Photo: Eyal Tuag
“I joked with someone that we are against the global trend on a regular basis. When everyone went crazy with Corona and companies that represent digitization flourished and reached crazy values, we were travel-tech in Corona, and everyone said to us ‘what the hell’. Investing in the field was not popular during the Corona period.” Shares Raviv-Shurtz, “What’s nice is that we showed that in the end if you are a good company with a good product, with real customers and real people – you will recruit. Because in the end there are enough smart people who will see through the buzz and see that this is a real company that has the potential for growth and growth and will want to be part of the story Yours and that’s what happened to us at Gasti. Despite the situation, Gasti has shown that it doubles itself more than year after year and not only in employees, but also in profit.”
Vared Raviv-Shurtz, serves as COO and president of Guesty since 2018, and before that, she served as COO at Fiverr for 6 years, during which the company grew from 40 employees to over 400. Before that, she was VP of Global Operations at MediaMind and Kenshoo, VP at Radware and a lawyer at the Seligman law firm. “I started out as a lawyer, I did IPOs, mergers and acquisitions. In 2000, some people called it the first bubble period, I realized that I wanted to be part of an organization, to lead processes and not just the one who writes the documentation on the side and provides assistance on the side.” She is accompanied in the first stages of development, as well as in mentoring and entrepreneurship programs for women.
When Raviv-Shurtz arrived at Guesty, it had less than 100 employees and only in Israel. Since the start of the corona virus, Gesti has almost doubled its size and currently employs 700 people in 15 global offices, including the largest development team in the industry. The company, founded in early 2013 by the brothers Kobi and Amiad Soto, benefits, according to its words, from the renewed growth in the field of tourism. “It’s a very complex and complicated product, which is why we have a product and development team of 150 people. Today we have about 14 offices in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia.”
“Gesti has a very comprehensive platform for asset management in the short and medium term, and when I say very comprehensive it means that when you come in the morning to manage your assets, you just have to open the Gesti dashboard and manage everything from there.” Raviv-Shurtz says. The Guesty platform enables marketing through the various websites including Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Expedia, Agoda and more. In addition, Gasti has a Marketplace trading arena with more than 130 partners, who provide complementary services including dynamic pricing tools, payment clearing, smart home products and more.
Can you tell us a little about the fundraising you recently announced – let’s remember, a fundraising of 170 million dollars
“You start a fundraiser and suddenly the ground shakes and everything is clouded around, it’s not an easy time. We were very determined about this fundraiser, we really believed in ourselves and our ability. We closed a fundraiser that we’re very proud of, mainly due to investors we’re very proud to have brought to the table. We brought 3 very strong funds that give We really have your back not only in this round but also in our continued growth.”
During the Corona, the company made the necessary adjustments to survive the period, during which Raviv-Schwartz also knows how to point out that the trends of remote work and domestic tourism began in different parts of the world, with an emphasis on the use of apartments and not classic hotels, which helped them to survive and grow during the crisis and in the last year the field has really ‘blowing up’. “People were looking for apartments and solutions for remote work. Suddenly it’s important for them to have WiFi and a desk, bigger spaces and longer-term solutions.” At the beginning of 2021 Gasti announced her previous recruitment (D) and in the same month also two acquisitions “We didn’t keep quiet about our reserves. Some people told us at the beginning of the corona virus ‘sit quietly, lower your head, spend a minimum’ and we said ‘no’. We are not going to fire Full of employees to find out that these are people we need to recruit in 3 months, we’re not going to not develop the product because it will come back and then we have to be ready.”
How do you communicate the situation at Gasti to the employees?
“Go back to basics and focus. Sometimes we get confused and think that recruitment is the main thing, it’s not. The main thing is to have a real company, with a real product, with customers, that does things. Think about your day-to-day and think if it makes sense, think if the way the company Doing is really a way up or straight or down. Sometimes we get a little confused on this issue, I sometimes see more articles about recruiting and equals and not about what the company does and what it makes a difference in this world, by the way it doesn’t necessarily have to be to cure cancer. Also that we allow For small businesses to grow and earn more and serve customers in a better way is, in my opinion, very appropriate. You justify your name as a startup or as a company by creating technology that changes something for your customer base and allows them to be more successful in what they do.”
I feel that the attitude towards Israeli high-tech workers has changed over the past decade, hasn’t it?
“The whole issue of high-tech employees has changed over the years, today it is called ‘human resources’ and once it was called ‘manpower’ – this difference also has an essence not only in semantics, slowly companies realized that employees are their main resource, they need to invest in and take care of them and I I think that the younger generation of employees also have other thoughts and other ambitions. I see more and more employees who care about what the company they work for does – whether it does good or bad.” Raviv-Schwartz shares, “Culture is not something that can be bought with money, culture is something that needs to be produced, and culture in my eyes is when you come to a company and you feel proud to be a part of it, proud to work with the people who are by your side, that you have common goals and beliefs and this is something that cannot be built only in Hapi The hours. I won’t be self-righteous and just say that we do happy hours and trips, but we do try to balance with activities that have substance.”
“I will give a very small example – I am very careful to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8. Last year I brought someone from the industry who experienced domestic violence and told her story. She is trying to spread it, at the same time we did a fundraising activity and tried to make a day with meaning and take action – Employees, not just female employees, came and told me that it was shocking. This is the kind of thing that doesn’t cost money but has meaning and in my eyes it is no less important than the party or the catering or anything else. We try to combine both – also how we help our employees to improve , to learn and develop all the time and also how we touch the community around us in different ways.”
We are talking about managing a global company in 14 offices, some of them hybrid, where does that meet you? Will we accept high-tech companies ‘made in Israel’ whose employees are scattered all over the world?
“Israeli innovation will not disappear and will continue, I do think that the new world allows us more flexibility.” She replies, “The approach of taking the people where they are and not where we are or is comfortable for us, was something that accompanied me for a long time. Today there are also many solutions that did not exist before, such as Papaya Global and the like, which makes it very easy, there are also many solutions for managing freelancers around the world and there are solutions that help you manage personnel all over the world. In terms of culture, you need to understand how you create the culture in the company virtually some of the times without losing your uniqueness.”
Is COO the role of the Minister of the Interior or the Minister of Foreign Affairs?
“It’s a somewhat amorphous role because in every company it expands and takes shape according to the company’s needs. I think there is something holistic about looking at everything from above and seeing how I make it happen, what the needs are, what the limitations are, how the company should look in 5-10 years And what I do to make her continue to follow the right path can be very different from one coo to another. It can be more the interior minister or really a combination of the interior minister and the foreign minister, sometimes it can also be the finance minister.”
What is Gasti’s vision for Kadima?
“The future is rosy. We have doubled ourselves and more in recent years, and we see it continuing to happen. The vision from a financial point of view is we want to reach an IPO and be public and continue to grow and manage a billion assets or more. But the ambition is not to recruit one or the other but to continue to grow Gasti and be the management solution Every asset everywhere and we keep expanding our canvas on the way there.”