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Host: We’re here with Micha Berkuz, founder and CEO of Giftedd, a gifting solutions maker. What’s up — how’s it going?

Micha: Good — visiting the Holy Land, trying to work with my team before a product relaunch we’re doing in the US and figure out next steps, but also visiting family, seeing some friends. I’ve been in San Francisco for the past two and a half years.

Host: How did that move happen — what made you fly over?

Micha: I moved with my company. It was an easier process because my wife is originally from New York, so it was an easier transition. I grew up here in Israel — spent six years here with my wife after we met — and then we decided to expand the business to the US market.

Host: What was the business before that?

Micha: It’s kind of a weird story — my co-founder Shai put it best: we’re a company that turned into a startup, not the other way around. We started as a platform here in Israel with a very basic premise — a consumer-facing digital gift-card marketplace, where you buy a gift card and send it to friends and family for restaurants, retailers, and so on, via text or email, with point-of-sale integration to close the loop. That was the vision, back in 2008 — it wasn’t obvious the way it is today.

Host: That sounds like it’s tied to something.

Micha: We wanted to build a company, and we got into the market right at the height of the Groupon explosion, so it was really hard to differentiate our product from a heavy, deep-discount daily-deal business. We had to explain to people that this isn’t a discount product, it’s a gift card — you’re not buying it for yourself, you’re buying it for someone else. It was a completely different pitch to get people to buy into.

Host: That’s still a thing — when I searched for you guys online, I saw a lot of confusion, comparisons to Groupon.

Micha: We were still trying to differentiate. It’s a lot easier today — in Israel specifically, we’ve basically taken over the gift-card space and built a brand that’s both consumer-facing and enterprise. But the original premise was that B2C consumer product, and we ran into a lot of challenges, starting with fundraising. We went to a lot of VCs and investors in Israel and got turned down in pretty much every boardroom. We wanted to expand the product into an international brand, and we couldn’t raise money — people told us the space felt saturated because of everything going on with Groupon, and that we weren’t the classic entrepreneurial team — no CEO/CTO/CMO out of the standard mold. My co-founder Shai came from real estate investing with a bit of tech, I was an engineer who’d worked at a few companies — it was never the classic model VCs expect, where you’ve come out of an elite army tech unit or have a computer science degree and a textbook founding team.

Host: Did you guys leave full-time jobs for this?

Micha: Not right away. Shai had his real estate business, and I had another company doing web development that let us sustain ourselves while we built this. We kept getting the usual answers — this is nice, but it’s early, do you have traction to show us, this is nice but it’s Israel, how does it apply to the US market? We didn’t come in with just an idea — we invested our own money and built our own platform, not what we have today, but something real. I always joke that when our angel investor finally invested, we sort of oversold that we had a product and he oversold that the money was really coming — a bit of a strange mutual leap of faith.

Host: If you both came from those backgrounds, why did you get into this specifically? Why this idea?

Micha: The idea came from a gift I got back in 2008. My girlfriend at the time bought me a PlayStation, and my sister wanted to get me a gift card for a game — she drove all the way to Tel Aviv, found a store near my office, bought the card, and even got my mom and other sister to chip in. She spent half a day, paying for parking, driving an hour each way, just to hand me a piece of paper worth a certain amount of money. After that I thought — there has to be something online that makes this easier. I looked, and there was nothing. Funnily enough, when I moved to the US two and a half years ago, I was organizing my computer and found the original Word document from 2008 where I’d written down what this product should look like. I still have it — it’s very close to what we actually built.

Host: So you had the idea fully formed, and you just decided to build it?

Micha: Pretty much — I had a clear idea of what we wanted to do, so we dove in and built a basic product. I partnered with Shai — we’d actually tried a different ad platform for discounts first, which worked out a little and gave us some early money to put into this. He’s known me since he was in school with my sister — probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He has no technical background, but he understood early, back in 2008, that he wanted to be in tech.

Host: How did you find your co-founders — did you go looking for partners?

Micha: Not really — it happened naturally. Later we brought on another co-founder, Tal, to help write our business plan, and we realized our business relies heavily on the financial side because of the volume of transactions we handle, so we brought him on as a co-founder too. He’d been a CFO at companies like Johnson & Johnson. So each of us brought something — I brought product and technical, Shai brought business, and Tal — who’s a lawyer who never practiced law — brought finance.

Host: You started off as a basketball player, right? How does someone go from basketball to building a product?

Micha: You don’t really have a choice sometimes. I played basketball growing up, up north in the Upper Galilee — played for a good league from a young age, all the way from the junior team to the professional team, played under David Blatt for a couple of years, then went into the army. At almost 21, a doctor found I had a heart condition — not something that would affect day-to-day life, but enough that I couldn’t play professional basketball anymore.

