Ronen Shilo keeps finding reasons to come back

Ronen Shilo’s career owes something to a pocket calculator. On a trip to the United States after his military service, he bought a programmable TI-55. He liked making it do things. A friend suggested computer science. Shilo went to the Technion. There are more expensive ways to discover a profession, and considerably less useful souvenirs.

Decades later, his work includes a clock that plays animations and framed art that reveals quotations. Between the calculator and the clock came Conduit, the browser software company he co-founded, and Como, where he led a move into customer loyalty. The products occupy different places in daily life. Read together, they suggest an enduring question: what makes someone look again?

That connection is a way of reading his career. Shilo has changed products, markets and roles, while keeping an engineer’s interest in what can be made to work. His story gets more interesting when the objects enter the picture. So do the people who helped make them.

A calculator with consequences

The Technion gave him a degree in computer science. His subsequent career took him to Ready Systems in Silicon Valley, then into ventures of his own. DoubleAgent, founded in 1995, enabled people to share applications online. NetManage acquired it; Shilo managed its Israeli operation before starting Effective-i in 1999, working on how companies could find and organize information.

At DoubleAgent, a young engineer named Dror Erez supplied an unusually persuasive introduction to his abilities. Before going out for lunch, Shilo described a difficult missing element in the product. When he returned, Erez had it working. The account has the pleasing economy of a good engineering demonstration: problem, lunch, solution.

Their collaboration continued across companies. By the Conduit years, the founders had developed a shared language, complete with room for disagreement. Shilo’s question to Erez was: “What exactly do you mean by no?” A long partnership evidently requires more vocabulary than a short meeting.

A little territory in the browser

Shilo founded Conduit in 2005 with Erez and Gaby Bilczyk. The service let publishers create branded browser toolbars, giving their websites a continuing presence in users’ browsing. A publisher could arrange content and services, then distribute the result to its community. Changes could be delivered centrally. Each publisher did not need to commission and maintain a separate software project.

In a January 2008 interview, Shilo described about 30 million downloads and roughly 12 million subscribers actively using at least one toolbar. He also discussed an $8 million investment from Benchmark. The model shared search revenue. The toolbar had to serve the publisher and its users while making the business underneath it pay.

It was a practical response to an awkward feature of the web: leaving is easy. Publishers could attract a visitor and promptly lose their place in that visitor’s day. Conduit offered a persistent little address in the browser. Its position was modest in pixels; the commercial ambition behind it was rather larger.

A billion dollars, and the washing still needs doing

Conduit reached a billion-dollar valuation in 2012. Shilo’s response included an observation seldom found in the congratulatory announcement: “I still do the laundry myself.” He said his family remained in the same home and community. The company’s financial standing had changed; domestic arrangements had proved less impressionable.

His view of value included how employees experienced the company and how the business affected the society around it. That view had a concrete expression in his account of Conduit’s ownership: staff participated in its success, including the people who cleaned the offices. Recognition reached beyond the people whose titles appeared in a deal announcement.

“I still do the laundry myself.”

Ronen Shilo, 2013

Founder control also mattered to him. He preferred taking responsibility for the direction of the business to blaming investors for an unwanted turn. Inside the company, he encouraged employees to speak to him across reporting lines and argued for shaping jobs around talented people. Such practices ask something of a leader beyond issuing instructions: being available to hear an inconvenient answer.

Public visibility took more adjustment. In 2012, he wrote about stepping out from behind a company with enormous reach and a comparatively quiet name. He saw himself as a product and engineering CEO. Speaking publicly meant explaining what the company was building, while conversations with journalists could challenge his own thinking. The spokesman had discovered a reason to listen.

The return visit moves to the till

The business changed shape. Conduit’s toolbar operation was combined with Perion in a deal announced in 2013, while the remaining mobile activities developed into Como. The familiar browser strip no longer describes the whole story. Mobile apps and, increasingly, customer loyalty became the work in hand.

