Yoav Vilner and the trouble with a perfect pitch

The buyer has done everything asked of them. Filled in the form. Answered the questions. Agreed to the meeting. Now, at last, somebody is going to show them the software. For Yoav Vilner, this was where years of marketing effort could meet their least dignified ending: a demo that broke, arrived late, or bore little resemblance to what the customer needed.

He had spent years helping startups get people to that meeting. Then he helped build Walnut around the meeting itself. Later, the company’s #WeAreProspects campaign made the frustrations of buying software into comedy. The joke had an unusually broad cast of potential victims. Anyone selling a product would eventually have to buy one.

Vilner’s career has since acquired several additional rooms: a board role, investments, venture scouting, writing, and an indie rock album. Yet the recurring question remains wonderfully ordinary. What happens when another person encounters the thing you have made?

A long way from the pitch deck

Vilner grew up in northern Israel, somewhere he has described through grass, a small river, quiet and distance from the center. Tel Aviv came later. So did the technology career. After army service, he spent a year traveling through Central America, including Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Mexico. The young traveler returning home had no settled identity as a technology entrepreneur.

An opening in online marketing gave him somewhere to begin. He learned through the work. Then, with a friend, he started approaching startup founders who had raised their first money and needed help finding customers. In his recollection, the early LinkedIn messages received an extraordinary response. This was a more innocent period in the inbox’s history.

The absence of an elaborate master plan matters. He was looking for freelance work. A business emerged because people kept needing it. Ranky, the agency he co-founded with Shachar Shamir, supplied marketing to startups whose technical ambitions had outpaced their knowledge of how to reach a market.

Six hundred chances to notice a problem

Ranky eventually worked with roughly 600 startups, according to Vilner’s accounts, and expanded to offices in London and Manhattan. He served as CEO for about seven years. An agency makes its living by helping each customer look distinctive. It also gives its operators a peculiar education: enough proximity to see the same mistakes recur under different logos.

For Vilner, that education extended beyond campaigns. He watched companies with different budgets, products and industries try to grow. Each assignment offered another view into the distance between a founder’s conviction and a customer’s willingness to buy. Familiarity with that distance would later prove useful.

The overseas expansion brought less flattering lessons. He has recalled entering the American market with confidence and insufficient preparation, discovering that an Israeli client list did not automatically impress American buyers. A reputation, it turned out, could travel less comfortably than its owner.

He also described a marketing department of American employees resigning after difficulties with its manager. Cultural differences had gone insufficiently understood until the consequences arrived together. It is an awkward detail to preserve in a founder’s biography, which is precisely why it belongs. Managing people in another market required learning that the company’s confidence could not substitute for listening.

“Make everything personal and reliable!”

Yoav Vilner, on improving the sales experience

The expensive moment before a blank screen

After Ranky, Vilner served as founding CMO at L1ght, a startup addressing harmful online content. Walnut followed in 2020, co-founded with Danni Friedland. The two approached the demo problem from different directions. Vilner had watched marketing expenditure deliver prospects to a disappointing encounter. Friedland had seen the technical complications from the startup and enterprise sides.

Software demonstrations carried dependencies that were easy to overlook from outside. A salesperson might need an engineer to make a change, a designer to prepare something specific, or a live product to behave on command. The buyer’s appointment could become a test of several other people’s availability.

Walnut’s answer was a platform for creating interactive demonstrations without requiring the sales team to write code. Teams could capture the product experience, tailor what the prospect saw and collect information about the interaction. The demo could have a degree of independence from the machinery behind the actual product.

That independence changed who could prepare the encounter. It also connected Vilner’s earlier work to his new company. Marketing had brought the buyer to the door. Now there was a product devoted to what happened when it opened. Even the company name joined the explanation: Vilner described the demo as a difficult nut to crack. A small naming joke can save a surprising amount of introductory PowerPoint.

Growth, with dates attached

The early demand became part of Walnut’s founding story. Vilner has described a waitlist of hundreds of companies before the business had fully found its stride. For a founder who had learned by watching other startups approach the market, that was an encouraging reversal: prospective customers were already signaling an interest.