Host: That must have been a real turning point.

Micha: It was — basketball had been the dream since I was six years old. But luckily, my army service was in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, and I was part of the team that built the first website for the IDF — back then, writing basic HTML, saving it to floppy disks, sending it by courier to get the site updated. That’s how I learned to code. And luckily, after I stopped playing, a reservist in my unit — who later became one of my best friends — brought me into his company to work as an engineer.

Host: We’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, and a surprising number turn out to have been competitive athletes. There seems to be a real correlation.

Micha: I think there’s something about dedication and mindset — I’m still trying to pin it down exactly — but there’s something about athletes moving into tech where they feel more comfortable than in a traditional big-corporate environment. I was a pretty poor student growing up — school bored me, I didn’t understand why I had to do a lot of the work, I’d be up all night teaching myself to code and then sleeping through class. But there’s a competitive discipline that sports gives you — the practice, the preparation for a 40-minute game that takes a whole week of work — that I never found in school. Maybe also learning to deal with failure and keep going.

Host: It sounds like you didn’t mind failing on the court, even though you clearly minded failing in school.

Micha: My theory is you can’t force someone to do something they don’t like for very long. I use that with my own team today — if someone doesn’t like their job, they might be able to do it, but not well, not for long. I don’t play basketball anymore because of back problems, so these days ping-pong is my thing — my little escape from day-to-day life. I think a lot of the problem with school is that the system tries to force everyone into the same mold, when really each person has a different personality and mental structure that fits different kinds of challenges.

Host: So how did that play out for you professionally?

Micha: I worked at Check Point for a couple of years — an amazing experience, very much a corporate-America style of company operating out of Israel, complete standards for performance reviews and how to run an organization of a couple thousand people, which almost nobody else in Israel was doing at the time, around 2005. Great experience, but I looked at the people above me in upper management and felt like I’d eventually get stuck. That pushed me out of working for someone else and into trying to build something of my own. Once I made that decision, I sort of became unemployable in the traditional sense — you get used to a level of control over your life that’s hard to give up, even though building your own company is objectively much harder.

Host: What do you think happens, psychologically, to successful professional athletes?

Micha: I think it comes down to this: you’re not born great at basketball, you start playing, you get positive feedback, you practice more, you get better, and eventually you’re good enough to play professionally. That process builds real self-belief — confidence. And I think when people leave a place like Check Point, there are two types: those who think, this is one of the only companies in Israel where I can get this level of responsibility at a US standard, I want to climb as high as I can here — and those who’ve already proven something to themselves once and think, okay, I understand what management looks like, I can do this myself. I wasn’t the best basketball player in Israel by any means — there were huge talents playing at the same time — and you deal with a lot of failure trying to build a career like that, and you learn from it. I remember sitting with David Blatt after a rough game, and he told me straight: I understand what you’re going through, but you have to understand this is our livelihood — if you don’t take this seriously, you’re affecting the food I put on my family’s table. That lesson had nothing to do with basketball, and I’ve carried it into how I run a company — sometimes telling a 24-year-old new hire straight out of college the same thing: you have to take this seriously, because this is our livelihood.

Host: I can relate to that, even though I was never a professional athlete — I worked in a big corporate office and had that same feeling that there had to be more than this.

Micha: Right, but you’re a good example too — you weren’t a professional athlete, but you have a track record of doing things successfully before. I think it comes down to a kind of accumulated confidence — once you have enough of it, you’re less scared of making a change, less scared of failure, because you know you have a toolset that will carry you through. There’s a line I heard recently: if failure isn’t an option, then success isn’t either. You have to know that if it doesn’t work out, you’ll recalculate and get back on track.

Host: So you left Check Point with that toolset of what a well-run American-style organization looks like.

Micha: Right, and going back to the company — we started with that basic B2C gifting idea, and the only person who really saw what we were building early on was an investor who ran a holding company and made small investments, on the order of a hundred, hundred-twenty thousand dollars. We got turned down by pretty much every other VC in the city. This was around 2010, and we kept getting the standard notes — come back with more traction, this doesn’t obviously apply to the US market, you’re great, you started in Israel, but figure out what the US market actually looks like first.

Host: Looking back, do you think you could have pitched it differently?

