimental for the company. So retention is a hundred times more important than acquisition. That's I think the core point. Then retention is being measured on, in our case, on a day-to-day basis. We want to see day-over-day retention. We're also looking at long-term retention. We have users that have been with us for five, six, seven years already. There's like a huge chunk of these people already on the platform, which is amazing. But we also looked at look at in-day retention. So we want to see how many times people visit per day, and within each visit, how many meaningful interactions they've made.

Rajiv Parikh 27:28

So that's a powerful way. If you've had that and you get a good average of that, you can then benchmark yourself against it. One of the things that you're you know also balancing with is your monetization side, right? So you have you must be analyzing why developers ignore generic recruiter outreach. And so you're talking about relevance, beating volume every time, right? That's the best way that you're gonna get the best talent. So if we took your playbook and applied it to B2B software sales, what's the single biggest recruiting tactic that tech sales teams could steal immediately to close enterprise deals with skeptical engineering leaders?

SPEAKER_01 28:02

All right. So so what we're we're trying to do here is to sort of like and I know you don't have playbook, but what's your advice? No, no, it's fine. We're trying to extrapolate from recruiting advice to sales. That that would be the point.

Rajiv Parikh 28:15

That's right. So we're talking about what's a recruiting tactic that a tech sales team could use. So you you deal a lot with recruiters, right? And you also have people who are marketing, who are marketing their products to your community.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

To your question, like I'm gonna zoom out and explain for a second how Daily Dev makes

Where Developer Attention Actually Lives

SPEAKER_01 28:31

money, right? This is this is an important part. So Daily Dev is a professional network of engineers. You can think of it in high level as if LinkedIn and GitHub had a child. That is Daily Dev, all right. It's like a professional network, but very, very much designed for tech audiences, engineers and developers, et cetera. And the biggest asset that we have eventually is developer attention and developer trust. We have developers that are coming onto the platform repeatedly in order to see what's new. And the way we monetize is primarily through all sorts of different advertising solutions. So there's a lot of different tech brands and developer-facing brands that want to reach developers at scale, which is that's a massive problem and a challenge on its own. I'm gonna elaborate on that in a second. And the second, second business unit that we have is what we call Daily Dev Recruiter, which is a platform for the HR and talent acquisition teams to be able to hire from within the Daily Dev Network. So when it comes to developer marketing, as I previously said, the key is not to try and disturb the developer and to disrupt their attention, is to actually try and find the most suitable and most organic way to meet them. Now it's easier said than done, right? That's like the best advice. Yeah. Be in front of them when they're receptive. Great. But then how do you do that, right? So if you're a developer marketer or if you want to get developer attention, eventually you realize that there are two families of things that you can do. One family of activities are things that generally have high trust, high engagement, but are very difficult to scale. Think about running events, think about running hackathons. Those are great. Engineers love these things. But when you want to scale it, what happens if you're working for a company that now needs a million developers in order to move their needle? That becomes very, very challenging, which gets you to the other type of activities, which is to go mostly on general purpose social media, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc., trying to either do organic or paid activities there. But over there, you have two types of two big problems. One, most of the traffic is mobile traffic, and developers don't buy anything on mobile for a very simple reason. They they want to try the thing with their hands, and they just practically cannot do it on mobile. It's not a fitness app, right?

Rajiv Parikh 30:49

If you want to sell an API, if you want to sell cloud service, you're not doing cloud code or or cowork or anything like that on a mobile device, right? You you need the bigger screen, you need to do something in one place, have it executed in another screen, like that multi-screen kind of layout when you're playing with something.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Exactly. And you don't get that on general purpose social media, you don't get that desktop traffic, and even if there is some desktop traffic, it's insanely expensive. And the second problem is all about intent and attention. When people browse general purpose social media, they're not necessarily in a professional mindset. They might be commuting, reading about politics, reading about gossip, doing like all sorts of things that could be completely unrelated to their profession.

