Edscale founder: "Check Font found us online" - voila! Of money

Mati Ram, founder of AdScale (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Who I am

: Entrepreneur, curious, I'm not good in my comfort zone, a leader by nature.

Decentralize authority to people I trust.

: Father immigrated from Iraq when he was two years old, after the Farhud riots and the family settled in Haifa.

Grandfather was an accountant at the electric company and grandmother raised the children.

Mother's family came from Malav, in Syria, and arrived in Haifa in 1933. Grandfather came here with all his brothers.

He was an entrepreneur and businessman, he had restaurants, shops and a lot of land.

I am named after him, Matthew.

The parents met at a discotheque in the Yaffe Nof neighborhood in Haifa.

They got married, stayed in the city and I am the eldest.

Mother was engaged in sewing bedspreads, curtains and everything related to the house and father, who worked with grandfather in his business, fell ill at the age of 40 with a skin disease, which manifested itself in sores in the throat that blocked his trachea, and erupted after his grandmother, to whom he was very attached, passed away.

I was 16 when he was diagnosed.

His great advantage, that he was always laughing, was in a good mood, it was hard to understand how sick he was.

For years he was in and out of hospitals, there was a constant fear that something would happen to him.

There was financial hardship at home, middle class minus.

I remember a very happy childhood, with a lot of warmth and love, but there was a tormentor who accompanied me all the time.

"At the age of 13 they bought me my first computer, a Commodore 64" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

My childhood

: Carmel French in Haifa.

Grandparents on my mother's side lived close by and there were many treats.

I cleaned stairwells to have my own money, spent a lot of time in our furniture store on Jaffa Street and helped my parents.

Even then I was a die-hard fan of Maccabi Haifa and to this day I come to all the games in Israel and abroad. In

high school I studied at "Leo Beck" majoring in business administration, which had just opened at the time, economics, accounting and the "Basic" programming language. At the age of 13 they bought me my first computer , Commodore 64, and I started programming. I wrote code for a drawing and a hundred times my name appeared on the screen. And I thought that this could be my direction. Like many Haifaites, I am also asthmatic, so I was assigned to the Home Front Command and the Seventh Armored Division.

I studied for a bachelor's degree in statistics and computer science and in order to finance myself I worked as a door-to-door salesman at the Matab, and then at the "Apple Center", where I entered deeply into the world of computers. After graduating I was hired at Aladdin, as a product manager for smart cards, I moved to a start-up that was dealing with email encryption, until it was closed. In 2000, the consulting company Comsec hired my services and I moved to work in the Netherlands.

My wife, the smart one in the house. She has a master's degree in computer science at the Technion, she was a senior researcher at IBM laboratories, and when I founded the company, she agreed to join me as CTO. We met at Antony's Pub, in downtown Haifa, when I was a soldier and she was at the end of high school, we got married after six years and moved to Yokneam, and we have been here ever since. We have three children, the eldest is a captain in 8200.

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"The big jump was after the 2008 crisis" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

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: Roni was then in the middle of her master's degree and Shahar was a baby, so they didn't join me and I lived for three years on the line.

I came home every three weeks.

I lived not far from Amsterdam, and I worked in information security.

At some point I decided to return home, become financially independent and no longer depend on my retirement savings.

: I joined three other people and we started working on risk management software, a field that was new at the time.

After the crisis of 2000, there started to be regulations in all kinds of fields, for banks, stock exchange companies, insurance companies, and this gave a huge boost.

We started in 2004, but the big jump was after the crisis of 2008, our timing was excellent.

During that time, the regulations went from talk to action.

It was clear that the numbers had been manipulated and therefore it was necessary to tighten the supervision.

We sold our software in Europe and less in the US, because I assembled it well. My relationship with the Netherlands did not end and we had a branch in Eindhoven.

: We were contacted by many large companies that were interested in the technology and nothing came of it. Then we received an email and they asked me to come to a meeting with a check Point. I thought it must be another lecture or consultation and I said to myself, 'Let's go, what is there to lose?' The division founded on Dinsk, I reported to him. He was a tough and decent boss, who improved me. He continued with me as chairman of Badscale.

The exit was moderate, several tens of millions of dollars.

It was fun to be successful, fixed me up financially, but didn't change my lifestyle.

It got me out of the rat race, gives me peace, a kind of comfortable pillow, but I haven't changed houses and the car is 12 years old, I'm enjoying myself but not going crazy.

"Check Point is an amazing company with not good enough PR" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Check Point

: An amazing company with not good enough PR, the high tech school and employee management, the best you can ask for.

You see around you people who are much richer than you who work hard, running around in the world from a place of creativity and commitment to society.

I was at Check Point for a little over four years, the entrepreneurial bug started digging in me, so I left and immediately founded Edscale and joined the team that accompanied me at Dinesk.

Asaf Frank, the first employee, for example, is my partner today.

: an advertising system that interfaces with the client's sales sites, analyzes the order, product and customer data, builds smart campaigns based on the data and provides the ability to analyze all advertising data 24/7 on one screen.

When we started at Dinesk, I took the $200,000 I had, hired a salesperson in the US and failed - and I made exactly the same mistake in Europe. I connected with David Asia, the father of the founders of E Tori who invested in me, was chairman and helped us a lot and he said, let's advertise ourselves on the internet

We had a lot of leads, we sold to them over the phone and it worked great for us.

Check Font also found us online.

That's where we realized the power of accurate advertising.

We are good at mathematics, statistics and science and we have harnessed these abilities to achieve advertising optimization.

We have an algorithm that knows how to calculate when it is worthwhile to advertise, where and with what intensity and wisely divide the digital advertising budget.

This format is ambitious.

: We started developing the algorithm in 2015 and the first product was released in 2017 to advertising agencies and to iCommerce in 2019. The company serves more than 5000 trading sites worldwide, 400 customers in Israel, it is profitable, received a grant from the chief scientist and we raised money, with the goal being to grow As much as possible.

"We sold a lot and made little profit" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Advertising

: At first we approached advertising agencies around the world, because we thought it was easier than selling to end customers, but our share of the pie was zero.

We sold a lot and made little profit.

Then we decided to focus and started selling directly to the customer.

We recognized that the opportunity in the world is the island of Commerce and we can know the relationship between the first click of the customer and how much he brought into the company.

: Once the tool for tracking the buyers was the cookies, which report to the websites what we did.

Following the heavy regulation, a large part of browsers stopped reporting to a third party, with the use of cookies set to decrease in 2023. Tracking customer behavior has become almost impossible.

Companies started jumping from one advertising agency to another, hoping to find a solution.

We provide a system that holds the data, generates insights about consumer purchases and uses them to refine advertising on Google and Facebook.

But the trick is to bring the new customers and bring them back via e-mail and SMS.

If you buy dog ​​food every month, you will receive an SMS after three weeks with a reminder and a coupon for 48 hours that encourages the purchase.

: have to invest a greater amount of work than before and their share of the pie has dropped from 30% to 10%, and they are fighting for their lives.

They don't want our system to help introduce advertising into companies.

Because when advertising is at home, you gain greater organizational knowledge and save a lot of money.

"I write very well, for now only for a drawer and for events" (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Pana

Y: reads management books, cooks and bakes excellently, with the specialty being sofrito.

I also have a tabon for pizzas and focaccia.

We travel a lot, twice a year on holidays abroad and of course we can't do without Maccabi Haifa.

: to continue to grow Edscale and in the future to concentrate on writing. I write very well, for now only for a drawer and for events.

• Of money

Tags

• Check Point

• High tech

• Exit