Recently, Gal Aviv was nominated CTO and GM Israel of Digital Turbine (NASDAQ: APPS), a company working at the convergence of media and mobile communications, delivering end-to-end products and solutions for mobile app developers, manufacturers and carriers, enabling them to grow their user base and effectively monetize mobile content. Gal is an alum of ours from 2018 and I met him to talk about his career and his work.
Gal earned his first degree in Computer Sciences at a very young age and went on to serve 7 years in the Israeli Air Force at Ofek, an R&D unit responsible for developing operational, intelligence, and other classified technologies. The peak of his academic studies, he claims, was his participation at the Executive MBA program at the Hebrew University Business School, with specialization in venture capital and risk management. At the same time, around a decade ago, he joined two entrepreneurs who started a company in what was then Ad-tech. AdTech has since flourished in multiple fields, with mobile being at the front. Everyone with a mobile app today knows that it doubles as advertising real-estate, whose value should be maximized, enabling users to enjoy free, quality apps in various categories. Back then, mobile advertising as we know it was at its very early stages. Gal’s job was to figure out a way to handle the user traffic on the apps to enable and optimize ad delivery. His military background was an advantage, he says “once you need to build army-grade, missing critical software, everything else is relatively easy.”
The young company, Inneractive, grew from a small start-up to one with hundreds of employees and a strong client base, eventually getting acquired by Fyber. Shortly after that, Gal was appointed as the CTO of the entire group. Fyber continued to grow and in 2021, the company was acquired by Digital Turbine, a major mobile player traded on the NASDAQ, in an over half a billion-dollar deal. Digital Turbine made a series of major acquisitions that year, and Gal was appointed as CTO App Growth of Digital Turbine, overseeing the multiple mobile growth companies brought together.
Gal named the unique ability of a one single line of code written by a programmer to influence and impact millions if not billions of people around the world in a second. In other professions, there is a limit on how much of an immediate impact one can have without considerable amounts of resources. In technology and High tech, it’s different. If you’re smart and skilled enough, you can make a huge impact even with a limited amount of resources and a small number of employees. Having worked in tech for his entire career, Gal says his personal accomplishment is the privilege of taking years of combined experience and skills and using them to impact millions of users around the world - as well as his global team of tech talent.
Many of our MBA students combine their studies with full time work. Gal almost did not start his MBA since he was busy working for Inneractive, when a lot needed to be done, until he was finally convinced by his friend and Fyber’s CEO at the time, Ziv Elul (today the CEO at Periapt). Dedicating his weekends to studying, he had to combine the studies with the day-to-day workload, as well as flying back and forth to Israel from other company locations like Berlin and Silicon Valley. He had to deal with work responsibilities alongside the rigorous coursework - all while balancing workaholic mentality and straight A student mentality. Looking back Gal says that without the tools he acquired from the program, he wouldn’t have been able to lead and plan as efficiently as he does.
Gal’s entrance to the AdTech world was not necessarily about advertising - but rather in the challenge of mobile advertising. The main challenges he identified was reaching so many users (almost everyone has a mobile phone) - and serving ads to these users while respecting their privacy. Nowadays, the technology Gal helps lead and develop provides opportunities for many mobile app developers, giving them a chance to make their innovations their business.
For me as an interviewer, Gal is a man who never stops working and sees every challenge as an opportunity. His work impacts millions of people every day and he constantly tries to improve whatever he is working on. He reminds me of a clock, continuously ticking without a break. Will he one-day pause? I don’t know. For now, he will keep ticking on even after the chime of midnight.