Rajiv Parikh 31:31

Good target, but out of context. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Exactly. And then and then when when you zoom even out a little bit further and you ask yourself, so, all right, so how developers actually browse the internet, you see the 99% of the time they would either try to find a solution to a problem or a bug they have, or they're trying to find an answer to a question they have. So if if you want to put ads when they're in this mindset, good luck. It's gonna be very difficult. And if you're very successful, by the way, it's probably gonna backfire because you just diverted their attention from something they deeply cared about, which again, it's not gonna work in your favor if you're trying to market to them. And then DD Dev is this like unique island of the internet where developers would go to as their window to discover what's happening out there to try out new things. So if you're marketing to developers, this is where you want to be at. That's number one. The second thing is that 90% of our traffic is desktop. I think that's one of the most magical parts of our platform. So you're actually able to get engineers from an impression to a conversion in the same session. It rhymes very well. Impression to conversion in the same session. And then the third part is that since developers are so engaged with Daily Dev, we're able to profile them in a very, very specific and well-targeted way that allows our advertisers to reach very specific audiences that you just cannot target in anywhere else without having to guess. And that combination gives you the right people, which are engineers within your targeting, at the right time, which is when they are ready to discover an exploration moment at the right place on desktop. That is just a killer offering, which makes hundreds of tech brands work with us in order to scale their developer reach online. So this is one thing that we're doing. So if there's something to learn here, I think I would urge for three things.

Start With What For Developers

SPEAKER_01 33:18

I would like advocate for three things. First of all, as I said, developer marketing is anything but marketing. So if you look, if you look at your copy and it looks even slightly AI generated, you should assume developers would smell that from a mile away. The second thing, you the challenge for you as a marketer is that oftentimes developers would understand your product better than what you understand it. Because they go into the technical aspects, they know how to ask the tough question, they have seen the worst parts of the internet already to be able to assess whether it's for them or not. So so trying to come up with a messaging that actually explains what it does and not how it does it and not why it does it, not all the benefit language, that is profoundly important. Like a lot of times in marketing, we talk about Simon Sinek, the start with why thing. In developer marketing, it's actually inverted. Like Simon Sinek is totally wrong when it comes to developer marketing. Start with what? You want to start with what? Just start with the freaking what. Just tell me what this thing does. Don't tell me that it saves me time. Don't tell me that it saves me money. Everyone saves me time. Everyone saves me money. Tell me what this thing does.

Rajiv Parikh 34:25

I want to verify. I I have a what related question, right? I already know the why. Why it needs to be.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Exactly. And the last point, and that that point I think is actually the most counterintuitive point for marketers, is that developers tend to choose the solution way before they actually have a problem. So since that audience is so intelligently curious and they're consistently looking out what's what's out there, they would explore solutions to problems that they don't have. You know, think about authentication, authentication solutions when when you want your site to be able to register users, right? Developers would look at different authentication solutions long before they have like a business need to actually adopt that. And if you're marketing to developers, you actually want to be there year long and being very cool and building your brand so that when the time comes and they actually have the problem, you're already top of mind for them and they know, all right, I want to use that product. And what a lot of marketers get wrong with that audience is that they say, All right, I want to get, I want to get performance, I want to see conversions now. But you know, when you're marketing something for developers, oftentimes the problem is not something that happened very frequently. Like how frequently would a developer adopt a new authentication solution? Once every three years, you know, it's like it's not very frequent. So you need to be out there, and it's true for a lot of different verticals as well.

Rajiv Parikh 35:45

Marketer may think they're getting a great signal by someone testing your solution, but in fact, they're preparing themselves for some future point.

SPEAKER_01 35:53

Yes.

Rajiv Parikh 35:54

So you have to almost be patient in the way you've like usually marketers tend to be very linear with a funnel. I'm giving articles, educating you, somebody starts to evaluate. So engineers actually evaluating it, they're actually testing, and then they're not ready to buy because their problem hasn't come yet. So it's very different.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

It's very different. Then and then the way sometimes it gets interpreted is oh, this like advertising doesn't work for developers, right? Because they see the conversions, but then everyone abandons, everyone churns. But it's not the case. You know, one of them might actually return and become like a six, seven-figure ACV contract, right? It could become a very large deal on the other side of the funnel, but it's going to be nearly impossible to attribute that.

