As per Statista, globally there are more than 2.6 Mn Apps on Google Play Store, and when you’re building in today’s age of internet, you need as much as visibility possible around –

# Accurately measuring the impact of your marketing initiatives

# Actionable insights on your user behaviour

# Potential Competitors & on what metrics do they compare with you and where do you & your team needs to focus more.  

To understand mobile marketing analytics better in this episode we’ve with us Oren Kaniel, CEO & Co-founder, AppsFlyer.  

Founded in 2011, AppsFlyer has grown leaps and bounds and is currently amongst the top choices of marketers to mobile marketing analytics.  

In today’s episode, we talk with Oren about how they built and grew AppsFlyer where there was almost a free option like Google Analytics available to the masses, also what’s their focus triangle about Privacy, Users Value and Safety.  

Lastly before we dive deeper into the podcast, something that Oren’s mentioned during the episode – “Do not fall in love with your product, fall in love with the ecosystem, with the problem-statement.”

Notes – 

03:09 – Intro to AppsFlyer

03:55 – Starting with Entrepreneurship

05:53 – Identifying the opportunity and starting AppsFlyer

09:18 – How well positioned is Israel for capturing Asian and Global markets? 

12:55 – $300 Mn ARR from the US & rest of the Global market

13:46 – Journey from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10

20:13 – Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?

22:25 – Ensuring faster growth by balancing pricing and revenue model

27:53 – Evolving of Go-To-Market insights over time

38:19 – Building the team and culture

Read the full transcript here:

Oren  0:00  

We had pricing. So we showed that to our customers, but it really didn’t bother them. We also didn’t bother to in the very early days, we didn’t really bother to have contracts if there is no if the customer doesn’t require a contract, let’s just start working with them. So, we’ve kind of removed all the barriers to the minimum in order for us to work with more great customers, so this offer will be used by more companies so that we can learn more and grow faster. So that this is something that we both, actually this is how it is right now, revenue right now has different meaning of revenues basically, is financing the innovation and financing this whole company, I mean, in the early days, your entire operation is based on a VC money and external invest or as you grow into that scale, the magnitude of the investment they can make is limited by how much revenue collecting so this is this is why it’s becoming much more critical on the less later stage in the beginning. 

At the beginning you must get validation for the fault for the value. Now for the externalization, obviously if you have revenue, you figure out okay, they pay for the service, they find value, this is great, churn is low, okay, this is great. But when you’re working in the company 24/7, you don’t need this kind of validation. Because you know companies find value, you know that they need you, you know that they’re using it every day. And you know that this is also sneaky by nature. So you don’t need this kind of validation. The validation is to have more customers and more validation. So we can learn more and enhance more. 

So I don’t remember the idea of the question. But anyways, I think that the revenue is kind of a byproduct of doing great things. And I think that we just need to follow it. The thing is, how can you build a lot of value and just capture and monetize a small part of it. So customers will be happily paying you for the service because they understand how much value you deliver to them. So this is kind of the mindset that we had and still have.

Nansi  2:32  

Hi, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to share that this podcast is brought to you by Prime  Venture Partners. An early stage VC fund led by Amit Somani, Shripati Acharya and Sanjay Swami. Prime is often the first institutional investor in category defining tech startups in FinTech, SAS, healthcare and education, such as Mygate, Quizizz, PlanetSpark, Bolt and Glip. To know more about Prime, visit https://primevp.in/ 

Siddhartha  3:03  

Hi this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Welcome to 100X Entrepreneur podcast. I have Oren Kaniel with me, the founder of AppsFlyer. If you are a mobile developer or ever have touched the mobile development part or a marketeer in the mobile space AppsFlyer wouldn’t have escaped you. They are one of the largest companies in mobile attribution, and mobile analytics for marketers. They help make sure that your marketing budget is not wasted. Oren, before the podcast mentioned to me, a very senior marketeer once told him that half of the marketing budget is wasted. But they don’t know which half. So Oren, welcome to the 100X Entrepreneur podcast.

Oren  3:52  

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Siddhartha  3:55  

Oren, would love to start by, what got you into entrepreneurship from the VC world? And why did you start in Israel first, and then move to the US?

