Inside Innovid’s bustling Union Square headquarters, I’m playing with a Roku device in Tal Chalozin’s office. Chalozin, Innovid’s co-founder and CTO, shows me how the company has created interactive campaigns for connected TV devices, allowing me to use a Roku remote to receive more personalized video content from a brand within a television ad.
The experience is novel but intuitive, which is indicative of Innovid’s success. The company invented interactive video and is on a steadfast mission to make television a two-way communication stream.
Innovid was founded back in 2007 by Zvika Netter, Zack Zigdon and Chalozin, who all wanted to build a platform rooted in creativity and technology. Previously, Netter and Chalozin had started a nonprofit in Israel called GarageGeeks, which embodied a physical and virtual space that allowed people to come together and build projects around technology and innovation.
Since 2007, Innovid has worked with over 220 advertisers, raised $53.6 million in venture capital and now employs over 200 people. We caught with Chalozin to discuss Innovid’s innovative strategies, collaborative culture and his journey to running the company as Chief Technology Officer.
Built In: How has your role in the company evolved?
Tal Chalozin: A lot has changed over the years, and part of our success is that we learn as we go. When we started, I was doing invoices for all vendors that we work with, doing legal work and anything else that needed to get done. It was like I was playing a quest video game — you do what you need to reach the target. When we moved our operation to New York, I did a lot of business development with our different partners, such as CNN, CBS and NBC, because we needed to integrate our technology with them. As we’ve evolved, I have similar tasks but to a different scale. Now we partner with companies like Snapchat, Facebook and Roku.
BI: What are your day to day responsibilities?
TC: I’m in charge of all of our partnerships with all of our platforms. I used to run day to day development of products for everything we do — but as you grow up, you need professionals. So we hired Yuval Pemper as our SVP of Engineering and Ronnie Lavi as our SVP of Products. Because we are in an amazingly fast-paced industry, and because everything is changing actively, it’s important for us to grow to stay nimble and be able to do quick proof of concepts and partnerships to prove we can be on the cutting edge of technology.
BI: How do you stay on the cutting edge of technology?
TC: We ideate products that may or may not be interesting and then we see whatever sticks in order to connect our projects in a routine way. Because we believe in technology and innovation, we heavily invest in new areas and don’t wait for other people to pave the way. For example, we started working on connected TV about two years ago, when no one even knew how to spell Roku. That started as a science project. It’s critical to never stop innovating because it’s such a key element for us.
BI: What type of employees are you looking for as you continue to grow the company?
TC: The most important thing for us is to maintain the DNA of the company. We believe that work is a place where you spend most of your day with a lot of people — it might as well be an awesome place. We mostly care that our employees are good people, smart and get stuff done.
Image by David Pexton.
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