The first ever Israel Growth Summit was held recently in Tel Aviv, co-hosted by the Viola Group and the Israel Growth Forum led by Wix, and attended by CEOs and executives from over 150 Israeli tech companies in their growth stage. Although this was an exclusive event, the content was so interesting and valuable, we wanted to make it accessible to the entire community of tech companies and startups in Israel, so over the next few weeks we will be publishing a series of video highlights from the event, by speakers from Viola, Wix, ironSource, Mellanox, Payoneer, Fiverr, Check Point, Goldman Sachs, Moovit, Zerto and DaPulse. In this post, SimilarWeb Co-founder & CEO, Or Offer, and Yotpo Co-founder & CEO, Tomer Tagrin, talk about the challenges of “going global” as startups scale.

Both SimilarWeb and Yotpo are examples of Israeli growth-stage startups that sought to create an international presence and global sales organization from a fairly early stage. It’s a formidable challenge for young companies, because with teams spread out across the globe, there is little room for error. In their ‘fireside chat’ at the Israel Growth Summit, Or and Tomer spoke about their experience with opening offices abroad, recruiting staff remotely, and maintaining effective communication and a healthy company culture as their companies continue to scale globally.

Here are highlights from Or and Tomer’s chat:
(Note: The videos are in Hebrew)

Going Global: Opening offices abroad (Part 1 of 3)

In this video:
Tomer talks about on the challenges of opening Yotpo’s NY office, going from 0 to 130 team members
Or talks about the challenges of opening multiple offices around the world

Going Global: Building a global sales organization (Part 2 of 3)

In this video:
Or talks about the decision to go from a ‘self-serve’ (a.k.a. ‘no touch’) SaaS model to an Enterprise sales model targeting SMBs, with a global sales organization servicing local hubs around the world.
Tomer and Or discuss the importance of employer branding in order to recruit the best possible team as the company scales.

Going Global: The challenges of communication & culture across international offices (Part 3 of 3)

In this video:
Or and Tomer talk about the challenges of maintaining a healthy and effective system for communicating between international offices – Or recommends Facebook at Work (worked wonders for SimilarWeb!) – and for maintaining a positive culture.
Or also offers some nice tips on how to instill the company culture even as early as the onboarding phase of new employees.

More about Or Offer
Or Offer has been the CEO of SimilarWeb since the company’s founding in 2007. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a small Israeli startup to a global business with over 300 employees, 7 offices and thousands of paying customers. Or was also a founding partner at AfterDownload (acquired by IronSource), and is an active investor in a number of startups. Or has been selected as one of the top 100 influencers in the Israeli high tech scene and 40 under 40 most promising young people by TheMarker.

SimilarWeb (a Viola Growth portfolio company) provides businesses with global multi-device market intelligence to understand, track and grow their digital market share.

More about Tomer Tagrin
Tomer Tagrin is the Co-founder and CEO of Yotpo, a platform of comprehensive tools for collecting and leveraging user-generated content like customer reviews, photos, and more, in order to acquire, convert, retain, and understand customers.

About the Israel Growth Summit
The summit was created to bring together this exclusive group of leaders so that they can benefit from the experience of fellow industry colleagues whose companies have already reached significant growth milestone. The summit – which will be held annually – was conceived to provide a forum for tech companies to network and benefit from shared knowledge and connections, in the hope of strengthening Israel’s ecosystem of growth-stage companies as they navigate their journey towards becoming global leaders.

Other videos in our Israel Growth Summit video series:
The State of Growth Companies in Israel (Shlomo Dovrat & Harel Beit-On)
Challenges faced by tech companies as they scale (by Wix’s Nir Zohar)
Why is Inorganic Growth so important? (by Tomer Bar Zeev & Eyal Waldman)
6 Guidelines for Change & Growth (by Check Point’s Amnon Bar-Lev)
Scaling While Maintaining Culture (with Keren Levy & Vered Raviv Schwarz)
Growth Financing Panel (with Goldman Sachs MD, Jonathan Penkin)