Yaron Galai’s high school yearbook predicted that he would become a newspaper publisher. It was a reasonable forecast for someone so interested in reading. The career that followed took a more circuitous route: web design, advertising technology, a recommendation engine, a public company. Now it includes an app that encourages children to read books. The machinery has changed repeatedly. The reader keeps turning up at the center of it.
Galai describes himself first as a product designer and entrepreneur, with an interest in both reading and publishing. That ordering helps explain a career usually filed under advertising technology. He has spent years working on the small, consequential interval between finishing one thing and choosing another. What comes next? Who chooses it? And who pays for the pleasure of discovering it?
An education with the pages left in
Raised in Israel, Galai served in the Israeli Navy before studying industrial design at the Holon Institute of Technology. He did not complete the degree. While studying, he started a web design business, NetWorks, handling the practical assortment of jobs the early web required: design, HTML, hosting and search optimization. A website needed making, and somebody had to make all of it.
He later explained that much of his education had come from magazines. The attraction was the editor’s selection: someone had assembled a finite collection of things worth considering. You could encounter something useful without knowing enough about it to search for it first. The internet supplied far more material, while making that comfortable sense of completion rather harder to achieve.
His first businesses also taught him what he wanted to work on. Ad4ever, which he co-founded in the late 1990s, developed rich-media advertising technology and was acquired by Atlas. Its technology eventually became part of Microsoft’s advertising operation. But the more interruptive side of advertising interested him less than the material surrounding it. He wanted to get closer to the reading.
The advertisement beside the story
In 2000, Galai co-founded Quigo. He served as CEO until 2003 and then as senior vice president until AOL acquired it in December 2007. Quigo worked in contextual advertising, connecting advertisements to the subject matter of the page on which they appeared. The page itself supplied a clue about what might interest the reader.
That sounds ordinary now because versions of the idea became ordinary. At the time, it was a way to give a publisher’s material a more direct role in the advertising transaction. Galai’s work connected the editorial surface of the web to the business needed to sustain it. It also left him with experience of publishers as customers before he began his next company.
Outbrain, founded with Ori Lahav in 2006, moved the question along. An advertisement could relate to the story someone was reading. Could the next story relate to that person, too?
Before the recommendations, a rating button
Outbrain did not begin with an enormous audience waiting politely for recommendations. Its early distribution problem was much smaller and more awkward: persuade individual bloggers to put a new tool on their sites. The initial offering gave readers a way to rate posts. That supplied feedback to writers who might otherwise hear very little from their audience.
Galai handled customer support himself, including for bloggers with tiny readerships. A helpful reply from the CEO could become a blog post about the company. Bloggers read other bloggers; the product’s users could also introduce it to the next users. Before revenue and click-through rates became central measures, the team counted positive mentions from bloggers.
Recommendations followed in stages. Internal recommendations encouraged readers to explore more of the same site. External recommendations and paid content introduced a wider network and a business model. Galai recalled that the external version stumbled in 2009, was shut down, and reopened in 2010. A business plan can contain a sensible sequence while the product still requires a second attempt. Readers are under no obligation to cooperate with the first one.
- 2006Outbrain founded
- 2008Internal recommendations
- 2009External version tested, then closed
- 2010External recommendations return
A cheaper click, a longer relationship
The recognizable Outbrain unit gave readers links to more material, including paid recommendations, while sharing revenue with publishers. The company occupied a junction where three interests met: the publisher wanted income, the advertiser wanted a response, and the reader wanted something worth reading. Keeping all three interested was the business.
Galai and Lahav described the consumer as “Our Boss.” In their explanation of the company’s approach, a higher-priced advertisement could lose to a cheaper one if the cheaper choice was more likely to keep a reader engaged over time. They illustrated the argument with an ad priced at a dollar and another at eighty cents. Two engagements at eighty cents would yield more than a single dollar engagement.
That arithmetic is an illustration, rather than a promise about every advertisement. Its significance is the time horizon: the value of someone returning tomorrow belongs in today’s decision. A publisher’s relationship with a reader extends beyond one available slot. In Galai’s account of the business, the recommendation needed to earn that next visit as well as the immediate click.
A worked example from the founders’ 2021 explanation of their model. Illustrative arithmetic, not measured campaign results.
The culture that was supposed to expire
When Outbrain became a public company in 2021, Galai and Lahav looked back at an early conversation with investors. With roughly 25 people on the team, they recalled being warned that their distinctive culture would eventually have to become more standardized. Growth would make it difficult to preserve.
