Tomer Shussman and his colleagues had prepared for the experiment. They had an app, a pitch, instructions and assigned responsibilities. People would download the software, use it, and give the team something to learn from. Then people arrived. Downloads caused trouble. Instructions failed to make sense. The tidy division of work became another obstacle. After several exhausting days, the founders went to a nearby bar and drank their beers in silence. Entrepreneurship had provided the feedback. Conversation could wait.
It is an unusually useful opening to the story of OneStep’s co-founder and CEO. Shussman has a background in physics, mathematics and sensor technology. Before starting a company, he had led people in a demanding scientific training program. Yet one of the experiences he has chosen to recount is the occasion on which preparation proved painfully insufficient. An elegant plan had met its intended audience. The audience had several amendments.
The cadet with the agenda
Before the startup, there was Talpiot, the Israeli military’s scientific and technological training program. Shussman studied there, worked as a researcher, and later returned as chief instructor and deputy commander. He has described responsibility for 150 cadets and ten staff members. Those numbers give the leadership experience some shape: a roomful of clever people is one challenge; an organization of them introduces calendars, competing judgments and the question of who gets to decide.
One cadet offered a practical answer. He came to their weekly meetings with an agenda, a plan and a precise account of the help he needed from Shussman. The instructor found himself being managed. Initially, this felt odd. Was allowing the cadet to take charge a failure to perform his own role? Eventually, he came to regard that independence as evidence that the arrangement was working.
His recurring question became “who’s actually in charge?” There is some comedy in an instructor discovering that the person across the table has arrived better prepared to run the meeting. There is also a serious management choice. Shussman’s advice is to make suggestions, leave room for capable colleagues to act, and ask “how can I help”. The cadet’s agenda had become a lesson for the instructor.
Cadets and staff Shussman says he managed as Talpiot’s chief instructor. A historical responsibility, not OneStep’s headcount.
A physicist sees a familiar object differently
Shussman’s academic route included a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a master’s degree in physics at Tel Aviv University. His technical work gave him experience with cameras and sensors. That is a particular way of looking at an everyday device. Where its owner sees messages and a dwindling battery, a sensor researcher also sees a machine constantly registering information about the physical world.
The eventual company drew together complementary skills. Shussman’s work involved sensing; his colleagues brought experience in data analysis and software development. They were friends who had worked together through Talpiot. In 2019, he co-founded OneStep with Yuval Naveh, Shahar Davidson and Amir Milo. Naveh became chief scientific officer and Davidson chief technology officer. The company’s beginning therefore included both technical specialization and relationships that predated the business.
OneStep’s central engineering choice was to work with the sensors inside smartphones. Shussman put the reasoning plainly: “Rather than sending you wearable sensors, we wanted to use the sensors already out there.” That choice makes the ordinary phone important. Each additional piece of equipment brings another object to acquire, remember and operate. Existing hardware lets a software company begin with something its users already carry.
When the instructions need instructions
The early test exposed the distance between building software and explaining it. Shussman has recalled trying to guide a participant by phone and describing the app’s icon with such elaborate detail that he could barely follow his own explanation. The people who had made the interface understood its logic. That understanding had quietly become part of the entrance requirement.
Anyone who has tried to explain a button over the telephone will recognize the predicament. The button is obvious when it is on your own screen. At the other end, there may be another screen, another expectation, or another interpretation of the word obvious. A product can be technically sophisticated and still ask too much of its first encounter with a person.
Shussman’s retrospective account is candid: “We thought we knew everything, and then everything went wrong.” The interest lies in the gap between those two halves. The team had done preparation. It had simply prepared around assumptions that use would expose. That gives the silent beers their place in the story. They follow an encounter with evidence the founders could neither explain away nor put back into the phone.
The ten-minute phone call
Shussman’s account of starting OneStep includes help from outside the founding team. In a public post announcing the OneStep rebranding, he thanked Elad Walach, the co-founder of Aidoc, as a friend and mentor. The details are more revealing than the thank-you itself. Walach had helped with choosing a problem, developing the idea, pitching, recruiting and negotiating. These are the decisions that sit between having technical expertise and actually running a business.
Shussman particularly remembered Walach finding ten minutes for a phone call even when busy. A short call sounds small beside a funding announcement. For someone making an unfamiliar decision, it can be the useful unit of assistance: enough time to explain the problem, hear a different approach and get back to work. His post credited both the practical advice and the example Walach and his fellow founders had set.
That acknowledgment adds another relationship to the profile. The cadet taught him something about authority; a more experienced founder helped him navigate company building. In both accounts, Shussman is willing to describe himself as a learner. The chief executive title does not require him to edit other people’s contributions out of the story.
One word: feedback
Asked to summarize OneStep’s value in a single word, Shussman chose feedback. In his explanation, timing matters: useful information can encourage continued effort and help someone act more accurately. The idea reaches beyond the mechanics of capturing a signal. Information has to arrive in a form and at a moment when a person can use it. Otherwise, collecting more of it leaves the important job unfinished.
He also described an ambition extending beyond the smartphone to other devices with sensors. The device in the pocket was a starting point for a broader interest in turning motion into understandable information. This helps explain the persistence of the sensor question across his career. The technical challenge is to extract a useful signal. The product challenge is to make that signal mean something to someone else.
“In fact, I could summarize our value as OneStep in one word, I would say, feedback.”
Tomer Shussman
What $36 million changes
In October 2024, OneStep announced a $36 million funding round co-led by Team8 and Vintage Investment Partners, with participation from Aleph, 10D and LionBird. The announced purpose included scaling operations and developing the technology further. For Shussman, the company had moved from a small founding group into an organization with institutional backers and a larger execution agenda.
Capital puts a number beside the ambition. It also makes the earlier leadership questions more relevant. A chief executive cannot personally conduct every conversation, supervise every decision and explain every icon. The cadet’s independent agenda offers a useful lens on that transition: an organization needs people who can take responsibility and ask clearly for what they need.
Shussman’s business work also includes explaining the product to a market. In a testimonial for communications firm Evergreen & Oak, he connected market education with growth and described the company’s stories as affecting its key metrics. It is a distinctly commercial concern for someone trained in science. A measurement must be understood; a business must explain why the measurement deserves attention. Neither task completes itself merely because the technology works.
Leave room for judgment
By 2024, Shussman was publicly discussing another allocation of responsibility: the division between artificial intelligence and people. He argued for using AI’s ability to process data and identify patterns while preserving human understanding, empathy and judgment. His position puts a boundary around automation. Greater analytical capacity still leaves decisions that depend on context and relationships.
This is a useful companion to the app story. In both, the technical system supplies only part of what the encounter requires. The early interface needed a clearer understanding of its users. An AI system needs people who can interpret information in context. Shussman’s accounts repeatedly return to the work of making technical capability useful in a human setting.
The business has continued adding partners. In March 2026, OneStep announced a collaboration with Protonics. Another, with Bioness, followed in September. These are concrete markers of an expanding network around the company he leads. They also give the personal story a current setting: a founder whose work now involves connecting organizations as well as building software.
The memorable scene remains the quieter one. A few founders sit together after a test that has dismantled their expectations. The beers do not resolve the design problems. They mark the moment when the problems have become impossible to overlook. Shussman can tell that story with amusement now. Its value survives the joke: he had taken something he believed in far enough into the world for other people to show him what needed to change.