Rajiv Parikh 36:38

Wow. So that's a very different kind of way of looking at it. Yeah. It's a really interesting way of looking at the way developers function. So when you have advertisers, are you guiding them on this?

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Yeah, 100%. A huge part of what we're doing is advisory and white glove service, not only in technically setting up the right campaigns, but also coming up with the right messaging, the right creative, iterating on that and aligning expectations and helping them truly win in developer marketing. And I think that us having the combination of all that, you know, corpus of attention and trust from that community, plus all the knowledge of what works and having all the process and team and infrastructure in place to really guide those marketing teams when they go to market and in front of that audience has been getting a lot of very, very positive reactions over the years.

Rajiv Parikh 37:29

That's fantastic. That's great to hear.

AI Changes Junior Hiring And Impact

Rajiv Parikh 37:31

You've been heavily critical of the tech industry about treating junior engineers like a cost center, right? That freezing entry-level tech hiring is a massive mistake that we'll pay for in a couple of years because the market will need 180,000 AI capable engineers, regardless of what LLMs are saying about code building itself, right? So now if the industry ignores your warning and relies entirely on AI agents and senior developers, what do you think will happen to the architecture of the tech industry?

SPEAKER_01 37:59

There's always the question of continuity and longevity for every kind of industry. And I think that one of the early notions around AI is that AI is going to take developers' jobs. And that was like a huge part of the conversation. I think that by now, most CEOs already understand that this is far from being true. It's just it's true in a certain sense, but not in a sense that was meant to in the beginning. So it's not that developers are going to disappear from the world. It's that A, the definition of who is a developer is going through a massive change. B, there's a tsunami of like new type of developers are coming into the industry. And C, what greatness or what's the definition of being a great developer also changes very, very fast. And I think that what happens now, which is amazing for those, there's amazing opportunities for those who know how to seize that, is that actually it it matters, it slightly matters less how senior and how junior you are. Because AI basically democratized the ability to write code.

Rajiv Parikh 39:08

It sometimes will tell you what where its own mistakes are or what are potential improvements and optimizations that you can do. So it's more about the knowledge or the understanding, the kind of innate understanding of the developer.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Yeah. So if if you ask me, like how do you stand out, eventually there's like two strategies to do it. One is that you understand that you outsource your knowledge, but you don't outsource your understanding. That usually works really well for senior engineers. They already have deep understanding of how things work, how to design systems, how to design architecture and things that are complex. And it's not that AI cannot do it, it's just AI usually lacks the broader context and implications and the business decision making and the history, et cetera, to really make the right uh architectural call. So one way to stand out is to understand that merely writing and producing syntax, producing code has been commoditized. But the ability to look at something and deeply understand how it affects a business and how it affects different parts of the code base, this is uh one way to stand out. But that is difficult for the junior audiences. However, for the junior audiences, the biggest opportunity is actually to be able to deliver real impact. So if you might not fully understand the engineering nuances and all the bits and pieces and like the big architectural decisions and logic, but you might very much understand product, or you might actually very much understand the business context of the company. So you'd be able to come up with ideas that produce business impact. And the best thing about it is since coding has been to some extent democratized, you're going to be able to execute on that. So if yes, if you're a junior engineer that expects to just get a ticket with a certain task from someone, just execute on that, you might be cooked. But if you're a junior engineer that takes that extra mile to understand what's important for the business I'm working for, the business I'm interviewing for, and you try to create something that portrays your broader understanding beyond just writing code, that's an unfair advantage. And I think you can land jobs in some of the best companies out there, even if you're like extremely junior. And I've seen a lot of founders hiring people who are just like professional vibe coders. They've never written a line of code before AI existed, but they have such good taste or they have such good understanding of the business they're working for, that they're able to produce massive amounts of impact. And sometimes the senior engineers would go and clean up after their mess. That's fine. They might be do a they might be doing a lot of things.