Oren  4:07  

Let’s start with entrepreneurs. So first of all, I think that people kind of make mistakes with a definition of entrepreneur, my personal definition of entrepreneur is someone that is deterministic about something. He has good judgment, he’s challenging the status quo. And he or she just has this ability to end resilience and consistency around their ideas and their passion, their beliefs and how they can make this change in the world. And that’s not necessarily leaving your day job and starting something of your own. I think that there is a lot of entrepreneurship internally. I think that when I was working for different companies, I think that that was intrapreneur because this is what my mindset was. 

And this is what I encourage: I encourage people, I encourage my people, my team here to think, like a founder to think like an entrepreneur, because they are. And no one is telling them what to do, and they need to figure this out, we can help them. And we have this as well, we have this kind of structure. But the structure doesn’t need to limit. If you have good ideas, all you need to do to actually to take your idea to convince people around you, and get some budget to it and get some attention to it. And the same goes for entrepreneurs. So I think that people kind of be stacked. You asked me about why I started the company.

Siddhartha  5:52  

Yeah. So one, why you started as an entrepreneur, and then what made sense for you to start AppsFlyer. And now you have become a VC before becoming an entrepreneur.

Oren  6:07  

About 10 to 12 years ago, I went to the US as an exchange student in Wharton, to complete my MBA studies. Back then, I was using a Blackberry like many of us, and I was sure that Apple didn’t have a chance to compete with this amazing device. Obviously, I was very, very wrong. I still remember the first few days that I was using this device, I couldn’t go to sleep actually, I was so excited. And I was sure that this device is going to change everything in our lives. And I wanted to take part in this revolution. Later that year, I was fortunate enough to find a summer internship in a local VC in Philadelphia. And over there our research was on mobile applications, data analytics and marketing technologies. 

And I still remember two major findings. One is that mobile is growing exponentially in a way that it was really the beginning and really in a way that reminded me of the 19 century gold rush. And specifically the Levi’s story, that only at this time, app developers needed software and software tools to allow them to do a great job and to be successful in this emerging market. And also found really major problems in the ecosystem that I was passionate about. One of them was the lack of measurement, a lot of spray and pray. And maybe for me as an engineer, and kind of looking for the logic and the logical mindset. It just didn’t make sense. That company makes decisions with data and data analytics tools, and I was sure that someone needs to solve it. 

The second thing that I noticed was that while the rest of companies, hundreds and 1000s of companies with a lot of conflicting interests. And I couldn’t find even one company to entirely represent the app developer, and that the company that is independent and unbiased, some sort of referee in the ecosystem, like an independent measurement that is not selling data or selling media or selling ads or selling their own app. So really a pure software to allow the ecosystem to work together and to collaborate together. These were kind of the first riggers to start thinking about what we want to build. And basically, this is what took me back to Israel to start working on this technology with Reshef Mann who is my CTO, my co-founder and the person that I have known for many, many years since high school. So for many years, so that’s basically it in a few minutes.

Siddhartha 9:17  

And you were based out of Israel when you started AppsFlyer. 

Oren 9:23

Yes. 

Siddhartha 9:25

What made you later move to San Francisco?

Oren  9:29  

Well, actually, I stayed in Israel. I stayed in Israel, I spent some time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley but all these years I was in Israel. So I did move for a couple of months, but no more than that, to stay more and be closer to the market and the team over there. But I think that this world is very well positioned for this kind of global business. We are really right there in the middle, because between the East and the West, we serve a lot of companies in the East and Asia, near in Europe, and also now in Africa and Latin America and the US. I think that in the timezone and also culturally, I think that this is really well positioned in this kind of growing the business. 

I also think that at the beginning, people thought, Okay, you’re going so fast, maybe you need to move to the US. But I think that we learned so much by working with companies in the East, in Asia, in mobile first, mobile only countries where they adapted mobile and mobile services and its smartphones faster than the West. It’s kind of surprising that a couple of years ago, we did research about lifetime value per device. And we found that an average device in Asia actually has more lifetime value per device in Asia than in the US or equal. This is kind of mind blowing. Because if you think about the GDP per capita, it makes less sense. But in the US, they have all these credit cards, and they pay here and they pay there and they have laptops, and in Asia, in mobile, first mobile only countries, including India, you do everything with a mobile device, you make payments, or have all the credit card and you have everything basically there. 