In July 2015, Como moved to acquire Keeprz. Shilo was CEO. The reported proposed price was $50 million, with due diligence and an agreement still ahead when the news broke. Keeprz brought a customer loyalty platform and a team expected to join Como in Ness Ziona. Its founders included Liran Mayost, Yair Holtzer, Danny Albocher and Orit Balicer Tsur.

The business question had moved closer to the shop counter. A publisher wants its visitor back; a restaurant wants another booking, order or visit. The relationship has different measures, and software must fit the people operating the business. Como’s direction made that next interaction something a merchant could work on deliberately.

Changing the business had a human cost. In April 2019, Como cut 45 jobs in a restructuring, leaving about 70 employees; Shilo confirmed the cuts at the time. That episode belongs alongside the acquisition and growth. A founder’s record contains decisions people celebrate and decisions other people must live through.

Einstein, Jobs and a gentleman from New Jersey

Shilo stepped down as Conduit CEO in early 2019 and founded Head Ventures. The investment firm and innovation lab gave him space for projects where design and technology could meet. One of them had an origin already visible on his office walls: pictures and quotations from Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Tony Soprano.

That is a broad advisory panel for any office. Shilo’s interest was in the words, and in finding a meaningful way to display several quotations together. Arranging them became a technical problem. A manual process gave way to an algorithm that packed phrases into a grid, with shared words overlapping.

Motiva brought that arrangement into framed artwork on paper. Light reveals phrases within the image. The viewer gets a reason to stay with the piece, or notice it differently on another occasion. A quotation that might have become part of the office wallpaper can reappear as something to read.

The product needed design judgment as well as code. Pentagram worked on the identity, typography and appearance, including a custom typeface developed with Ben Nathan. Images and letters had to remain legible together. The artwork could not overwhelm the words; the words still needed to belong in the picture.

A 2023 collaboration with Karim Rashid brought the designer’s own quotations into a series of three Motivas, each limited to ten signed pieces. Shilo also received a Bronze A’ Design Award for Motiva. His engineering career had acquired a new set of collaborators, and a very different place to display the result.

The shift also suits interests that preceded these companies. Shilo collects old cameras and stereoscopes, objects concerned with how people see. His older public biography records an enthusiasm for working with his hands, listening to Queen and watching The Sopranos. He had even developed a toy to introduce preschool children to music and mathematics. Design did not arrive in his life only after the software business.

Giving the clock something to say

Klydoclock takes another familiar object and gives it changing content. Shilo is Klydo’s founder and CEO, and the MoMA Design Store credits him as the clock’s designer, with a design year of 2022. The desk clock combines timekeeping with artist-created animation. Its materials include bent plywood and aluminum.

The ordinary functions remain unusually tangible for a connected product. There is a knob for setting the time and a remote for browsing animations. Owners can choose how often the imagery changes, or keep it fixed. A tick and hourly chime can be muted. Even an animated clock should leave its owner some say over the conversation.

Klydoclock entered the MoMA Design Store in fall 2025. In January 2026, Klydo brought its Living Media concept to CES in Las Vegas. Animation supplied by an artist community gives the object material to show over time. The clock’s continuing appeal depends partly on what arrives on it after the initial purchase.

Shilo’s other current work includes 4T.ventures, founded with Roy Gen under the Head Ventures framework to invest in early-stage businesses in Israel. Colleagues from the Conduit years appear in that story too. New projects have room for old working relationships.

Head Ventures describes an approach that reaches beyond financing: innovators can draw on business, technological and creative advice, office space and a lab for developing projects. That arrangement gives an idea some company while it is still becoming a product. For Shilo, it also creates a setting in which investing and inventing can happen alongside one another, rather than requiring a clean departure from making things himself.

There is something apt about the clock at this point in his career. A programmable calculator once made him curious about what a machine could do. Now, with software inside objects people can live with, he is asking what they might enjoy seeing. The hands keep moving. He keeps making things.