Rajiv Parikh 41:48

You might have to go back and take it take it back. But if you really understand the the value, the difference, if you're showing interest in it and you're not, you're not just seeing yourself, as you say, it's just as a ticket taker and ticket executor, that's where the difference is. I'm seeing the same thing, by the way, in my engineering team and my my team, the ones that are going to the events, that are trying to advise the client on where they should go based on what they're seeing and what they're developing, or even the the team that's working with the client, that's more valuable than, oh, I just solved this problem, the single singular problem. I think you nailed it. That's the difference. And you'll still want the senior folks to create amazing architectures, especially when you're looking to scale, right? And you have to really be clean and efficient. So you still need people that know that code. I don't think coding is going away. I can tell you from my own usage of it, it's not going away. But you definitely you definitely needed developers of all types, and and this is a great way to talk about that advantage. So, Nimrod, this was fantastic. I really appreciate this particular section. Let's

Table Tennis Rules Lightning Round

Rajiv Parikh 42:53

go to the game. Welcome to the SparkTech. We are joined by Nimrod Kramer, the CEO and co-founder of Daily Dev. But long before he was capturing developer attention at hyper-growth scale, Nimrod's path to the startup world went through a uniquely untraditional tech route. You are a professional table tennis player.

SPEAKER_01 43:10

Yes. Used to be.

Rajiv Parikh 43:12

You've spent your career decoding intent and figuring out how to cut through digital noise. But today we're stripping away the code bases and testing your rapid inference skills on a completely different kind, a high-speed tracking problem. We are diving into the ultimate sandbox of elite professional table tennis rules. So, Nimrod, are you ready to prove that you're sharp in the physics and politics of the ping pong table as you are in the home page of tech?

SPEAKER_01 43:38

I hope I wouldn't disappoint, but yeah, let's do it.

Rajiv Parikh 43:41

All right. Be careful when you write these intake forms. Okay. I'm going to give you a question. I'll give you three multiple choice answers, and then you just tell me which one. Okay. Unless you can just answer it up front, which has happened in some cases. But usually these are pretty tough and they're hard to get. Under the official ITTF. Expedite system. If a single game has not been completed after 10 minutes of continuous play, a high stakes countdown clock begins. From that moment on, what specific sudden death mechanical pressure is placed on the player serving the ball? A. They must win the point within five seconds of tossing the ball, or the point is automatically awarded to the receiver. B, they are legally forced to step back a minimum of six feet from the edge of the table to serve, neutralizing their spin. Or C, they must win the point before the receiver executes 13 successful returns, or the point is automatically given to the receiver.

SPEAKER_01 44:42

I would go, wow, that's that's a very nuanced question. I I would probably go with C. I think that one makes most sense, at least to me. But it could be it could be A, but I if I had to bet it would be would have been C. Why do you think C? Trying to cap a game on time feels too arbitrary for me. The second option just doesn't make sense. There's like no way to enforce that. That's B. So I would go with C.

Rajiv Parikh 45:06

All right. Well, great logic. Correct answer was C.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

Yes.

Rajiv Parikh 45:10

The expedite system was introduced to break up grueling endless defensive rallies. Once a 10-minute threshold hits, players alternate serving for just one point at a time, and the umpire stands there, out loud counting every single shot. If the receiving player manages to keep the ball alive and make 13 successful returns, the server automatically loses the point. This rule was born out of pure historical trauma. In the 1936 World Championships in Prague, defensive play was so extreme that it took an hour just to decide on a single point.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Whoa. Master.

Rajiv Parikh 45:43

All right, you got number one. You're on the right track already. So number two, in October 2000, right after the Sydney Olympics, the ITTF completely upended decades of muscle memory by forcing a fundamental shift in the equipment. They increased the official diameter of the ball from 38 millimeters to 40 millimeters. What was the governing body's explicit goal when engineering this extra two millimeters of drag? A to make the balls heavy enough that air conditioning units in massive Olympic stadiums wouldn't blow them off course. B to intentionally slow down the ball's velocity and decrease extreme spin so television viewers could actually track the rallies. Or C to accommodate new, eco-friendly, non-celluloid manufacturing materials that couldn't be molded into smaller spheres.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

So yeah, that's B. I'm quite confident it's B. Watching table tennis online before 2020 was a huge pain. You just weren't able to track the bull. It was too small and too quick. And most cameras weren't able to capture enough frames per second to really display that. And ever since then, online viewing of table tennis has been skyrocketing. So I would go with B.

