Top 5 insights in this episode
- Why you don’t have to spend a dime on marketing 05:24
- The best way to know if a candidate is right for your startup 16:16
- How to manage employees without meetings 17:20
- Why bigger isn’t always better 20:17
- What you can learn from nature about building a successful startup 23:59
About Ofer Vilenski
We’ve interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs here at The Startup Camel, but only one that can claim to be a fighter pilot, professionally trained actor, and made two successful exits worth more than $100M all in the same sentence. That entrepreneur is the amazingly versatile Ofer Vilenski, a man of many proven success and even more hidden talents.
In true entrepreneur tradition, Ofer co-founded his first startup, a software tool company, in his basement, only to sell it the next year for a sizable profit. He used that money to co-found Jungo, an OS for routers and several years later, Jungo was acquired by NDS for a staggering $107M.
These days, Vilenski’s mission statement is to make the internet a much better place. One that is free of censorship, region limitations, and speed limits. If his previous efforts are any indication, he’s going to add some pretty impressive achievements to his CV in the near future.
Related Content: Wibbitz is changing the way we consume content online
About Hola
Hola is the first community powered VPN, meaning each one of its 47 million users are automatically helping each other to access region-restricted sites like Netflix and Pandora. Basicly Hola is making the world wide web – worldwide again.
Currently the startup is growing at a monstrous rate of 100,000 new users per day, but that wasn’t always the case. Until January 23rd 2013, after being around for two months, and only 80 downloads a day, Hola shot up to 40,000 downloads overnight.
How did they do it? If you ask Ofer, he’ll tell you it was because they were always focused on constantly improving their product, and the major spike in user came organically when the product was, in his words, “good enough.” You can hear his fascinating and unusual work methods in this weeks interview.
So what does the futue hold for this trail-blazing startup? “We’re trying to make a better Internet”, Vilenski explains, “We’ve made it more open for millions of users. Now we want to make it faster”. Whatever they end up doing, we know it’s going to set the tone for how the internet is consumed in the future.
4 useful links mentioned in this episode
- Make the Internet a better place with Hola
- If you’re not using Google Docs already, now’s the time to start
- Mobileye, the company Ofer admires the most
- JoyTunes, another startup mentioned in this episode
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