By January 2022, Walnut had raised $56 million in total, including a $35 million Series B led by Felicis Ventures. The reported customer list included Adobe, Dell and NetApp. The dates matter: these milestones show the speed of that early phase, when the team was turning demand into a business with larger customers and more resources.

The connections around the business also reflected Vilner’s route through the startup world. Its backers included NFX and Eight Roads, alongside technology founders and executives. Money gave the company resources to develop its product and expand its team. It also put a young company in the company of people who had built larger ones.

Give the prospect a speaking part

In 2022, #WeAreProspects took the irritation out of private conversations and put it in public. Walnut’s campaign asked what familiar software buying rituals would look like in ordinary life. The premise required very little technical explanation. Endless qualification feels absurd when the thing you want is standing right in front of you.

The campaign’s partners included businesses such as HubSpot, Apollo.io and Similarweb. Vilner’s line was simple enough to survive being passed around: “We are all someone else’s prospect.” A sales professional could recognize the buyer’s complaint without surrendering membership of the sales profession.

His role extended to the production itself. He later described appearing in the video, pouring coffee, while colleagues took other parts. The founder whose business made demonstrations easier had become part of a demonstration of how buying could go wrong. There are worse uses of executive time than participating in your own joke.

The humor had a purpose beyond making people stop scrolling. It gave a shared irritation a name and a phrase people could repeat. Walnut had a product to sell, of course. The campaign invited people to talk first about an experience they already understood.

The joke needs to know its audience

Vilner subsequently joined the Webby Awards’ judging academy as part of its new B2B Marketing cohort. Asked about successful creative work, he emphasized planning, speed and creativity. He also made a qualification that is easy to lose when a campaign succeeds: an approach that suited Walnut’s revenue audience would not necessarily suit a cybersecurity business.

That observation places a useful limit on the founder’s reputation for funny marketing. A successful joke can become a bad instruction when copied without its audience. His point was about fit. The people receiving the message determine how far its tone can go.

Writing had long been another part of that work. Vilner contributed to publications including Forbes and Entrepreneur, covering technology, marketing and the practical concerns of startups. The writer and the operator shared material. One spent time inside companies; the other tried to make the experience legible to people outside them.

Another chair at Walnut

By January 2025, Walnut had a new CEO, Eric Anderson, and Vilner had moved into a supporting board role. Vilner described seeking his investors’ support to bring in a US-based leader. He would continue helping Anderson and the company.

The shift extended an existing interest in other founders. Vilner had already mentored startups and made introductions between entrepreneurs, investors and job seekers. Advising gives him a different relationship to the company in front of him: close enough to help, with someone else carrying the daily decisions.

By September 2026, his work included scouting for Andreessen Horowitz. He had joined that network in May, looking at areas including cybersecurity, data infrastructure and artificial intelligence. The former agency founder, once learning from customers’ companies, was now looking for companies at an earlier point in their lives.

Eight tracks, no discovery call

Then there is Run Blind. Under that name, Vilner released the eight-track indie rock album Slow March in 2025. Its quieter textures and 1990s indie influences give his public biography an agreeable complication. Someone looking up the Walnut co-founder can now find a record alongside the interviews and startup advice.

He described the release with humor, saying he had been preparing to face tomatoes. Making an album involves a different kind of exposure from explaining a software product. The listener owes you neither an appointment nor a polite follow-up. They can simply leave halfway through the first song.

There is no need to recruit the music as proof of a management theory. It can remain music. The person who has spent so much of his career thinking about how to reach an audience also wants to make something an audience might choose to hear.

The familiar sentence is the danger

His recent essays return to the business of being heard. The Birth of the Storytelling Engineer argues for founders taking responsibility for their companies’ stories. The Sameness Trap examines security businesses whose descriptions have begun to sound interchangeable. In his view, more efficient tools for making products and language can leave buyers struggling to tell the results apart.

That concern reaches back through Walnut to Ranky. A founder knows the effort inside a product. A buyer encounters a sentence, a meeting, a screen. The difference between those perspectives has supplied Vilner with years of work. It has also supplied a useful instinct: pay attention to the person being asked to listen. They may have heard quite enough already.