🎙 Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.
Before Facebook, before Twitter, and before Chrome became what they are today, Outbrain helped shape the modern internet—and grew into a $1B+ revenue, public company with 1,000+ employees.
Ori Lahav, Outbrain’s former CTO and Co-Founder, opens our conversation with: “Entrepreneurship is like living with a chronic disease.” Not because it’s “morbid” — because it’s constant. It never stops calling. And if you’ve felt that “bug,” you’ll recognize yourself instantly.
In this episode, Ori tells the unlikely story: a kid raised in a kibbutz (where “business” and capitalism didn’t exist) secretly learns to code on a PDP computer (a “washing machine” sized relic), disappears from keyboards for a decade… and then gets pulled back in by the dot-com wave — until a sailing trip and a friend’s idea turns into Outbrain.
You’ll hear the behind-the-scenes lessons most founders miss:
• Why Outbrain started as a simple 5-star rating widget (and why bloggers loved it)
• The brutal truth of early-stage: ~2.5 years to get distribution, then 3 pivots in 18 months to find a business model
• The “lighthouse” framework Outbrain used to pivot fast without losing the mission
• The moment Outbrain fired its biggest client to protect “trust” (and the cost of doing the right thing)
• How to build culture when you scale across oceans
• Ori’s core rule: “Trust the other side”
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