Gal Rimon and the Trouble with Keeping Score

Gal Rimon knew how it felt to captain a winning team. He captained his school volleyball team, then the regional team. They won competitions. Then he joined Israel’s national youth squad and discovered that the view from the other end of the rankings was considerably less flattering. The other players had been practicing since childhood. He had started at twelve. His reward for doing well was entry into a room where almost everybody was better.

He practiced more. At the next training camp, he still did not lead the group, but he had climbed out of last place. Years later, running an enterprise software company, he remembered that adjustment more vividly than his school victories. A score can deliver an unpleasant introduction. The interesting part begins with what a person does next.

Today, Rimon is the founder and CEO of Centrical, a company whose work revolves around that next step. Its software connects frontline performance with learning, practice, coaching and recognition. Behind the product sits a former player’s question: once you have identified a weakness, who helps you work on it?

The captain learns to coach

Rimon eventually moved to the other side of the net, becoming a volleyball coach. In his first year, he gave all twelve children the same program. Fundamentals, repetition, discipline. The team got results. Then he read Power Volleyball by Arie Selinger and reconsidered the method. Selinger described technique at the level of the individual athlete. A movement could be taught differently to different players.

In his second year, Rimon adjusted his coaching to each child. He recalled their progress in a September 2026 essay, using the experience to examine how managers distribute attention. The habit he now questions is familiar: a few employees get repeated help with a few familiar problems, while colleagues outside the manager’s immediate field of attention wait.

It is an unusually concrete origin for an enterprise software argument. The young coach had already learned that equal instruction could produce unequal usefulness. Decades later, his company is trying to make individualized guidance available across teams too large for one supervisor to remember every detail.

A good career, and an inconvenient question

Before Centrical, Rimon built a career in business intelligence. He worked at EDS and Bashan, became vice president of customer relations and operations at Deloitte Consulting, and led Gilon Business Insight. His education joined the commercial and technical sides of that work: an MBA in marketing and information technologies from Tel Aviv University.

Ness Technologies acquired Gilon in 2010. Rimon became a senior vice president and joined its executive management. The sequence offered a recognizable corporate destination: responsibility for larger organizations, a place around the management table, and the possibility of running a company with thousands of employees. He had already led one with about two hundred.

Yet the profession he knew so well had left him with an irritation. Companies could assemble data and identify weak performance. Turning the resulting insight into changed behavior was another matter. The display could announce a problem with admirable clarity while leaving the person responsible to work out the remedy.

“data with no action is like business gossip”

Gal Rimon, on the limits of performance reporting

That phrase captures his impatience with measurement as an end in itself. A manager can know an employee’s numbers and still be unable to help. A report is a rather expensive place for useful information to spend the afternoon doing nothing.

A hundred refusals, then a working product

Rimon left the corporate track and founded GamEffective in 2013. He was forty-two when he made the move. The familiar executive wardrobe gave way to the startup uniform of jeans and a company T-shirt. Investors were less ready to change their expectations: he later described two years of unsuccessful fundraising and roughly a hundred funds turning him down.

Yahoo supplied a different kind of opening. It contacted the company through its website. Rimon entered a tender and traveled to Silicon Valley. His company passed the technical assessment but failed the business validation. The contract went elsewhere.

Two months later, he spoke to the relevant Yahoo manager again and asked about progress. The chosen supplier had finished its specification and expected several more months of development. Rimon offered to deliver a working solution by the end of the week. Yahoo became the first customer; Microsoft and Intel followed. The episode gave his pitch something more persuasive than a forecast: customers using the thing he was trying to describe.

The leaderboard has a blind spot

GamEffective began with game mechanics applied to work. Missions, progress, rewards and competition could make goals visible and encourage participation. Early company demonstrations used race and fantasy-sports narratives. There was an appealing familiarity to the proposition: people who understood a game could understand where they stood and what action to take.

Rimon was also writing about how badly a contest could be designed. In a 2015 essay, he warned that sales rankings could punish rookies or employees assigned smaller accounts. Rewarding a result without examining the behavior behind it could encourage exactly the wrong response. A contest built around meeting a self-generated forecast might reward the salesperson who made the forecast conveniently modest.

His proposed corrections included personal goals, comparisons among appropriate peers and attention to the middle of the workforce. Team goals mattered, too, especially when a sale required cooperation. The scorekeeper had to understand the game being played. Otherwise, the leaderboard could become an elaborate machine for congratulating the already advantaged.

By 2019, the company had become Centrical. Rimon later explained that the gamification label had confined the business to a niche while its ambitions stretched into employee performance more broadly. The new name put the employee at the center of the proposition. Learning and coaching were becoming part of the same conversation as motivation.

What a manager does with Tuesday

Rimon’s focus increasingly falls on the supervisor between the strategy presentation and the customer conversation. Many frontline managers, he observes, were successful agents or sellers before being promoted. Their new role asks them to develop other people, often while dealing with reports, evaluations and teams working in different places.

In a July 2025 podcast conversation, he described managers losing time to analysis and administration. He said users of Centrical’s AI tools reported saving up to ten hours a week. That is a company-reported outcome, rather than a promise for every workplace. Its relevance to his argument is straightforward: a supervisor’s calendar determines how much coaching an employee actually receives.

Rimon has developed these arguments in public as well as through the product. His Forbes writing includes a November 2023 essay titled KPIs Are Dead-Why Behaviors Matter More Than Metrics and a February 2024 piece asking Will AI Copilots Mean The End Of Frontline Managers? The titles show the progression of his attention: from the limits of a performance measure to the changing work of the person expected to improve it. He keeps returning to the manager’s role, even as new tools make more decisions available for automation.

His advice to a team leader, in another conversation, was wonderfully economical: “Be deeper.” A low conversion rate identifies an outcome. The useful follow-up examines whether the employee struggles to ask probing questions or respond to objections. Specific feedback gives the next practice session a purpose. A general instruction to improve leaves quite a lot of homework for its recipient.

The problem travels with the employee. In his 2020 writing on remote work, Rimon argued that managers had to maintain contact and make performance visible even when teams no longer shared an office. Access to information and an ongoing human relationship belonged together. Moving a worker’s location did little to remove the need for direction.

The next team includes software

By June 2026, Centrical was raising money for a wider version of the same idea. A $39 million Series D, led by Leeds Illuminate and Kingfisher Investment with participation from JVP and other existing investors, would support global expansion and AI development. The company said it served enterprises across 150 countries and 60 languages. Those figures describe Centrical’s reach, rather than Rimon’s personal following.

His latest interviews extend the coaching argument to teams in which people work alongside AI agents. In an October 2026 conversation, he described Centrical’s evolution from gamifying performance measures to adding learning, practice simulations and support for managers. The aim now includes coordinating those activities around a business goal, then adjusting the program as performance changes.

That ambition raises a practical question: who is responsible for a software agent’s work? Rimon argues that digital workers need clear objectives, performance standards and oversight alongside their human colleagues. In his June interview, he emphasized certification before consequential tasks and feedback that identifies deterioration. The responsibility cannot disappear into a collection of separately managed tools.

For human employees, his emphasis remains on preparation. Role-play offers a place to rehearse a difficult conversation before a real customer is on the line. Coaching turns an observed gap into something a person can attempt differently. The test of his expanding software business will be whether those connections remain useful in an ordinary working day.

Rimon’s vocabulary has changed across the years: business intelligence, gamification, employee performance, workforce orchestration. The volleyball story supplies a more durable reference point. He remembers what it felt like to arrive among better players, and what happened when he practiced. Now he is building systems around the interval between seeing the score and taking the next turn.