Micha: Honestly, if you ask me to look back and give advice to my younger self, I don’t really have any — because all of that became part of the learning process. There’s no shortcut between failing in front of investors, getting rejected over and over, and figuring it out, versus someone just handing you a roadmap. But more broadly, I do think about the MVP question — whether we came in too early or too late. By the time we had a working product, we weren’t selling a dream anymore, we were selling metrics, and the bar for that is different — sometimes it’s actually easier to sell a dream to an investor than a half-built product, because once you have something real, they want to see traction, not vision. We came in with a product that was half-baked — we still needed to hire engineers, build a team, get things moving. And it was genuinely tough, because on the consumer side we had a two-sided marketplace — we needed merchants and suppliers providing content, and we needed people buying gift cards to create demand, which is exactly the kind of chicken-and-egg problem that forces you to pivot your product toward whatever gets you initial traction.

Host: What did that pivot look like?

Micha: After our first investment came in, we tried an advertising and media partnership that didn’t really work — sending people to our own website has a fundamental problem when you’re in gifting, because you need to catch someone at the exact moment they need to buy a gift for someone else. So instead, we started partnering with merchants directly, putting our gifting solution on their websites so we could tap into their existing traffic instead of building our own from scratch. That created real traction — I no longer had to worry about customer acquisition on my own branded site. And every person who bought a gift card through one of those retailer partners automatically became our client too, because they’d signed up on our platform and we had their information. That was the real unlock — we realized what we’d actually built wasn’t just a platform or a website, it was a relationship with essentially every retailer in Israel. And that relationship is what let us build our B2B business: using that retailer network to go after corporate customer retention and employee recognition — giving companies a dashboard to run gifting programs for their own employees and customers. That was the next evolution of the product.

Host: How big is the company today?

Micha: When I left Israel about two and a half years ago, we had a team of around 13 people. Today we’re around 70.

Host: What brands are you working with?

Micha: In Israel, we work with a huge range — companies like IBM, HP, Facebook, and many more. In the US, we did more of a soft launch — it’s actually a different brand there, and we’re still working out product-market fit.

Host: How did that connect to trying to raise money again?

Micha: We went back to VCs once the Israeli business was clearly working — great growth, a real product, validation, everything you’d want to show. And the first response was always some version of: it’s great that you’re doing this in Israel, but we want to see US traction. No one would invest purely on the Israeli numbers. One of our most popular products was birthday gifting for employees — we worked with companies like IBM, HP, Facebook here — and when we pitched that in the US, we kept hearing that Americans don’t really celebrate birthdays at work that way. Today, two years later, birthday gifting is actually our most popular product in the US too. But at the time, you just don’t have a good answer for that kind of pushback in the room.

Host: So how did you eventually break through in the US?

Micha: Luckily, things in Israel kept accelerating — revenue, headcount, brand recognition. We made some good marketing calls, including bringing in Jeremy Piven to shoot a commercial for us while he happened to be visiting Israel.

Host: That’s a great story — how did that come together?

Micha: We’d started working with a new advertising agency, and I was in San Francisco, my co-founder Shai was on vacation in Denmark, one of our investors was in Thailand — and all of a sudden our CEO in Israel, Jonathan, calls and says he needs all of us on the phone in two minutes. We’d told the agency upfront we had basically no budget and that they’d have to get creative. The agency called back and said, I can’t believe I’m about to offer you this, but Jeremy Piven is in Israel as part of the Omri Casspi Foundation’s trip, and he’s open to doing a campaign — but it would mean tripling our marketing budget for the year, and we had two hours to decide before they offered it to someone else. Shai and I had no idea what half the industry jargon even meant, but Jonathan was sure this was a huge opportunity, and within the hour we said yes. We shot the commercial the next day. We didn’t have money for TV, so we ran it on Facebook — which turned out to be an amazing partner — and it ended up getting about 1.5 million views in two weeks, which is a lot for Israel.

Host: Was that mainly a brand-awareness play?

Micha: Yes — we measured the metrics, but the real goal was building a high-end, elevated gifting brand, where the perceived value to the person receiving the gift feels high. Our platform in Israel lets people send gift cards to top restaurants and experiences you can’t find on other gifting platforms, which gives us access to a certain audience. In the US today we work with something like 150 to 200 brands; in Israel we work with around 900. That success in Israel — even after we again failed to raise money in the US, hearing the same “this doesn’t translate” feedback — eventually got the business to profitability, which let us self-fund our move into the US instead of relying on outside investors.

Host: How do you approach entering a brand-new market like the US?

Micha: The product itself translated fine — the supply-and-demand logic that worked for US-headquartered companies with Israeli teams told us the same logic would work for companies based entirely in the US. But you quickly run into the classic sales-versus-marketing tradeoff — do you go in cold-calling and building a network for your first clients, or do you build the brand first through marketing? We started by leaning on relationships we already had — Israeli startups with big US teams were natural early customers. From there, working directly with US clients taught us where the real product differences were. In Israel, HR managers work closely with our customer success team through onboarding. In the US, clients are much more used to self-serve SaaS products — they want to do things themselves. We had clients tell us, flat out, that every minute they spent on the phone with us for something simple, like changing a color on a greeting, was a waste of their time — they wanted to do it themselves online. That was a real shift in how we thought about the product for that market. We also learned that while birthday recognition is big in Israel, in the US, work-anniversary and tenure milestones often matter even more — same core product, different emphasis.

