Or Offer wanted to sell jewelry. His family made it; he wanted to make the business bigger. Then someone mentioned an American designer he had never heard of, David Yurman, and the unfamiliar name prompted an unusually productive question. If a designer this relevant had escaped his attention, who else was out there?
It is an awkward discovery for a shopkeeper: the market is larger than your knowledge of it. Offer could look up a name once he knew it. Finding the names he did not know was harder. Search gave him destinations. He wanted the neighborhood.
The answer eventually became Similarweb, the digital intelligence company he has led since its beginnings in 2007. It took changes of product, audience, and ambition to get there. The jewelry business did not become the enterprise he had imagined. The research problem grew into one of its own.
The jeweler he had never heard of
Offer’s parents were artists and jewelry designers. After his military service, he helped expand their business into physical stores and online retail. His ambitions ran toward the sort of recognizable jewelry brand that could travel beyond a workshop.
Yurman supplied an example. A supplier thought there was a resemblance between the work Offer was selling and the American designer’s jewelry. Offer investigated, admired what he saw, and wanted to find other comparable businesses. The missing tool suggested a browser extension: visit a website, ask for similar ones, keep exploring.
There is a pleasingly practical quality to this origin. The initial customer was Offer himself, trying to understand his trade. A merchant’s curiosity had run into the limits of the available software. He recruited people who could help build a way around them.
The company’s name preserves that first idea. Similarweb began with resemblance. Its later business would depend on comparisons of a different kind: traffic, audience behavior, market share, and the choices people make online.
A keyboard salesman finds the back room
Computers were already familiar territory. At 14, Offer took a summer job in a Jerusalem computer shop. He was assigned to sales, where he tried to persuade parents to buy a Comfy Keyboard for their children. Sales proved an imperfect fit. The shop moved him into its PC lab.
The reassignment seems a useful early piece of career counseling. There, he learned to investigate faults through details, experiments, and repeated attempts. A computer that refuses to cooperate offers immediate feedback. It is less concerned with the elegance of your explanation than with whether you have fixed it.
He later credited the jewelry business with lessons in management, branding, and work processes. Together, the two jobs provided a practical education: making something function, then making a business function around it. His formal education came at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, now Reichman University; his corporate biography records a degree in Information Technology and Marketing.
He could code, but did not want coding to define his job. The business question interested him too much. That combination helps explain the move from repairing machines and selling jewelry toward building a tool for other people making commercial decisions.
Changing the thing you refuse to abandon
The website-discovery idea was only the beginning. A browser tool and a business that measures digital markets have different customers, different products, and different ways of earning their keep. Offer had to work through that distance rather than simply declare a larger ambition.
By 2011, the team was redirecting its efforts toward digital measurement. The analytics service arrived in 2013. In between lay the less photogenic work of changing a company that already existed: deciding what to keep, what to rebuild, and what to stop doing.
“Pivoting the company is like a divorce.”
Or Offer, 2017
Offer has described losing an early colleague and later cutting half the team during the pivot. His recollection makes the process sound costly and personal. The tidy verb used in startup histories conceals a considerable amount of disruption.
The new offering paired free website-traffic information with deeper paid analysis. That gave a visitor a way to test a familiar question about a company, then discover whether a more detailed answer was worth paying for. The casual browser and the professional analyst could begin at the same door.
By 2017, Similarweb had about 350 employees. Offer described thinking about broken parts of the organization in the evenings. “It’s a very big chess game,” he said. The board kept getting larger; the founder still had to choose which problem deserved the next move.
A market beyond the shop window
The practical appeal of the later product is easy to explain through the earlier business. Your own shop tells you who came inside. It says much less about the customers who walked past, found a rival, or decided to buy something else entirely.
Digital businesses have a version of the same problem. Their own records describe their own activity. A view of the surrounding market can put that activity in perspective. A rise in traffic means something different if the whole category is rising faster.
Offer’s customers came to include investors as well as operating businesses. Naspers used Similarweb in its investment work before becoming an investor in the company. That is a persuasive kind of introduction: the prospective backer had already encountered the product as a working tool.
The attraction also calls for judgment. Web activity can offer clues about demand and competitive position, but a clue still needs interpreting. The useful question is what a pattern might mean for a decision. A chart cannot take responsibility for the decision itself.
In his public writing, Offer repeatedly returns to that commercial purpose. Marketing, sales, strategy, and investment teams have different daily tasks. Each wants information that changes what it does next. The distance from an interesting number to a useful action became another product problem to solve.
The bell, the book, the next problem
Similarweb listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021 under the ticker SMWB. Shares were priced at $22, above the proposed range, at a valuation of about $1.6 billion. The company raised $165 million in the offering before any additional underwriter option.
On listing day, Offer looked back to the venture’s beginnings in his rented student apartment. The company had reached 800 employees. His account connected the celebration directly to the attempt to understand his parents’ market, fourteen years earlier.
A bank involved in the IPO gave him a David Yurman jewelry book. It was a well-chosen present. The name that once exposed a gap in his knowledge now belonged on the desk of the executive whose company sold ways to investigate such gaps.
The exchange bell provided a public milestone. Inside the company, the work continued to branch outward. In July 2024, Offer announced the acquisition of 42matters, an app-data company that had already been a partner for two years. The relationship moved from collaboration to ownership.
iOS and Android apps covered by the expanded App Intelligence offering, across 58 countries.
By March 2025, he was introducing an expanded App Intelligence offering that tracked more than four million iOS and Android apps across 58 countries. Its measures included usage, engagement, retention, and app-store activity. A business trying to understand its audience increasingly needed to see the movement between websites and apps.
His January 2025 review of the previous year also ranged across search, retail, sales, and stock intelligence. The detail is revealing: personalized homepages, market-share maps, keyword tracking, and easier exports. Much of making data useful consists of removing the small obstacles between a question and an answer.
In May 2025, Offer introduced Similarweb AI Agents for tasks including trend analysis, SEO strategy, meeting preparation, and outreach. The pitch centered on moving from interpreting information to doing something with it. For a founder who began by needing help with market research, the direction was recognizable.
A date for handing over the keys
Then came a change involving his own job. In May 2026, Similarweb announced a formal search for its next CEO. Offer said he had been thinking about succession as he approached two decades leading the company. The initial timetable anticipated a completed transition by mid-2027.
“Similarweb has been my life’s work.”
Or Offer, May 2026
On September 24, the company announced Michael Akkerman as his successor, effective November 2, 2026. Akkerman’s experience includes digital advertising, data, and commercial leadership. Offer is to remain closely involved during a transition period, supporting the incoming chief executive and the board.
As of October 22, that handover is still ahead. The date puts a different kind of appointment on a founder’s calendar. There have been products to release, employees to hire, investors to persuade, and an exchange listing to prepare. Now another chief executive will take responsibility for the next set of choices.
The original problem remains an unusually good introduction to the person. Offer was trying to sell jewelry and discovered how little he could see of the market around him. He kept following the question until answering it became his business. Soon, someone else will be running the company that grew from it.