Three months and at least ten job interviews, that’s what the selection process for the current position of Ofer Karp, CTO and manager of Fundbox operations in Israel, included, a process that in his view was very good.
“It’s just like getting to know each other and it should be fun for both parties. The process was long both because the company’s management is based in the US and because there were many things I wanted to ask, know and understand. Because it’s a field I was unfamiliar with, I wanted to make sure that they would have the patience and leisure to teach me the domain so that I could have an impact beyond technology,” he says. “I believe that if you don’t understand the business, you can’t have an impact. It is very important to sit down with the CFO so that he can explain the business logic and the risks that, in hindsight, today some of them are materializing.”
The risks that Karp is talking about are inflation, interest rate increases, the crisis in high-tech and now also a coup in Israel and the collapse of banks in the US. When he took office, some eight months ago, it was a different world. He joined a company that numbered 160 people with the goal of increasing it to three hundred or four hundreds of employees and open operations abroad. Instead, in October Fundbox, the Israeli fintech unicorn, laid off 150 out of 360 employees, half of them in Israel and the rest in the US.
“We reduced half of the employees as a response to the market situation, as a measure designed to give the company the ability to conduct itself in a smart and efficient manner and to come out better from this situation. But it is a very big challenge, which I have not faced before. When I started positions in the past, the way I acted was always to arrive, to find the team , to understand the business and that’s what I was supposed to do here. Instead of recruiting and setting up websites, the challenge I received is how to become more efficient and how to try to get as much output as possible and to improve the business as much as possible with fewer resources and it’s very difficult when you’re new. There are no other management members in Israel so everyone looks at you to see How do you react to the situation and where does it go? It’s a huge challenge. I’ve worked the hardest I’ve worked in the last six months in terms of the amount of hours, the worry and the self-digging. This is the truth. On the one hand it’s terribly difficult, it’s not easy to fire people, and on the other hand if it was easy then everyone could to succeed and if it’s difficult then someone special needs to take it,” he says.
His first job interview in the high-tech industry was during his studies for the Mercury company, an interview that he thought was bad and it is not clear why he passed successfully. “I was really a child and I think I made all the possible mistakes in an interview. I really like being interviewed and since then I have changed my strategy a lot on how to properly interview. In that first interview I talked a lot. They asked me three sentences and I gave a ten minute speech. Today I am less concerned with describing things What I did and much more talks about results. Where I got to, what the organization looks like, what the company looks like and how the company progressed during the time I was in the company.”
Besides focusing on results, Karp also asks a lot of questions and makes an effort to make the other party, the interviewer, have fun. “I always ask the interviewer questions for him as well, because it helps to understand my perspective and the way I think. I am a very curious person, not one who sits in his niche and says ‘Tell me what to do’. I am always interested in business, what goes into the CEO First of all, why the entrepreneurs don’t sleep at night and how we approach the board to raise more investment. In my first interview I told about myself and in retrospect it was not interesting. I think one of the important things is to have a conversation that the other side will remember as a cool hour.”
These are Karp’s answers to the popular questions in job interviews:
1. Tell me about yourself
“My name is Ofer Karp, I am 46 years old, married to Fanny, two daughters and a son, I live in Moshav Shadimat Debora in the Lower Galilee, I have a dog, two cats and a horse. My main hobby is running, I have been running every day for 10 years. A high-tech man, twenty or so years in the industry I came to high-tech quite by accident, as a child I didn’t bother with computers, I was a fighter in an elite unit and then an officer, I ended up in industry by accident and since then I just love what I do.
How did you get into the industry?
“I came back from the trip after the army and I had to find a job, because on a trip to South America you use up all the money you saved. In my last job in the army, the Hummers had just come in and to drive them you needed a license for a truck. The army then sent me to get a civilian license for a truck. Two years after , when I came back from South America I was looking for a job and I was approached by a good friend whose father got a franchise to distribute Hagan ice cream at the time and was looking for drivers to distribute ice cream. He wanted me to drive a truck. I told him that I had never driven a truck except for the license, he said that it would be fine, and that I would have a driver to accompany me for two months Three. I arrived, and of course the person who was supposed to join me was sick. So I started handing out ice creams in a truck and they sent me to Jerusalem, to the German colony, with the narrow streets and me with a truck trying to cause as little damage as possible to parked cars. After about a month they discovered that I was a mediocre driver but knew how to do other things So they let me manage the distribution system. I started building an Excel system to see which lines and which drivers should be inserted. My sister had just studied at the Technion and with her help it became a very basic software in Visual Basic. I learned to program and at the same time as work I went to study computer science. I fell in love. Towards the end This year Mt Asuna, I left the position and went to work as a programmer while studying.
