The first ever Israel Growth Summit was held recently in Tel Aviv, co-hosted by the Viola Group and the Israel Growth Forum led by Wix, and attended by CEOs and executives from over 150 Israeli tech companies in their growth stage. Although this was an exclusive event, the content was so interesting and valuable, we wanted to make it accessible to the entire community of tech companies and startups in Israel, so over the next few weeks we will be publishing a series of video highlights from 8the event, by speakers from Viola, Wix, ironSource, Mellanox, Check Point, Payoneer, Fiverr, SimilarWeb, Yotpo, Goldman Sachs, Moovit, Zerto and DaPulse. In this post, ironSource’s Tomer Bar Zeev and Mellanox’s Eyal Waldman talk about the importance of Inorganic Growth and M&As for startups as they scale.

One of the most important catalysts startups to achive significant growth, is to grow inorganically. This relies on their ability to both identify companies that are suitable for potential acqisition, and to understand how to incorporate the acquired companies into their own business. Mellanox and ironSource are both great examples of Israeli companies that have successfully acquired other companies on their journeys to achieving significant growth. In their “fireside chat”, Eyal and Tomer shared some of their own experiences and tips on what’s important for companies to consider as part of their inorganic growth efforts.

Here are highlights from Tomer and Eyal’s chat:
(Note: The videos are in Hebrew)

Why are M&As and Inorganic Growth so important to startups in the growth stage? (Part 1 of 4)

In this video: Eyal & Tomer talk about why inorganic growth is a necessary catalyst for building truly large companies, and how they each went about growing their own companies inorganically (including acquiring companies).


What should a growth company consider when acquiring another company? (Part 2 of 4)

In this video: Tomer & Eyal talk about how to identify companies that are good prospects for an acquisition and what to consider when when creating the acquisition terms.


How do you judge the success of an M&A and what is the difference between a merger and an acquisition? (Part 3 of 4)

In this video: Tomer and Eyal talk about the criteria they use for judging whether or not an acquisition is successful. Tomer also talk about the difference between a merger and an acquisition and how they each impact the organizational structure as well as the culture of the company.


When should a startup consider buying another company? (Part 4 of 4)

In this video: Eyal & Tomer talk about when is the right time for a growth company to acquire another company and what issues need to be taken into consideration.


More about Tomer & Eyal

Tomer Bar Zeev is Co-founder & CEO at ironSource (a Viola Ventures portfolio company), which was founded in 2010. ironSource builds monetization, engagement, analytics and discovery tools for app developers, device manufacturers, mobile carriers and advertisers. With over 3.5 billion installs to date, 6 million successful new installs per day and 1 billion unique users reached across all major geos, devices and platforms each month, ironSource leverages its massive scale and advanced segmentation and targeting algorithms to provide the right content to the right people at the right time.

Eyal Waldman is a co-founder of Mellanox, and has served as Mellanox’s president and CEO since the company’s founding in 1999. Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ: MLNX) is a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions as well as services for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure, that increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance.


About the Israel Growth Summit
The summit was created to bring together this exclusive group of leaders so that they can benefit from the experience of fellow industry colleagues whose companies have already reached significant growth milestone. The summit – which will be held annually – was conceived to provide a forum for tech companies to network and benefit from shared knowledge and connections, in the hope of strengthening Israel’s ecosystem of growth-stage companies as they navigate their journey towards becoming global leaders.


Other videos in our Israel Growth Summit video series:
The State of Growth Companies in Israel (Shlomo Dovrat & Harel Beit-On)
Challenges faced by tech companies as they scale (by Wix’s Nir Zohar)
Why is Inorganic Growth so important? (by Tomer Bar Zeev & Eyal Waldman)
6 Guidelines for Change & Growth (by Check Point’s Amnon Bar-Lev)
The challenges of taking your company global (with Or Offer & Tomer Tagrin)
Scaling While Maintaining Culture (with Keren Levy & Vered Raviv Schwarz)
Growth Financing Panel (with Goldman Sachs MD, Jonathan Penkin)