I remember that we also kind of compared e-commerce and grocery shopping habits we saw in Asia. 90% is coming from mobile, 90% is coming from mobile application, while in the US it was only 20%. So our ability to work with the most innovative companies in Asia, and build the technology to actually help them do great jobs in their market and outside and globally. I think that this is what allowed us to actually build great technology, and then give the same technology to the west and to Europe and the US. So actually, it worked well for us. I mean, you can call it luck, or whatever it is, it really worked out really well for us developing that with great companies in Asia and building that and leveraging this kind of knowledge globally.

Siddhartha  12:55  

And currently, you are $300 million in annual recurring revenues. 

Oren 13:02

That’s right. 

Siddhartha 13:05

So what part of it is coming from the US market and what part of it is coming from the rest of the world?

Oren 13:10  

The mobile business is very global. And if you take it has a very strong correlation to the population. Now you have 300 million people in the US, 9 billion globally, make the calculation. People have more devices and smartphones. We have a lot of revenue coming from global markets.

Siddhartha  13:44  

Got it, and can you describe your journey from zero to one million, one to 10 and then 10 to 100, like what are the various challenges faced during these phases?

Oren 13:55  

Well, that’s a big question I need to try to answer. At the beginning, it was very hard for us to actually get funding, for example. And that’s really hard. I mean the good answer that you’ll get from a VC is no, it’s not interesting for us, which is a great answer. Most cases you don’t get an answer. And I think that that was a very, very different time than it was obviously last year in the last couple of years. Back in 2011, the environment was very different. It was very hard for us also specifically to raise money, like I mentioned. But I think that this is what created this company. And I think that there’s a lot to learn from it. Number one is that we said to ourselves, you know what, your investors don’t understand what we do. Let’s stop chasing them and chase building great technology that app developers can use and get value from. And the rationale is very simple. If you cannot build a product that delivers value to customers, why should you go ahead and raise money, there is no need to raise money if you cannot do that. 

And we thought, okay, we can build this technology, we don’t have to have a lot of money to build it, actually, we are just us. And at the end of the day, even if you have interest in Vc and are interested in us, they will call our customers and ask them, okay, is there a value, how to use it, and, all these questions, and we said to ourselves, let’s start from the end. If we can deliver value, great. If they’re going to call our customers and ask for their opinion, we want that to give them great insights. And if we take money, we want to make sure that we can make a lot of money for them. 

So we said, okay, instead of focusing on nice investor decks, let’s focus on building technology let’s focus on having great customer relationships. And I think that this is also what created the customer obsession kind of mindset in this company from the get go. Because like I mentioned earlier, once you’re very close to the customers, you can be very close to professionals that can really teach you a lot about the ecosystem, about their targets and goals and how the day to day looks like and how technology can help them achieve their goals. And once you have a relationship with let’s say, the top marketing and product professionals in the world and building applications, we can probably have the insights that donors have, and we can build software and technology to help them do great jobs. And this is kind of enhancing the relationship that we have, because we started without knowing anything about the digital ecosystem, or advertising or marketing or applications. 

So we learn everything from the customer. So this is really the seeds of our customer obsession value, which is a core value added to this core value in this company. This is what actually enabled us to do what we do. So that was the basis, I can tell you that another thing that we learned, every time that we take money, we want to make sure that the new investor is making a lot of money. So I address that in the previous question that you asked me. And then also, at the beginning, we didn’t really care about the revenue actually now so the revenue is secondary for us. What is primary, so many other things, but the revenue is secondary. And it was more important for us to work with great people and work with great companies. 

So we can further enhance and build the technology that can solve more problems for them and can make their lives easier. And to help them to be more successful in this ecosystem. That was the most important thing for us. And that this is what we’ve been passionate about. And this is why we woke up in the morning. I can tell you how this story started, I mean, starting to collect from customers, because at the beginning even collecting money from customers, it’s overhead. So how do you do that with two people or three people, this is really hard, have you thought about implementing credit cards and stuff like that, this is really hard. And also to have all these operations around it. And we thought to ourselves, okay, it doesn’t deliver much value to customers to actually charge them. So let’s not charge them. So there is a pricing, but we didn’t bother to charge because we didn’t have the ability to charge. 