Rajiv Parikh 47:00

That you're you totally nailed it, Nimrod. And for the right reason too. By the late 1990s, professional table tennis had become a blistering blur of microsecond rallies that were completely unwatchable on standard TV screens. To fix this, the ITTF artificially slowed the sport down by increasing the ball size from just slightly 38 millimeters to 40 millimeters, adding just enough aerodynamic drag to reduce overall speed, drop the extreme spin rates, and give TV audiences a chance to actually follow the action. You got two, so you're you're on a roll. I mean, this you're doing better than most people do. All right. Number three, in the late 1970s, a bizarre piece of game called the combination or frictionless long pimple rubber nearly broke the sport. These sheets featured long, thin rubber pegs that would wildly bend and scrape the ball, completely reversing the opponent's spin back at them in unpredictable ways. To outlaw this chaotic strategy, what strict engineering metric did the ITTF introduce? A they instituted a strict aspect ratio limit, stating that the height of the rubber pimples divided by their diameter cannot exceed a certain threshold. B, they mandated that all rubber sheets must be entirely smooth, completely banning the use of external pimples. Or C, they required all rubber pegs to be coated in a friction-increasing grit to prevent the ball from sliding off the surface.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

So it's definitely A. I think they regulated the height of the pimple.

Rajiv Parikh 48:54

To save the integrity of the sport, the ITDF stepped in with strict geometric engineering laws, mandating that the height to diameter aspect ratio of the rubber pimple could not exceed 1.1, thereby cutting down the physics-defying wobble. So you got it, three out of three. You want to keep going? I got one more. Let's do it. All right, one more. In the modern professional era, you can no longer simply drop the ball onto your racket or sneakily flick it out of your hand to serve. To guarantee total transparency and give the receiver a fair chance to read the spin, the ITTF introduced a strict vertical metric for the initial ball toss. According to the official rulebook, how high must the ball be thrown near vertically from the palm of the free hand before it can be struck? Do you know this off the top of your head?

SPEAKER_01 49:45

I think it's roughly 30 centimeters. I think that's more or less the, but but I don't recall that.

Rajiv Parikh 49:50

Okay, I'm gonna give you three choices. A a minimum of 10 centimeters, the height of a standard smartphone. B, a minimum of 16 centimeters, roughly 6.3 inches, or the height of a dollar bill, or C a minimum of 30 centimeters, exactly one standard ruler length. So smartphone, dollar bill, ruler.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

I think size of a ruler.

Rajiv Parikh 50:15

All right. Well, guess what?

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Oh no.

Rajiv Parikh 50:18

You actually got one wrong. I should I should have I should have stopped at the peak. You peaked out. But you know what? Just like any great entrepreneur, you're open to learning and pushing the envelope. So it was B 16 centimeter service rule was created to eliminate hidden momentum by forcing the server to toss the ball up at least 6.3 inches from the open stationary palm. The Empire can verify that the ball is traveling almost purely vertically and the player isn't imparting hidden spin or velocity using their fingers before the racket even hits it. So they were looking for that balance. But you probably force that in your offices. Because I know engineers, they love playing table tennis. So I could probably see saying, Well, nope, make it higher.

SPEAKER_01 50:58

Yes, and they definitely lose to me. They don't stand the chance.

Rajiv Parikh 51:01

You are the champion. You are still the champion in the office.

SPEAKER_01 51:04

Yeah, no, it's it's just unfair. It's like a sumo wrestler with a seven-year-old kid. It's like they they can't win.

Rajiv Parikh 51:10

Okay, so that'll be the challenge. When you go to any office, everyone's gonna want to take you down. For me, that's uh I'm not a professional, but foosball was the one thing I played every day in college. I typically can meet beat much younger, more agile folks. So, okay, did you know you always wanted to work in technology?

From Military Intelligence To Startups

Rajiv Parikh 51:28

Was there like a specific moment or project that sparked your passion? What got you sparked?