Their IPO letter argued that the values had become more necessary as the organization expanded. Respect and inclusion acquired greater practical importance across countries and offices. The founders also emphasized something more personal: they wanted colleagues they would be pleased to come to work with each morning, and took pride in helping those people develop.
The same letter contained a small concession to change. The core experience still resembled the mock-up in their 2006 business plan; the original logo had, thankfully, been replaced. This is a useful distinction in a founder’s working life. A principle may deserve protecting for fifteen years. A logo need not receive tenure.
“The consumer is our real Boss.”Yaron Galai & Ori Lahav, 2021
Hugh Jackman, coffee and a targeting problem
One of Galai’s more entertaining recollections concerns an early experiment with Twitter. In his account, Outbrain explored a partnership with the platform around 2009 and 2010. When those discussions failed to produce an agreement, executive Josh Guttman pursued another route: work with people who already had followers.
Hugh Jackman and Charlize Theron agreed to participate. Outbrain built a way for them to choose stories from its advertising database, which then consisted largely of material from publishers and bloggers. Jackman was interested in coffee, including sustainable coffee farming.
Attention arrived. Control proved harder. A celebrity’s tweet remained visible after an advertiser’s budget had run out, and the audience did not necessarily match the geography the advertiser wanted. Galai recalled Australian clicks consuming budgets intended for American readers. The experiment ended without a formal Twitter partnership. He explicitly disclaimed credit for Twitter’s later sponsored tweets. The anecdote’s charm lies in its very practical disappointment: a famous face could attract readers, but fame supplied neither a budget switch nor a map.
A zipper is a perfectly respectable ambition
Ask Galai about admired companies and he has an answer rather less glamorous than a social network: YKK, the Japanese zipper maker. He admired its concentration on a small, apparently unexciting product. He also cited Disney’s ability to run a complicated operation. His taste in businesses combines a designer’s interest in an object with an operator’s respect for execution.
His leisure preferences are consistent with the rest of the picture: books, magazines and sailing, ideally combined. His connection with Lahav predates Outbrain; they met during naval training and later made a habit of sailing together. A shared company was one chapter in a longer acquaintance.
There is also a brief Hollywood detour. During a year at Beverly Hills High School, Galai and fellow students were asked to stand on a sidewalk for a car-chase shoot. He later joked about his minuscule appearance in Beverly Hills Cop II. The distinction between starring in a film and occupying a few blurry pixels is one he enjoyed exploiting.
The company changes its name; the question stays
Galai’s interests also surfaced in Listory, the content-curation venture he co-founded with Yaniv Gilad. Launched in 2020 after a management buyout from Outbrain, it sought to help readers sort through newsletters. Listory was acquired by SpokenLayer in May 2023; Galai became chairman following the acquisition. Another format, another attempt to make an abundance of material easier to navigate.
His daily role at Outbrain changed the following year. Effective April 1, 2024, he stepped down as co-CEO, leaving David Kostman as sole CEO. Galai retained the chairmanship and served as an adviser through the end of that year. The distinction matters: founding a company, running it and chairing its board are different jobs.
Outbrain acquired Teads in February 2025. In June, the combined company changed its corporate name to Teads Holding Co. and adopted the Nasdaq ticker TEAD. Galai is listed as Teads’ chairman. The Outbrain name remains part of his history, even as the company’s nameplate has changed.
And now, a book to finish
Galai’s newer venture, YOMU, brings the story closer to the yearbook prediction’s original impulse. Co-founded with Amit Elisha, it helps children log their reading and gives parents ways to encourage the habit. Its name means “to read” in Japanese. The product is built around books and the everyday work of making time for them.
The app lets families track reading and recognize progress. YOMU has also announced a second app, Magic Bookmark, for older readers. It helps keep track of characters, relationships and earlier events while avoiding spoilers beyond the reader’s current position. Galai’s accompanying explanation emphasized keeping the book at the center of the experience. The intended destination is still time spent reading. A phone becomes a way to support that activity, rather than the whole activity itself.
The partners around the venture include a familiar connection. Daniel Cohen, whose earlier firm invested in Outbrain, has described Sticker Ventures leading YOMU’s round. He singled out lessons he had learned from Galai about measurement and running an early consumer business. Relationships, as well as reading habits, have carried into the next company.
There is a pleasing circularity here. Galai built technology to help people find another story on the web. He is now helping families encourage a child to stay with the story already in hand. The next page, after all, need not require another tab.