Ofer Shayo Show Notes

Ofer Shayo is a passionate tech entrepreneur with over 15 years of senior management experience focused on enterprise SaaS, mobile, social networking, and Cloud TV products with superior user experience.

Co-founded Tvinci in 2007 and built and developed a world-class team of talents with a diverse, innovation-driven culture. Tvinci was acquired by Kaltura in 2014, and today it serves Kaltura’s customers under the name Kaltura Media and Telecom. Tvinci’s Cloud-TV platform is serving today millions of Pay-Tv subscribers worldwide (Deployed by Vodafone, Veon, Turner, Viacom, KDG, Ono and MediaCorp).

Currently, Ofer is based in London with his family and is starting to build a new tech company.

What is Ofer most passionate about?

• I defined myself as an entrepreneur almost from day one. A few months ago, I left Kaltura – the company that acquired my company five years ago – and I’m now in the Avery structured ideation process to find an innovative idea and establish a new company with my current co-founder.
• In the beginning, for a few months, I started to look for my new startup idea without a structured process. I had a lot of free time, and since I’m based in London with beautiful parks around me, was sitting there and thinking of new ideas. Whenever I thought of an idea that seemed good to me, I said OK, let’s do a proof of concept and research around it. I thought of three new ideas that way.
• However, I realized it’s not the right way for me. I want to be able to compare a few ideas, to make sure they have a big enough target market, and that we can lead the market in terms of the competition in a market that hasn’t been destructed so far.
• I have a few parameters on my list at the end of the process. I will choose an idea that most likely will be my day job for the next five to seven years.

The story of Tvinci

• I met Ido Wiesenberg, my Tvinci co-founder, while we were on a trip walking on a mountain in Guatemala, and we talked about the opportunities for connecting Mobile, TV, and PC, the “holy triangle,” and that was in 2004.
• We were both students originally from Israel. When we came back, I joined the business Ido established a few years earlier as co-CEO. It was a kind of creative agency.
• After a few years together, we reached some really big customers in Israel and outside of Israel. We decided that we wanted to build a product company. We made a clear decision that it would be in the video space.
• This was right after Google acquired YouTube in 2006. We did some business research, and we built a sort of demo: a proof of concept of a kind of interactive player with social layers above it.
• We shared it with a few prospective customers. One of them was Wacom in Israel. They liked it, they adopted it, and we built a product around it. We branded it as Tvinci, and we raised our seed money.
• At the beginning of 2008, we already had a few customers, including Wacom.
• The name came through our third co-founder Guy Barkan. In the beginning, we thought we are reinventing the TV, and the first entrepreneur in the world was Leonardo De Vinci so together it’s Tvinci.
• The product was a white label of Netflix. We approached mobile operators, TV cable operators, and media companies and allowed them to build their own TV business on the cloud.

Ofer Shayo & Ido Wiesenberg – Tvinci co-founders

Ofer’s best advice about customer focus, marketing, and sales

• Success is something personal. Our bigger success in Tvinci was...