SPEAKER_01 51:34

I think what actually got me sparked into tech was a series of events. I think the first spark was actually in high school when there was an extracurricular program that was provided by an Israeli local tech company that really tried to encourage young entrepreneurship. It was a class you would take in the evenings twice a week. And I decided to apply to that program, and it was fantastic. We were building something very similar to DoorDash, but we're talking about 2007. That's like a long time before DoorDash founders even were allowed to buy a pint of beer. So we were doing that, that was really cool. And then the second place where it really accelerated that passion in me was actually after I after I joined the military. So I was lucky enough to serve in the intelligence forces, and that was an amazing place to A, be exposed to very good work ethic and creative thinking, and B to be exposed to a lot of different technological innovations that got me inspired to try and do my own dent in the world. But I took it in my own way and in my own style. And what I wanted to do is things that are actually the opposite of what militaries in the world do. They usually do bad things because that's the nature of what they're obligated to do. So I wanted to do good things with technology. I wanted to do good things with my creativity, and this is how I basically got into tech.

Rajiv Parikh 53:08

Nice. And next question. You began your career serving in the Israeli military intelligence, as you talked about. Today you spend your time deeply analyzing how developers and recruiters interact at scale. So, how did analyzing complex intelligence in a high-stake military environment prepare you for the challenge of deciphering developer behavior and building a data-driven platform?

SPEAKER_01 53:28

Yeah, look, so obviously for natural reasons, I cannot talk a lot publicly about what I've been doing, but a big part of my job was to be able to ingest a lot of different pieces of information from a lot of different pieces of sources and to come up with a clear image of what's happening now on a certain topic or matter. And that is a muscle. It's actually a muscle that you can build. It's not an easy muscle to develop. And you need just to kind of like put you in perspective, to be successful in that job, you need to be able to read more or less 300 pages, like A4 pages a day of content, of different types of content in order to really understand enough amount of information to get a clear picture of what's happening. That time I really learned how to scan through a lot of different uh pieces of information very quickly so that I'm efficient.

Rajiv Parikh 54:24

And a lot of times when you're doing that, it's not in a narrative or story, it's just information all over the place. And you're you have to see enough of it to create the synthesis to synthesize it, and you're learning how to do that.

SPEAKER_01 54:35

Exactly. And and I think eventually in in tech, it translated to something that I take great pride in, which is to analyze the market and the positioning and to make sure that we're building the company in a way that is both different, because I I'm these kind of people that believe that different is better than better. So I never want to play the better game. I always want to play the different game. And that requires like deeply understand what other big dominant players are doing and where they're heading. And oftentimes they wouldn't publicly disclose that. They might talk about some things, but that doesn't necessarily imply what are the real intentions and where where they're actually heading. And I think that I've developed this like sixth sense of seeing where markets are going. And that allows me oftentimes to kind of like shift things in daily dev to position ourselves in front of the wave before it comes so we can surf it. And that has been really impactful for me as a business owner, I think.

Optimizing For Happiness As A Leader

Rajiv Parikh 55:30

Great answer. You have described your core philosophy as an entrepreneur as trying to optimize for happiness, which you define as working on a mission you love with people you love. Throughout your career, what's been the hardest professional decision you've had to make to protect that happiness optimization? And how do you maintain it now that Daily Dev has scaled to millions of users?

SPEAKER_01 55:51

All right. So there's two parts of this question. So I think that if there's something that has been important for me for years is always to optimize for happiness. Now, when I say that, oftentimes the the first impression is all right, this person is very selfish and he only cares about himself. But what I actually mean in the simplest way is that optimizing for happiness is living the moment. But I don't want to, I don't want to stay in that level. So what I've seen over the years in my environment is that there's a lot of people that are always chasing the next thing, right? So you see, especially you see a lot of young people that they are in this mindset that when I finish high school, I'm gonna be able to do this and that, I'm gonna be happy. When I get my driver's license, I'm gonna be happy. When I graduate from university, when I get the that promotion in my job.