Host: So what’s the long-term vision — the endgame?

Micha: I don’t really believe in a rigid five-year plan in a market that moves this fast — if you look at the list of the five largest companies in the world a decade ago, it was full of oil companies, IBM, General Electric. Today it’s an entirely different list — Facebook, Google, Apple. So I can’t credibly project that far out. What I do know is that in our space — recognition and engagement — there’s no dominant brand yet, the way Slack owns internal communication or a company like Zenefits owns a certain part of HR tech. I want Giftedd to be the name people think of immediately when they think of that space, in the US the way we already are in Israel.

Host: It sounds like you’re already on that path. Do you think of yourself as having a knack for spotting where a market is going before others do?

Micha: I think I do have some ability to see a little ahead of where the market’s heading. A lot of companies build a vision, manifest it, and then really struggle to figure out the next step — they pivot without a clear direction. I feel like I have a genuinely clear roadmap for the next couple of years — what we need to do, and where we’re trying to take the product and the market position.

Host: You seem pretty stoic, too — not easily distracted.

Micha: When you know exactly what the goal is, it’s a lot easier to stay focused on getting there. I love the product side of this — the attention to detail. I look at a company like Airbnb and think about the level of polish I want us to eventually reach. But I also know I can’t do everything well myself — someone once told me you’re the average of the five people around you, and I think that’s a useful way to think about building a team. I have a manager here in Israel who’s much better than I am at the culture and team-building side, and I learn from him constantly.

Host: On fundraising — you mentioned you’ve actually never successfully raised outside funding in your life. Do you think there’s something about you that makes that hard?

Micha: Honestly, I’m not sure — I can sell our product, but for whatever reason I’ve never been able to sell it to investors specifically. I don’t know if it’s a gap in how I present, or something else. You see serial fundraisers who’ve clearly cracked that code. That’s part of why I say we became a company that turned into a startup — right now we operate like a startup, moving fast, iterating quickly to figure out what’s working. But we didn’t start that way — we started with a very traditional business model, figuring out the revenue model from day one instead of chasing growth first and monetization later.

Host: How did your one early investor end up saying yes when so many others said no?

Micha: I told him directly — I want someone to fall in love with the company and the vision, not just tick boxes. I’d sat in front of eight or nine other investors explaining why we were a good bet, and it just wasn’t a fit. I don’t think it’s only that people turned us down — I think it’s that this particular investor genuinely connected with us and what we were building. He also had real insight into backing founders who don’t fit the standard mold — no CTO with a marketing MBA from Stanford, no one from an elite intelligence unit. We came in as a very non-traditional group of founders.

Host: You also mentioned learning from best practices outside your own industry.

Micha: Right — sometimes the products that aren’t direct competitors are the ones worth studying most closely, especially in traditional industries where the standard of product quality is low. If you bring in best practices from other, more sophisticated spaces, you can differentiate yourself in an industry that isn’t paying that much attention to detail.

Host: And going back to something you said earlier — that you have no advice for your younger self, because everything, including the mistakes, was part of the process. That’s actually my favorite thing you’ve said today.

Micha: That reminds me — we talked before the podcast about the Steve Jobs biography, and he said something similar: a lot of entrepreneurs tell the story afterward as if everything followed a clear plan and a clean vision, but the truth is you can only really connect the dots looking backward, in hindsight. Founders with all the money and an amazing product and an incredible team can still lose their way if they don’t understand where they need to go — you have to stay agile.

Host: So you wouldn’t want to spare yourself those specific mistakes?

Micha: Not really — those are the situations that shape you into the entrepreneur you become. That’s probably why I don’t give my younger self advice — honestly, I was probably too young and too stubborn to have listened anyway. It’s one of those things you think you understand until you actually get hit by it. I wouldn’t want to stop other entrepreneurs from making their own mistakes either — it’s how you recover, and what you change afterward, that matters. Certain smaller setbacks prepare you for much bigger ones. Even today, looking back at the last two years in the US, there are things I’d do differently, and I’m sure three months from now, once we’ve had real feedback on our new US product, we’ll say the same thing about decisions we’re making right now. There’s no way to predict every pothole in the road — there are just too many of them. You can’t avoid mistakes; you just find your own way through them.

Host: Lots of luck, and thank you so much for this.

Micha: Thanks for having me — this was great, thank you guys.

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