I live in Manhattan NY. I also work here in the west village, at the headquarters of the company I’m at, Taboola. Originally I started this business in Israel, Tel-Aviv, and moved as soon as I could. Mainly as a superstar (and great guy) joined to manage the Israeli site and lead our tech/product (http://goo.gl/Xzt8) in israel. In addition, our business required us here close to our customers (http://goo.gl/5YLG) . Good move.
Recently, there is a lot of buzz, noise, and people questioning this. Is NY the right place for entrepreneurs to be, and if so, what type of companies should be here? Is there enough capital, access to customers/business, technologists?
I thought I’ll write my personal take on this, being here over a year.
I hated studying history in school when I was younger, and I really loved mathematics. The main reason is that it was never natural to me to memorize a book, and it makes a whole lot of sense to understand how to operate a function once, and use it many times.
There is one thing though I really loved and love about history. As Karl Marx said, “it repeats itself”. And it so logical that it will. Maybe in different form, color, temperature, but at a high level – things happen again, and again (and then again). Now, some things are fully random even though we want to believe they make sense (Black Swan Theory), but to generalize, history is amazing for being a great tool for us (human beings) to use. Not using it, in many ways, at least in my mind, is being stupid. It happened before — you can read about it, listen to it, talk to people that were there, and at least be able to analyze it with respect to your situation to make a more intellectual decision. I’m not saying – do exactly the same, but information is for sure POWER.
So history is great.
I’m a geek. It mainly means that I love technology, and it gets me excited.
Life is more interesting if you know how to use technology.
In many ways, technology is like a really good radio song. You never notice it’s there until you do. And when you do, you suddenly start hearing it all over the place, at work, in your car, on your Pandora. It’s there.
Technology is similar. As soon as it’s surfaced, you’re using it. oh yea.
I was at a panel yesterday in LA discussing media, and where it’s going.
There was a big discussion about Google TV, setup boxes in general, and the living room. I got to tell you – I don’t know.
If I think that the notion of open-operating-system on the TV, offering apps, connecting the web to the TV is amazing. absolutely yes. even for us at @taboola it’s really exciting to outreach our discovery and video recommendations to the big screen.
About all the rest (how to do it, boxes, cables, new-sony-tvs). I don’t know.
When changing industries upside down, I don’t believe it can be by merely adding a new feature, a notch, a slot someone just forgot to check out. It has to be substantial change. Simple, but big. Obvious, but not that easy to do. A real change. Disruptive.
It’s always great to see industries change over the years with new companies coming from the bottom to become segment leaders. In the history of time, it has always been like that if you think about it. From steam-powered boats to combustion engine in the 18/19th century, from single broadcast channel to multichannel tv, remote control, VCR to DVD, mainframes to PC, mp3 devices to ipod, yahoo directory to google search, mobile phones to iphones, and now — facebook. (note, i’ve skipped many cool changes, but you get the message)
As us Taboolars spend so much time together, working hard on making a real change, it makes sense to bring all the things we love into our work environment.
And what can be better than our favorite pets to spend some quality time with us while we work on changing the way people discover videos around the world.
In this picture, you can see Romeo (Adam’s dog) standing in front of our gigantic logo, making sure everything is under control
originally posted on @taboola blog — http://taboola.com/blog/2010/03/29/who-let-the-dogs-out/
hey there. my name is adam singolda 
