Shai Reshef
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Shai Reshef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. So to understand what you do and what you buy and what you rent and what are you focusing on. And last but not least, and probably the most important thing is never giving up. I think that you should be ready to make mistakes. You can't succeed without making mistakes. But accept them and learn from them and change. I'll give you an example, actually with KIT. The concept of KIT was B2B.
that we are going to test centers and convince them, tech test centers, when you want certification, et cetera, you go and take the exams, and to convince the people who's coming there to get academic degree, which sounds great, except the people who sell this product sell days in a center. They don't sell degrees. And this is a different product, which...
They did not know how to sell and they were not interested. So it was a total failure. So pretty much the entire concept of that university collapsed. And then we said, OK, but there is another market, the private market. Let's go for the private market. And we switched 180% degrees the way we operate. And we went to a different market and it worked. So be open. See if it doesn't work.
Is there another way?
Well, first of all, I take the stress on myself, not necessarily on my team. So And I like being under stress. I don't think that I'm the easiest person to work with. I want everything to be done yesterday. I'm really, really pushing hard and always deadlines and always, okay, why do you think it will take you a month? Why can't you do it in a week?
You know, and I'm always pushing people to the limit. which I think makes it hard to work with me. On the other hand, I think that people appreciate, first of all, I don't do it for the sake of making their life miserable. There is a reason for that. And second, I'm the first person to accept mistakes. I'll give you an example from, again, history. We had a marketing, VP marketing.
When we were three people, one of them was already VP marketing because I'm a strong believer in marketing. And he was a kid like myself. And one day I see a truck coming to our office and download doggy bags, just bags, thousands of them. And I said, did you order that? He said, why? We're a test prep company. And he said, you know what? I still don't remember.
Probably he said something, but it wasn't... Good enough for me to remember what he said. But I said, you know, he's an amazing VP marketing and he's doing amazing things. And he made a mistake. That's okay. We all, we're a human being and you accept the mistakes. And I think that people appreciate it. So it goes both ways.
I won't say names because I wouldn't give any name without their permission, but I'll tell you a few stories. Sure. Well, it's a story of a young woman that at the age of 14 became homeless. At the age of 16, she was homeless with a kid, single mom with a kid. At the age of 18, single mom, homeless with two kids. And she said, my only way to get out of it is through education.
So she went to a college, graduated after four years with tens of thousands of debt and couldn't find a job. And she said, I'm not giving up. I'm going to master the degree. And she came to us. And she did her MBA. And when I met her, she said, I'm now a manager at Amazon. I have my own home. I have my own pool. I have my vintage car. I'm the American dream. And it's all because of you people.
So this is one story. Another story, which is actually, you know, it goes to a different direction, but it's very important. I met one of our students who started studying also.
He grew up in a family who came from Mexico, and he grew up in a poor neighborhood, and he couldn't afford going to college until he found us, started studying computer science with us, and after nine months got a job with IBM while studying with us. And again, you know, these are people that we help even if they don't complete the degree. So we have hundreds of thousands of stories like this.
We have graduated to work with Amazon and Google and IBM and Microsoft and JP Morgan and World Bank. Most of our students actually work while studying with us, the population. A lot of them are working adults. But 70% of them say that they got promotion while studying with us. So we are really giving them a better future. And it is important.
When you help someone to get a better job and a better future, you don't help them, their families, their communities. And if it's a lot of them, it's their countries. And if many of them, it's the world.
It's interesting because I think that if I've started... nonprofit earlier, I could have done more. However, the fact that I came there when I can afford doing that and I'm not depending on a salary or anyone to let me do that is a great benefit. So from that perspective, you know, I feel that maybe I could have done more. But on the other hand, I'm very happy that I started it where I started.
I feel that the world should appreciate philanthropy in general more. I hope the world would have been more philanthropic. I think that I would love more people to go into NGOs because the world needs NGOs. I think that I myself, I wish that I would be able to contribute to the realization how online is powerful. So more people will take the opportunity for their own benefit, obviously.
But I'm very happy with where I am and I would just wish to continue doing what I do.
Yeah, we are just at the beginning. That's true. I hope.
Thank you for inviting me. It was a great conversation and thanks for doing it.
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