Rajiv Parikh 56:40

Always look forward to something else that'll drive your happiness instead of living for today.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

And trying to constantly achieve happiness and achieve perfection is counterproductive because something that is perfect is by definition perfect because you you cannot touch it, right? It's it's untouchable. Once you touch it, it's no longer perfect. That's the conflict, that's the inherent conflict. So for me at least, the the way to unlock happiness, happiness is to make sure that every single thing that I do on a daily basis is something that I that I'm inspired by, that I appreciate, that I work with people that I love working with, that I'm working on things that I believe matter, not only to myself, but also to a lot of other people in the world. And when people ask me, like, why am I an entrepreneur? the first answer is I optimize for happiness. I could have probably done a lot more money going through different career paths. I could have been very successful in other places as well. But and I could have failed too, taking a lot of risks. What you know, you can never know. But for me, the reason why I'm doing daily dev is because I feel that with every single thing that we do, we eventually touch billions of people. Because you think about developers, they're the ones building everything around us from the software and the iPhone that we're using to the app that my grandma is using in order to book an appointment with a doctor. And if I'm able to inspire these people, if I'm able to give them the slightest of edge to do a slightly better job, that in the aggregate affects so many people in so many different ways around the world.

Rajiv Parikh 58:10

It's a dream job, you know. For me, it's a dream job. Is there a decision a hard like you were talking about the hardest professional decision you've had to make to protect that? You made that decision to go into being an entrepreneur versus any number of careers you could have gone into, right? With the same mindset and capabilities. So this is your ability to risk, make impact, but in that job, have you had to do something that to protect that notion of happiness optimization?

SPEAKER_01 58:36

The hardest decisions are always around people, obviously. And letting go of people is is definitely difficult anytime. And I'm I'm the kind of manager that really believe in in the people that I hire, even when they sometimes when they don't deliver, even when sometimes you know I expect them to do something or I expect them to grow into something and they fail to do that. I keep believing more and more and more. But at some point, it might become weight. And when you're running a startup, it's really important that you're you're doing that with A-class people. And those types of people tend to really thrive when there's other A-class players next to them, right?

Rajiv Parikh 59:18

By the way, and I think sometimes what you're doing by having that person that's not fitting with your team, it may not be that that person is not able to grow. It's just not able to grow in the environment that's there. They need an they need a different environment for them to do well in it. So sometimes you're actually freeing them to do something better if they take it the right way. And I I've found that to happen with like at my company's at now about 150 people. I, you know, many times will look at it as, well, this person's been with me for a while. I've tried so many ways to help them, but I can't, they're not getting it. So maybe I should let them get free and so that they open their mind to new opportunities. There's going to be pain. It it's terrible to feel like you've been pushed out. But if you do it the right way, they may feel better and they may find something that's much better for them. And they should find something that's better for them.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:08

Definitely. It it happens, it happens very frequently. Like I can totally resonate with what you're saying. In my particular case, I just always use those opportunities to remind myself of my part and how we've gotten into that point. So it's it's never just me or just them. There's always like some sort of like shared responsibility here. And whenever I feel that I have like shared responsibility in something that wasn't successful, it's usually like weighing on me and getting me away from being able to live the moment because then I live a moment which is very difficult to live in. And then to fix that, that usually means that you will need to go through a little bit more pain and more suffering, but it's part of the journey as well.

Rajiv Parikh 1:00:54

I tell you, just like you, I feel tremendous pain whenever I have to make those decisions, but at some point it happens. So let's go to some quick

Quick Personal Questions And Trust

Rajiv Parikh 1:01:02

personal questions. So quick questions, quick answers. What's something that you've gotten significantly better at in the last year that has nothing to do with work?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:10

Organizing the dishes in the dishwasher. You just you you wouldn't believe how efficient I am in that. I've engineered the hell out of our dishwasher.

Rajiv Parikh 1:01:19

All right, when you come to my house, uh, we'll we'll have a contest to see who's the most efficient at arranging and if the dishes get cleaner, because I'm a fanatic about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:29

Yeah.

Rajiv Parikh 1:01:30

Okay, if you could swap lives with someone for just one week to see what it's really like, who would you choose?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:36

I would be interested switching lives with Donald Trump.

Rajiv Parikh 1:01:41

Why would you say that?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

I don't know. He's such a character. I would love to just be there for I don't think I would be able to absorb 24 hours of that person's character, but I would be interested to be one hour in his mind and just like see how this guy thinks because it's just unbelievable the way it's unbelievable and unpredictable. So I just want to be in that brain and understand what's going on there. Not from I'm not saying that from from uh as as a critical.