I still remember that we had kind of a support ticket. And the ticket goes how do I pay here so they couldn’t find the payment page. So I need to take a screenshot of that support ticket. And then we started charging and growing. I mean the rest is history but the thing is that in the very early days we learned so much that really impacted the entire company and as we know it today.

Siddhartha  20:13  

Dear listeners, before we dive further into the podcast, I would like to welcome Prashant Kunti, Head of Product Management at Zoho payroll and Zoho book. Prashant, What trends are you observing in the payroll and HR space?

Prashant  20:27  

Thanks Siddhartha. So first off with the pandemic induced, remote working. So that’s something that has caught on and a hybrid working a distributed workforce is here to stay. So this affects the way a company’s HR and Payroll departments operate. And so this introduces some complexities while a distributed workforce is good. It introduces payroll and HR complexities as well. Secondly, we are going to see more and more in the emerging area of compensation and payroll analytics. Next, what I’m seeing is more and more embedded banking, payroll systems connecting with banks, more and more banks coming forward to integrate with payroll systems and so do insurance providers so that the convergence between banking insurance, FinTech and payroll that’s going to happen. 

Also expect more AI and ML going to be incorporated into payroll as well, that’s not something that comes to your mind at the very beginning when you think about payroll, but we are going to see payroll assistance that employees can interact with to understand their compensation details better. And finally, we’re also going to see a lot more payroll being more deeply integrated with various other systems, not just from the transaction point of view, but to help with better decision making across organizations.

Siddhartha 22:16  

Thank you, Prashant. Dear listeners, you will find more about Zoho payroll in the show notes. Now, let’s further continue with the podcast. 

And so your revenue started coming in the later part of the journey. First a lot of usage started happening, as you said and then you figured out how to make revenue and how to make a business model once you had usage.

Oren 22:41  

We had pricing. So we showed that to our customers, but it really didn’t bother them. We also didn’t bother to in the very early days, we didn’t really bother to have contracts if there is no if the customer doesn’t require a contract, let’s just start working with them. So, we’ve kind of removed all the barriers to the minimum in order for us to work with more great customers, so this offer will be used by more companies so that we can learn more and grow faster. So that this is something that we both, actually this is how it is right now, revenue right now has different meaning of revenues basically, is financing the innovation and financing this whole company, I mean, in the early days, your entire operation is based on a VC money and external invest or as you grow into that scale, the magnitude of the investment they can make is limited by how much revenue collecting so this is this is why it’s becoming much more critical on the less later stage in the beginning. 

At the beginning you must get validation for the fault for the value. Now for the externalization, obviously if you have revenue, you figure out okay, they pay for the service, they find value, this is great, churn is low, okay, this is great. But when you’re working in the company 24/7, you don’t need this kind of validation. Because you know companies find value, you know that they need you, you know that they’re using it every day. And you know that this is also sneaky by nature. So you don’t need this kind of validation. The validation is to have more customers and more validation. So we can learn more and enhance more. 

So I don’t remember the idea of the question. But anyways, I think that the revenue is kind of a byproduct of doing great things. And I think that we just need to follow it. The thing is, how can you build a lot of value and just capture and monetize a small part of it. So customers will be happily paying you for the service because they understand how much value you deliver to them. So this is kind of the mindset that we had and still have.

Siddhartha  25:15  

So when I was running my own company, we were using AppsFlyer, back in 2017. And I still remember that if the cost of install for us was, for example, $1, then you guys used to charge like 10 cents or five cents.

Oren 25:32  

Much less, so the pricing is based on conversions. And this is a kind of estimate and how much value we deliver to the customer. It’s interesting that you made this distinction, because between the measurement of technology to the actual money spent, so that was our kind of decision to actually charge the cents, and not the dollars, because you have a cost per instal $1 or $10, or $50, we prefer to charge the sense for the technology, then taking this big bucks of the media. And that’s actually paid off pretty well. So I think that staying independent, and staying unbiased is something that actually what built this company, and, staying away of being a Data Broker, or selling media or licencing, or selling data, or licencing data and all that kind of stuff that we avoided, doing and really focusing on what was the right thing for for customers. 

