In 2018, Ori Hofnung founded GiantLeap together with Nadav Goshen. Ori leads the company as CEO. For his company, he says that he got his idea after overcoming a negative childhood experience. He had trouble reading at 12 years old, even though he had a high IQ.
With GiantLeap, Ori Hofnung created a platform that could become a “solution for my parents, and the many other parents who face similar challenges.” He says that “leading development researchers from Israel and the U.S.” joined forces in developing the system that became GiantLeap.
Upon the creation of GiantLeap, Ori Hofnung led the company to join forces with Texas Medical Center in a “strategic partnership, which allowed the company to meet the market at an early stage and build the system based on real feedback that was collected from a U.S.-based pilot.”
In February 2020, Ori Hofnung saw GiantLeap hold its open beta launch in the United States. Currently, over 2,000 adults and children are using the “new innovative platform.”
According to Yair Vardi, founding partner at Fusion LA, Ori Hofnung and GiantLeap “will help millions of parents better understand their kids and help with their development.” The company says that the “newly acquired funds will help recruit necessary talent tthat will help further develop and improve the system and create more successful partnerships.”
Check out more interviews with development tech innovators here.
We are the first company in the world that took upon itself the challenge to democratize multidisciplinary scientific knowledge and turn it into accessible and actionable insights tailored specifically for parents. Ori Hofnung, GiantLeap
Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Ori Hofnung: We are the first company in the world that took upon itself the challenge to democratize multidisciplinary scientific knowledge and turn it into accessible and actionable insights tailored specifically for parents. By leveraging recent advancements in research, we can provide comprehensive child development evaluations earlier than ever before, from as young as 4 years old (when parents are most curious), and deliver these evaluations remotely (from home), independently (by the parent), and at scale (fully automated).
Jerome Knyszewski: Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?
Ori Hofnung: After many trial and error attempts to outsource our development work, we hired a superstar developer via a development studio in Ukraine. This developer did a fantastic job of developing one part of our product. However, by that time we had gotten plenty of advice suggesting that we should have the whole R&D team In-house, in one location. We interviewed candidates for over three months, eventually hiring an Israeli programmer that cost us 25% more, was far less competent, and was a bad cultural fit for the team — which caused some unnecessary drama. My key takeaways from this experience were the following:
1) Invest a lot more time trying to understand if the person you’re interviewing would be a good cultural fit for the team.
2) In the early stages, focus on what your company needs right now instead of what people are telling you it will need in the “very near future,” then ruthlessly prioritize it, for most start-up companies that will be speed over in-house programming abilities.
3) Be extra careful with thinking about replacing a really good programmer. Statistically, one out of five programming hires would be an exceptional programmer.
Once you understand the scientific method, you can understand how to separate truth from falsehood.
Jerome Knyszewski: You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Ori Hofnung:
- Social skills and persuasion — In the very beginning we had no investments, stock-options or any type of monetary compensation to offer, so I had to convince a friend to help with the presentation and website design, another friend to help us set up the marketing platform, convince researchers to meet me and join our team to get credibility for the science behind our platform. All of this was done through persuasion.
- Becoming a perennial learner — there is no skill called business; excelling in business requires a myriad of skills where the quality of your outcomes is derived from the quality of the questions you ask yourself. And the only way to ask yourself good questions is by adopting a daily habit of reading books even in days when you are busy.
- Focusing on foundations — the ultimate foundations are mathematics and logic; if you understand logic and mathematics, you can have the basis for understanding the scientific method and hone your critical thinking. Once you understand the scientific method, you can understand how to separate truth from falsehood.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Ori Hofnung: The understanding that just because you’re doing a lot doesn’t mean you’re getting a lot done. A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things. You need free time and a free mind to reach breakthroughs.
A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Ori Hofnung: In tech, I think one of the biggest sins is to think you know better than the market. The market knows what it wants best. This is a common misconception among young tech CEOs. Michael Scibel from Y Combinator gives this great example of many young CEOs that think that Steve Jobs is this person they should emulate, but they have a false picture in their heads of why Steve Jobs was so successful. They think that he dreamed up perfect ideas out of his head and into the world. But the iPhone didn’t just enter the market as this perfect, magical device. It went through countless iterations. People often don’t realize that Steve Jobs was iterating at every step. I like to remind people how clunky the first iPhone was. First iPhone, had no 3G, back when 3G was a standard feature. One carrier. Horrible battery life, a Screen that cracked all the time and no App Store.
In order to avoid this mistake you need to study how to become a great user interviewer:
- Seek out feedback from your users. Never rely on feedback from your friends, investors, or family members; they will lead you 100% astray.
- Talk about their life instead of your idea; if possible, don’t mention your idea at all. Ask them how they’re dealing with it and why they’re doing it that way. Learn about them and their real needs, and let that guide you.
- Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or hypothetical about the future, instead of asking would you ever, might you ever, could you ever, ask them what they did last time when they had this particular problem your solution can potentially solve, get specifics in the past.
- Avoid asking questions like “would you buy this product if it did X.” This question is bad because it’s hypothetical. Questions like “would you ever,” “might you ever,” are non-committal. You are asking for opinions and hypotheticals from optimistic people who want to make you happy. The answer to a question like this is almost always yes, which makes it worthless.
Never rely on feedback from your friends, investors, or family members; they will lead you 100% astray. Ori Hofnung
Jerome Knyszewski: In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
Ori Hofnung:
- The value of continuously refining your user interview questions to dig deep and understand with high probability why a user would pay for a particular feature.
- Asking your users to describe to you how they would describe your product to their friend who could be potential users to see the very few words from your marketing messaging has the biggest impact on your users.
- Spending less time in meetings, less time on PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets and more time with customers; trying out your own product on a weekly basis thinking about ways to improve it, or scheduling free time to get inspiration from how successful products in other industries are solving similar problems/creating exceptional user experience. Challenging assumptions and creating deadlines — although first principle thinking now became a big buzzword thanks to people like Elon Musk, I think very few people practice this and really ask themselves important questions such as how do I know what I’m thinking is true, what evidence do I have to support that?” If I have evidence, are they from good sources? “What if I thought the opposite? Additionally, In the early stage of a start-up company, founders tend to underestimate the importance of deadlines to test if their hypothesis and strategy plan are correct.
Jerome Knyszewski: You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Ori Hofnung: Exactly what I’m doing today, leveraging technology to create a movement for democratizing the science of child development for parents, which I genuinely believe that, if adopted, will help us create a better society.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Ori Hofnung: You can find me and learn more about GiantLeap here:
LinkedIn = Ori Hofnung
Facebook = Or Hofnung
Twitter = Ori Hofnung
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