Rajiv Parikh 1:02:10

It totally makes sense. You you're not the only one who said that. So I I appreciate it. It does make sense. It's so different than what we've been used to as a leader or president of a big democracy. So it would be interesting to a lot of folk to and obviously I don't take any like political stance here.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:28

So it's not a political thing, figure. Yeah, it's just fascinating. I just gotta be in that person's brain for an hour and just see what's going on there.

Rajiv Parikh 1:02:36

I would yes, it would be amazing. What's something you do to feel like yourself when life gets chaotic or overwhelming?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:44

I take long walks with my dog. That is the number one. At this point, I'm married, I have two kids, and my wife is pregnant with a third child. But but our dog, Luli, came before the kids, so to some extent, she's like the elder child in the in the house. So whenever I need some quality time to decompress, I would take her out for a long walk. It could even be like two, three hours, just like walking all across the place.

Rajiv Parikh 1:03:10

And when you pet your dog, it elicits oxytocin. So that's a great thing to do that. So and be to be with a pet that's unconditionally loving you. So, what's something you wish you could experience again for the first time?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:23

Going to Disneyland with my kids. We've just gone there a couple of weeks ago, and it was such a magical experience seeing them there and how they believe that they're actually meeting the Disney figures. I would pay any fortune to relive those moments. That was just like amazing.

Rajiv Parikh 1:03:43

When I go when I would go there with our kids, it didn't matter what age they were. I would marvel at how they've designed the experience to appeal to every age, from baby all the way up to a senior person. They how they arrange the sets, the lighting, the rides, the the characters. It was really well thought through and continues to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:07

It's amazing. There's no no way to describe it. But if you're listening and you have young kids and you haven't been to Disneyland and you can go and you can afford going to Disneyland, please do it. Do yourself a favor.

Rajiv Parikh 1:04:18

Definitely a great life moment with your kids. Something you shouldn't miss. And the last question: what's the most important thing you've learned about earning someone's trust that you wish you'd known earlier?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:29

I think the most important part of earning someone's trust is just to be your full authentic self. And one of the biggest struggles for a lot of people is that they are still debating internally between them and themselves who they actually are, what really matters to them, what they want. And to be able to go through those resolutions at an earlier age, I think can be profoundly important for you to build a character and to understand who you actually are, what are your values, and then stick to those values, and that will then attract and establish trust with the right kind of people over time. And if there's something that I would I wish I would have done earlier was a leadership process that I've gone through in officer's course in the army. It's like a seven-month training, which is focused solely on who you are, what are your values, and and how do you then lead with those values and basically reinforcing all the screws in your spine so that you're so that you know who you are. And then when you go through that process, it changes your posture, not physic, both physically, but like it changes your mental posture in front of other people that allows you to build long-lasting relationships and trust with individuals. And I think a lot of people decide whether they trust a person or not in the first couple of seconds probably of a conversation, whether it's in a conscious way or an unconscious way. So being very complete and coherent with who you are will just help you get that more naturally, I think.

Rajiv Parikh 1:06:06

That's great. You know, I must say the minute you got on the call earlier today, I felt the same way about you. So thank you for joining us today and being so insightful. I know it's really late at night where you are near Tel Aviv, and really appreciate you spending the night with us talking through this amazing company you've built and what makes you tick and what what's your spark? So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:29

Fantastic. The pleasure is all mine, and don't worry, I'm a night owl, so I only get started now. It's gonna be a long evening.

Closing Thanks And How To Support

Rajiv Parikh 1:06:41

All right, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere podcasts can be found. The show is produced by Anand Shah, edited by Laura Ballant, production assistant by Taran Tali. I'm your host, Rajiv Parik from Position Squared, a leading AI native growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at Position2.com. This has been an F Funny production. Remember and look out for their upcoming kick ass movie, Vivia's Guide to the Afterlife. It's a dramedy, it's it's funny and poignant. I think you'll really enjoy it. And we'll catch you next time. And remember, folks, be ever curious.