So, today we have a free plan, customers can sign up for the service and use deep linking and basic analytics, then they have to pay as they go. So if you use a little bit, you pay it in a bit you pay if you use it more, you pay more. And then you have contracts and all contracts in this specific scale, and then you don’t have to buy everything. I mean, over the years, we’ve developed a lot of other services around it, I mean, and we also can discuss that, but you don’t have to buy everything. So you can buy what you need and pay on the volume. So again, a really adaptive model to make sure that we have the right pricing for the right customer.

Siddhartha  27:52  

And can you share the go to market insights that you have built over a period of time?

Oren  28:00  

Go to market insights, what do you mean?

Siddhartha  28:02  

Yeah. Like, on reaching out to the right set of customers, how to build your sales team? And how to distribute, what are the various functions to have in your sales team that made you reach 300 million in ARR.

Oren  28:24  

So in the early stage, it was a lot of market education. So we didn’t have competitors at all at the beginning. And then we had few, but we were not really competing, because it was really a blue ocean. And all we need to do is educate the market. We did some kind of growth hacking, like really hacking. We had one competitor that managed to raise a lot of money. They headed out of business, and then they actually shifted, also built that product. So they’ve been really well funded. They had other businesses that didn’t finance that as well. And we were Bootstrap. And I remember that I added AppsFlyer as their competitor in CrunchBase. So everybody that’s been looking for this company, because they did a really good job in market education. And this is basically what we needed. So market education. 

So people understand that there is a need for measurement, there is a need for Attribution Analytics. They’re going to search for something and we want to make sure that they find us. So we added us as a competitor, which is not really the logical way to to think about things. I mean, usually companies say yeah, early stages there. We don’t have competitors. I think that maybe it’s important for you to actually define a competitor so you can both go after the same vertical and learn from each other. So we defined, okay, this is a competitor. And we made it publicly. Another thing that we’ve done is Google AdWords. I mean, it’s not a strategy, but we didn’t have money. So I remember that I bought Google AdWords coupons on eBay. So it can buy $100 In and $2. So that’s quite good business. 

So you buy into that as you buy $100. $100 was enough for us to buy the words, mobile attribution for almost a week and a half, like we can have $100, you buy all the searches in the water or mobile attribution. So everybody’s been searching for it. Probably seeing us, which is great. So a lot of things that we’ve done. At the beginning, I think in the beginning also, you need to attract customers that are passionate about what you do. I think that this is crucial. At the beginning, they don’t buy from two people in the garage working on something. They buy the entrepreneur’s passion, and they buy what they are trying to do in the world and the problem that they’d like to solve. 

And I’ve had a few stories about it. One is, obviously I went to all the meetups and places where we can meet app developers and stuff like that. One of them was Google Analytics for mobile. Back then, obviously, this is a meetup that they must go to. I went there. Remember that the presenter was talking about Google Analytics and stuff like that. And then I asked them, Okay, actually, I didn’t say, I asked him okay, how do where the users are coming from? And he wasn’t sure how to answer my question. And he said, I don’t think that we have it. And I said, Actually, I said to myself, should they ask them or not? Because this is Google. I mean, Google offices, they probably can Google with an army of developers that can build it tomorrow. So I still remember asking myself, Should I ask that or not? Eventually, I did. And I said, Look, this is what the company is, this is what we do. 

And at the end of the meetup someone reached out to me, and told me, Hey, Oren, this is really interesting what you’re building, I have an app. And I would love to try using it. And I remember that I was really excited to come back to Office, we didn’t have an office to go back home. But let’s shift my partner and tell them, Look, we have a really big application coming, make sure that your server is ready. I sent this new customer, the SDK, after he sent me an email. Look, your SDK crashed my app. And I’m like, wow, this is such bad luck. I mean, all of a sudden, we have a real customer. Because up until then, it was only friends and family and stuff like that.

