Boaz Yaari and the trouble with a good idea

“Keep your day job.” Boaz Yaari heard that advice before he started Sharegain. It was sensible enough. He had a career in capital markets, experience managing portfolios and a professional life that did not require explaining securities lending to people who had never heard of it. A startup would introduce that particular pleasure, along with several others.

He remembers the discouragement as fuel. There is a familiar founder’s story available here: the doubters object, the entrepreneur persists, the cheque arrives. Yaari’s own account has a more interesting middle. He understood the market he wanted to change. He still had to learn how to build a company capable of changing it.

In October 2020, five years into Sharegain, he published a reflection asking why nobody had warned him quite how hard this would be. It is the sort of question that rarely appears on the first slide of a fundraising presentation. By the fifth anniversary, it had earned its place.

The advice he didn’t take

Yaari’s route to finance had already included some sharp turns. Born in Tel Aviv, he served as a paratrooper, studied law and business, and worked as a lawyer. His interest in law owed something to L.A. Law. Television had made the profession appealing; practising it produced a less satisfying review.

He moved into FX derivatives trading and later into hedge fund portfolio management. In 2007, a role at Brevan Howard took him from Israel to London. His career also included BlueBay. He has described the move as an opportunity to enter a larger, more demanding market and become a learner again.

That willingness to begin again matters more than the variety of his job titles. Each move required surrendering some familiarity. Expertise is comfortable company. A new profession has a habit of sending it outside to wait.

By the early 2010s, securities lending had caught his attention. Large institutions knew how to earn revenue from lending financial assets. Many other investors had no practical route into the same activity through the firms holding their portfolios. Yaari saw an access problem, with technology and established practices helping to keep it in place.

The comparison he reached for was Airbnb for stocks, bonds and exchange-traded funds. An asset could have another use while its owner held it. The analogy made an unfamiliar market easier to explain, though translating that idea into a financial service would require rather more than a booking calendar.

A market hiding in plain sight

Yaari founded Sharegain with Liad Amit in 2015. Amit brought experience from retail financial services and had headed innovation at Bank Hapoalim. Their backgrounds met at a useful junction: understanding the market, and understanding how a new service might reach its customers.

For Yaari, the opportunity concerned assets people already owned. He wanted investors to have access to another potential source of income through lending those assets. The difficulty was making that possible through a bank or broker whose existing business might have no securities lending operation.

Sharegain developed an institutional answer. Its service would fit into the relationships investors already had. A broker could add lending rather than ask customers to establish an entirely new financial home. For the founder, that meant selling to organisations with their own systems, obligations and reasons to ask difficult questions.

The company launched its Digital Agent Lender offering in 2017 and its enterprise Securities Lending as a Service proposition in the final quarter of 2018. The latter gave the business a name that practically insists on an acronym: SLaaS. Finance has never willingly left a group of words unshortened.

Yaari described a revenue model tied to actual lending, with a success fee rather than setup or management charges. The proposition addressed a practical question for a prospective customer: how much new machinery would the institution need to own and operate before it could begin?

That distribution choice gives his ambition a particular shape. The investor is central to the argument, while the institution is central to delivery. A founder pursuing that arrangement must care about the person at the far end of the service and the organisation deciding whether to introduce it.

The apprenticeship nobody could skip

Yaari’s five-year essay makes clear that recognising a market opportunity did not settle questions of execution. He wrote about hiring, finding the right investors, locating early adopters and building technology that financial institutions would accept. The problems were connected. A convincing proposition needed an organisation behind it.

His account of technology was particularly revealing. Large financial institutions had little appetite for an early product that might break their systems. Sharegain invested in secure, flexible architecture early. That could be expensive before widespread adoption, but waiting until after adoption would leave an awkward question about how to earn it.

The familiar startup instruction to move quickly becomes complicated when the buyer has an operating business to protect. A founder can accept uncertainty on behalf of his own company. A customer must consider everyone affected by introducing that company into its work.

“We will live or die by our actions and not by our omissions.”

Boaz Yaari, 2020

He wrote that line about company culture. It is a demanding standard because it denies inaction a comfortable disguise. At the same time, his discussion of infrastructure shows the distinction between acting promptly and expecting every result promptly. Some work has to accumulate before a customer can see its value.

By 2022, the team’s growth had made that work more visible. Sharegain recruited graduates in London and Israel, bringing its workforce above 70 that summer. Yaari or deputy CEO Keren Halperin participated in the interview process for every new joiner. Hiring remained something the leadership did with its own time.

A company selling infrastructure also builds an internal structure: people who can translate between the client, the technology and the operation. Growth adds more conversations to that structure. The founder’s original understanding of a problem must become something other people can use without asking him to explain it again.

Other people at the table

Danny Kessler, Sharegain’s chairman and an early backer, remembers Yaari arriving with two ideas. He disliked one and continued arguing about its merits afterwards. The other was Sharegain. It is a pleasing detail: the successful idea did not arrive alone, already wearing a ribbon.

Kessler backed the initial seed round. Looking back in 2022, he described the responses they encountered changing over time, from rejection towards willingness to attempt the work. His recollection gives the company’s progress a human measure. The words people use in a meeting can change before the outside world notices anything has happened.

On 15 February 2022, Sharegain announced a $64 million Series B led by WestCap, with Citi, EJF Capital and Optiver PSI joining the round. WestCap partner Scott C. Ganeles, formerly Ipreo’s chief executive, joined the board. The investor list brought experience from several parts of the market Sharegain wanted to serve.

The operating relationships tell another part of the story. In 2021, Citi announced an automated securities lending solution developed with Sharegain. It was designed to integrate with wealth managers’ existing technology and give their customers a digital route from opting in to managing their lending.

In 2023, Yaari visited Optiver’s Amsterdam headquarters to discuss the partnership and securities lending. The setting suited the work: a founder meeting a market participant that had also become an investor. Capital, expertise and potential practical use were sitting near one another.

Swissquote subsequently widened access to its securities lending offering with Sharegain, following an introduction in Luxembourg. In October 2025, flatexDEGIRO announced that it had selected Sharegain to launch lending for its customers. These partnerships gave the original access argument concrete distribution through established financial businesses.

A different clock

For Yaari, one adjustment has been the distance between a decision and its answer. Portfolio management offered a relatively quick reckoning. Building Sharegain required years to establish a proposition and a brand. The work remained fast, but the verdict took longer to arrive.

He has been candid about the change in daily responsibilities too. A portfolio manager benefits from a support structure and a defined objective. A founder must attend to whatever the business needs. His description of the early role included bookkeeping, quality assurance and even plumbing. The chief executive title evidently came with a generous job description.

His lighter asides help restore a person to the financing announcements. In an earlier interview, he named a Vesper Martini at DUKES Bar as something he missed, and a freediving course in the Maldives as a bucket-list ambition. Neither requires a theory of entrepreneurship. People are allowed to want a pleasant drink and an interesting holiday.

The operating demands continue to change. In March 2026, Sharegain named Ronny Maate chief product officer and Ben Smith chief AI officer. Their remits included product development and applying AI to revenue optimisation, liquidity and operations. Yaari described clients rolling out retail securities lending at scale.

That puts another set of responsibilities around the original idea. A founder who once had to explain why a market should become more accessible now has to help an organisation deliver the service repeatedly. The question has acquired colleagues, clients, processes and a much longer calendar.

“Keep your day job” would have spared Yaari considerable work. His public reflections suggest he understands exactly how much. They also preserve the part that a financing headline tends to lose: the experience of being capable at one profession, choosing another, and spending years learning what the new job actually asks of you.