I was very lucky and ended up in companies that gave me the opportunity to learn to advance, to grow. My first position was at the Mercury company, many of the people who lead the industry in Israel came from there. To this day I say it was the best management and high-tech school in general.
I did positions there such as tester, team leader developer, I grew up in the technical track, I managed development organizations, product, both in Israel and abroad in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, China, I managed very large organizations of many, many people and quite major products in the portfolio. So I decided it was time to move to a start-up and I moved to Perfecto Mobile, which was involved in the same field but was a private company. There I managed the development for almost four years during which we increased the company both in terms of business and the size of the organization by three times. In the end we sold to an American company. After the sale I remained to see that things Work well and I moved on.
I moved to Walkme where I was for three and a half years, I managed the engineering and the product. When I arrived the organization had 120 people and when I left about 300 including a team in Ukraine. In June 2021, together with the team, we issued the company on Nasdaq, which for me is also a very big achievement. After the IPO, I was looking for the next big thing and I was very interested in fintech, everything related to finance and investments and I jumped on Fundbox. It is a private company, a start-up whose goal is to grow and become a factor significant in the market”.
2. Where do you see yourself in five years?
“I’m constantly asked if I don’t feel like starting something of my own. The question comes both from ventures that contact me to be a partner and from investors, and the truth is that I don’t feel like it. People always say ‘I’m tickled to be an entrepreneur,’ but I really like the position of being a senior manager, to lead significant processes in the company without necessarily being the founder. I like to reach a point where the company has grown and already has a product market fit, a business direction and take it to scale and success. I am both good at it and really like it. I mainly want to experiment, to be in other interesting situations of taking good companies and make them amazing and also to grow people. To take young and good managers with potential, like they did for me, and bring them to a place where they can do the best and biggest roles.”
3. What are your advantages?
“This is a question that is always asked and I try to answer it through results, or what happened to the companies I was in. At Mercury we sold for 4.5 billion dollars, at Perfecto we reached a beautiful exit, at Wakami we went public on Nasdaq and in all the places the organization I led, of the technology and the product, were a very significant part from the success I know how to take and make a positive impact on an organization and a company. When pressed and asked how do you do it? I answer that it is a combination of analytical ability and the ability to go deeper. I know how to identify the areas in my company and organization that if we improve then there will be a significant jump in results. Not only identify but treat: build a team, bring in the right people, put the emphasis in terms of where technological and architectural changes need to be made, even if these are complex things that require courage.
I am a person who is not afraid to take big decisions and also generate support for the management and lead significant changes at the product or technological level. This is how I make the organization successful.
I always prefer to give examples and not talk in slogans. Let’s say in Fundbox they asked me to explain how I do it. The example I gave is a position at Perfecto where I recognized that in order for the company to grow we need to make a deep technological change and run the product in the cloud. We were buying hardware and I said there was a lot of business to be gained by moving everything to Amazon, and that required a change in the way the product was built. We rewrote entire parts of the product over a period of about two and a half years and this is a step that has proven itself because we were able to receive customers of types and sizes that we could not before. We were also able to build products that could not have been built without it in terms of the amounts of information and computational power that was required. It’s a step I saw the benefits of when we started and then when we finished we identified more opportunities.”
What are your weaknesses?
This is a question that is always asked and I try to say things that have been said to me, that I have heard before. I’m very direct, I really ask people to tell me when I’m not doing well, so when they ask me, I reply that I’ve heard this criticism more than once and I’m really trying to improve. I’m not always sensitive enough, I’m too analytical and do what I feel I need to and don’t stop for a second to understand where it meets people, who are sometimes important people and key people in the organization. It is possible to achieve equally good results with a better combination between rationale and emotion. I really try to find the balance point. That’s the main thing. There are other things in communication, in conveying messages that I can do better, but I take it as a challenge, reading and learning from people who are much better than me at presentations and I learn and hope that I improve.
4. Why do you want the position?
“I came to the process because the company is very interesting to me and I feel that I can both learn a lot and experience things that will be very interesting for me. Also, I have a lot to contribute from my knowledge, experience and abilities to really take the company forward in the direction of the goals it has set for itself, which I really connect with And I feel ready, which is the right thing.”
5. Why should we hire you?
“First of all, because I’m a really nice person, I’m a great management partner, very supportive, very helpful. Second, because in my field I can bring great success, I think I know what needs to be done and I’ll probably know more after I join and learn more in depth. I I can’t say at a full level, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to take the organization forward.”