By around age 23, Erez Arnon, the cofounder and CTO of AI software development firm Canals, was already the most senior engineer at Adap.TV, one of the first companies to build ads that appear before you view videos.
Because Adap.TV was small, it was a valuable training ground for Arnon as he learned how to manage engineering and product. He sees Adap.TV as an example of a company that was inevitable as advertising moved online.
“I think at a more established company, me being so young, I would have had a lot fewer opportunities to advance,” Arnon said.
At Adap.TV, Arnon worked in the C programming language at a job that involved lots of data and traffic, he said.
“You're close to the ones and zeros of the machine,” Arnon said.
Later, he moved to Uncommon.co, a now-defunct AI-powered online recruiting platform, when AOL bought Adap.TV. Arnon’s role at Uncommon, a company that handled lots of data requests on the internet, involved working in Python as well as building UI and deployment pipelines. He says Python offers less control and limits on the ability to optimize.
“There are fewer lines of code, and it does a lot more for you [compared to working in C],” Arnon says.
He views learning programming languages as easier these days because users can ask Google for help on how to build something in a certain language.
On Founding a New Company
When potential founders are looking to start a new company, they must be sure they are addressing a key need, Arnon stressed.
“Working on the right thing is very important,” Arnon said.
Rather than just solving a business problem, he suggests focusing on why the business problem has not been solved before. The answer could be that the technology required for the company to launch does not exist yet, according to Arnon.
When starting a tech company, “You want to try to work on something that’s inevitable, that’s going to happen,” Arnon said.
At Canals, a provider of AI technology for wholesale distribution, Arnon and his co-founder, Michael Delgado, were looking to address the manual processes in the wholesale industry. The next step was to go to conferences to find out more from distributors about what problems they were experiencing from a tech perspective.
“Talking with distributors and basically seeing what made their eyes light up — that's how we landed specifically on our first product,” Arnon said.
From there, they looked for a design partner that could share data and help build out a product. Today, Canals provides automation for manufacturers, distributors and contractors to help them enter their orders into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and send automatic replies to customers.
“We connect with their emails, we identify those invoices, we do all the data entry, and we flag any discrepancies,” Arnon shared. The system sends out confirmations of payments and shipments for customers. It also automatically spots discrepancies of dates and products shipped, he said. In addition, Canals’ inventory optimization system provides guidance on what customers should buy and when.
As the company evolved, Arnon’s role grew from performing 100% of the coding for the company to handling small-scale recruiting, managing a small team and then overseeing managers. He says the company reached 80 employees without raising money.
Then the company started hiring one to two engineers per week, according to Arnon.
At Canals, Arnon has also developed expertise in team organization.
“You want to organize teams in a way that they can be as self-sufficient as possible, and not be blocked on other teams,” Arnon said.
The Evolution of a CTO
When Arnon went for CTO training, he learned about potential roadblocks when a company gets to 50 people. Companies face difficulties in aligning priorities for the team. However, this wasn’t a challenge for Arnon’s team.
“That's a problem that I don't really think we've run into, even though at this point we [have] 85 engineers,” Arnon says. “I chalk that up to the teams being very self-sufficient.”
He explains that becoming a strong leader and CTO and demanding excellence may involve some ruffling of feathers at times. However, he suggests that people like to grow and appreciate the push.
“I think it's very easy to avoid conflict and to want to make everybody feel good, and that is the opposite of demanding excellence all the time, and so it can be uncomfortable,” Arnon says. Instead, tech professionals who want to grow should expect to experience discomfort, he adds.
“A lot of people will choose comfort over excellence and discomfort, but specifically choosing discomfort because we want to grow, that is a choice that many people will not make,” Arnon explains.
He says a valuable skill he has gained as a CTO is the ability to hire solid engineers, including convincing them to come work at Canals instead of top-tier AI and tech companies.
With software engineers not known for their speaking skills, Arnon also provides feedback to engineers on their presentation skills following meetings. He finds that this is feedback they would not usually receive.
“I ask them to record themselves and send it to me. We go back and forth, and we do that a few times until they're just good at it on their own,” Arnon said. “That's super valuable, and they appreciate it.”
Looking Ahead at Canals: ‘Seeing Around Corners’
As Arnon developed his career to become a founder and CTO of Canals, he evolved from an individual contributor at Canals to a frontline manager who develops leaders. After that, he focused on making the business more scalable. He describes a final stage of development in his role as allowing his team to operate without his help.
“The doing is almost gone, and now I'm relying on this team that we've built,” Arnon said.
Arnon’s work at Canals involves “trying to see around corners and predict the future” as well as providing feedback where he can.
He advises aspiring leaders to be very clear on the culture they want to set, and that includes knowing their values.
“Being very clear on what is the culture you want to set and then making sure everybody in the organization is behaving in that way, that is, I think, very important when leading a company,” Arnon said.