It was really frustrating. But I trusted the guy. So I sent him the source code of the SDK. I told them look , maybe you can find the bug for me. Long story short, because someone else developed the SDK code, but we’re gonna save that time. So he’d been looking for the bug. And long story short, this guy started to work for AppsFlyer for a couple of hours every day, every week and developing the SDK and enhancing it and enhancing it. And then he started to work one day, two day, three days in the company. And 10 years later, he’s leading the innovation in the company. He built a significant amount of products, the analytics, the deep linking the protect 360. So he’d been leading all these products and going to the market and everything. And he knows it all came from this random meeting, me telling the world what we want to do in the world and basically shouting our dreams. 

So my recommendation to entrepreneurs at the early stage, to talk about what they want to do, to talk about their passions, to talk about the problems that they’re trying to solve. I mean, lots of companies and entrepreneurs are in stealth mode because they are afraid that if someone is going to steal your idea, no one is going to steal your idea. And I think that and if they do maybe you’re gonna have another competitor instead of 1000 You’re gonna have 1001. Who cares, but you’re going to attract people that are passionate about what you’re trying to solve, and then the technology and everything else. And this is what allowed us to actually have these kinds of people, his name is Gil Meroz, I actually think that he’s well known in India and the Indian customers, because there are a lot of problems from there. So anyways, I think like him and so many other people. 

So that’s at the beginning, really look for the very early stage, look for companies that are passionate and people that are passionate about your passion. And then really, magic happens. Then as you scale, depending on your fit, we had a really amazing market fit. At the beginning, I asked the team to actually drop 50% of the leads. And focus on companies that we really want to work with, that we can learn from. Not too big, although it’s really hard to say no, to a really big lead. But sometimes you do need to say no, if you’re really, really small, and this big company with all the complexities of navigating big company that can kill you, you need to find this really good fit of companies that you actually prioritize the market, the product development and product enhancement, as opposed to everything else. Even having a huge logo or revenue or something like that. I think that the development and the velocity of the product development and the enhancement they can make in the early stages, actually what can create this huge advantage in the market and taking over the market, I think that is really important. 

So I thought that look, let’s just drop, we cannot serve and we cannot give good service to all these customers. And we probably don’t really want to. And let’s pick the ones that we really want to work with and work with them. That’s another one. We’ve been focusing on customers from the beginning. So the first department that we officially built was customer service and customer support. We didn’t have marketing, we didn’t have sales, we didn’t have anything. We had customer success, r&d. This is what we had, r&d and customer success. And the last department that we started building was cells. That was the last department that we built. Obviously, when you are moving into enterprise cells and more complex cells, you have to have a sales team. But we’ve been kind of delaying it as further as we could.

Siddhartha 38:20  

Let’s come to the team building part. How big is the team at AppsFlyer today?

Oren  38:26  

Well, I think that if we can relate that your question to the previous one, I think that what is the single most important thing that will allow you to win the market is the company culture. And the company culture in my opinion is kind of an irreversible process. So these are my thoughts. When you start the company, it never ends. And it’s really hard to change backwards, you can evolve it. But it’s hard to change. It is where we put a lot of the emphasis on it on company culture. And the culture is based basically on learning. So we have kind of a list of beliefs and it’s actually more of learning. One example is that making mistakes is a crucial part of learning and making mistakes is okay. Another one is believed to be soft and what does it mean it’s hard. 

The thing is that we and I personally try to practice and demonstrate that just to be yourself and if I am going to be myself, everybody else maybe will be themselves. It’s really hard acting and thinking like a founder or being only in customer obsession. and a bunch of other learnings. I think that we also created some kind of frameworks or decision making frameworks. For example, in terms of values, we have only two. One of them is to only do things that make you proud to be part of the company. So basically, for every decision that you make, you need to ask yourself two questions. Does it make you more proud to be part of this company? And does it help our customers? If the answer is yes, for both, that’s a legitimate decision to make. If not, it’s not a good decision, you need to go and pick another one. 

Another framework is in this very dynamic market, that changes rapidly, we’ve been thinking about the things that are never going to change, we call them invariance. One thing is customers, you always need to have customers, so we put them at the beginning, then privacy and security, privacy and secure security are not gonna go away. So we made that the second pillar, enabling innovation, enabling innovation internally and externally, actually, I think that this is really something that is a core part of the company, because we have 10,000 partners, and we want to enable them to build great stuff for customers. So we can provide them with these API’s and infrastructure to allow them to build great technologies for the benefit of our customers. So enabling innovation, and obviously, reliable data and data analytics. I mean, if there’s so much, so many decisions made based on the insights that we provide our customers, it needs to be accurate. So that’s the fourth one. 

So we have this kind of Pilares that guides us in everything that we do. And basically, this is the best prediction into the future, because the future will include privacy and security, customer enable innovation, and reliable data insights. So that’s the invariant frameworks. And I think that every company can and should beat the things that are never going to change and everything else is going to change. And that’s really important. Also, we defined the things that we need to be very consistent about outside this invariance framework, one of them is to stay independent and unbiased. 

So this is something that we will repeatedly made our commitment to the market to stay independent, unbiased, and means that we’re not going to get into media, buying selling, we’re not going to be able to start an ad network or having our own customer, consumer app or selling media or selling data or trading data or accessing data. The data belongs to our customers, they have full control of their own data, and they are in the decision making and how to handle their own data. So we’re just providing them with the cloud services and software. And this is really critical for us. And I think that eventually, is the company mission. And I think that it took us quite some time to actually understand our purpose in life and why we exist. I mean, I think that a lot of people kind of think about missions and envision differently. And I think that in the last few years, it’s become very evident why we exist. I think that there are so many challenges with the ecosystem and privacy, etc, and the complexity of the market. 

And we thought, okay, because we have this kind of independent and unbiased position, we are in a position to actually build technology to allow companies to collaborate together while preserving people’s privacy. So we’ve made our vision kind of the ultimate goal in how we would like to see consumers at the end of the day. So we asked ourselves, what is the right thing for consumers? If we are a b2b company, and we serve b2c, only b2c companies. So if you really want to take good care of our customers, we need to take good care of their consumers though the end user so we asked ourselves, what consumers care about. Consumers care about privacy, they care about getting value of the product, getting a good user experience. 

And the third thing is safety. general safety, you want the product to be safe, and unfortunately, not that safe these days, especially if not for kids and children. So we said to ourselves, okay, this is our vision. And let’s work backwards and build the technology to allow app developers to use this technology to enhance the user experience, privacy and safety of the consumers. So this is how we’ve been thinking about it, and in another for you. And this is a really high level goal addition, I mean, the thing is that every day, you take a kind of a really small step towards it, but you can never achieve it. Because how much value is enough, It’s infinite. How much safety is enough, as much as it gets. How much privacy, as much as it gets. You need to have a balance of this triangle. And to maximize this kind of a triangle for consumers. This is how we analyze consumers. This is how we analyze the digital ecosystem. And basically, we hope that regulators in the world will also look at what is the right thing for consumers not in one angle, but this triangle. 

Privacy users value experience and safety. Because if you try to maximize one, you’re probably going to kill the others, or possibly kill the others, I think that this is a very sensitive ecosystem. And this is why it takes a lot of responsibility, from regulators all over the world and from companies and companies like ourselves. So we’ve made that our vision and it also means that another thing that is really hard is not to fall in love with your own products and not to fall in love with your own creation, this is really hard, because tell the developers and product managers that they’re working on a product that is very successful, not to fall in love with their own baby. 

And I think what companies need to do and what we do, and we practice, I’m not saying that we’re perfect, what we practice is to fall in love with the ecosystem, from falling in love with the problems that you need to solve, fall in love with the vision or with the purpose, and not necessarily with the product, because products will come and go. The solutions are going to be different and need to focus on solutions, you need to focus on how to solve this, the current challenges and the future challenges, not the past challenges. And I think that everybody needs to adopt it. Even in the furniture industry, I’m just making it’s not even a joke. I think that everything is changing so rapidly in this world, that you have to have this kind of an agile market, agile mindset. 

It reminds me of what Darwin quote, it’s not the strongest will survive but the most adapted to change. And I think that this is so accurate. I think that being adaptive to changes is critical to the mobile ecosystem. If you’re not nimble you gotta go. You gotta go out of business, that’s for sure. It’s a matter of time. So I think that everybody needs to take note if they go to this record system. You need to be agile.

Siddhartha  48:44  

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure hosting you on the podcast. It’s been a real pleasure hosting you. Thanks. 

Oren 48:51

Thank you

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