Yonatan Stern and the $25,000 lesson

The awkward number was $25,000. Opster was still developing its software when Yonatan Stern argued that its service should cost that much per year. Leads were arriving before there was a finished product to demonstrate. His answer was to offer support for the search-operations problems those prospective customers already had. There was work to do, someone who needed it done, and a bill that could reasonably follow. The software would catch up.

It is an instructive entrance for a founder whose name is attached to ZoomInfo, CardScan and Bizo. An acquisition price makes a tidy ending to a business story. Stern is interested in the less tidy beginning: the first offer, the first buyer, the point at which an idea has to support an actual company. At SmartUp Academy, the school for entrepreneurs he founded, these questions have become a curriculum. The romance of the startup is welcome to attend, provided it brings a calculator.

First, something you could hold

Stern trained in computer science, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at the Technion. His background includes service in Unit 8200 and the Israel Defense Prize. His company-building career began with Rosh Intelligent Systems, founded with friends from the military. Its software helped engineers diagnose and maintain complex equipment. Before he taught entrepreneurs to understand a customer’s job, he was building tools for people whose job involved figuring out why something would not work.

CardScan, which he founded in 1993, offered a more immediately legible proposition. A small scanner read business cards and turned them into a searchable digital address book. The scattered tokens of a business relationship could become usable information. Anyone who has returned from a conference with a pocketful of cards can appreciate the appeal. Networking produces many things; an orderly filing system is rarely among them.

When Stern introduces CardScan in his teaching, he enjoys its physical simplicity. He can hold it in his hand. He can explain precisely what it does. That small joke from an experienced software founder carries a useful challenge: can the person building a business explain its usefulness as clearly as its technical workings?

His March 2024 introduction to the foundations course contains another deflating detail. Rosh eventually had an exit, he recalls, but he personally received no money from it. A company’s destination and a founder’s financial result can be different stories. Even the word success needs a little unpacking before it can become a lesson.

The directory that gave the business away

ZoomInfo began with a research group inside CardScan, exploring how to extract information about people and companies from the web. In 2000, the effort became a separate company. The continuity is revealing. Stern moved from organizing the business contacts someone had collected to finding business information spread across public pages. The material changed; the problem of making it useful remained.

In his account of ZoomInfo’s early commercial life, recruiters were an important audience. By 2004, he says, revenue was about $6 million and the company was profitable. Expanding toward sales teams created a distribution problem. A reputation with one kind of buyer would not automatically travel to another. The company decided to publish its directory online.

For a business selling information, making that information discoverable could look like an odd way to protect it. Stern recalls his technical colleague questioning the point of the exercise. Yet the directory gave people searching for names and companies a way to arrive at ZoomInfo. Distribution became part of the product’s design, rather than a task postponed until the engineers were finished.

The new audience also wanted something different. Recruiters needed to narrow a field to a few suitable candidates. Sales teams wanted a much larger pool of contacts. One database could sit underneath both demands, but the work each customer wanted to accomplish was different. In Stern’s classroom, that distinction gives the story its practical value. Finding another market also means discovering what the next buyer actually needs.

The later transactions are familiar markers: DYMO acquired CardScan in 2006; LinkedIn acquired Bizo for $175 million in 2014; Great Hill Partners acquired ZoomInfo for $240 million in 2017. Stern left the ZoomInfo chief executive role in 2018. DiscoverOrg bought the company the following year and adopted the ZoomInfo name. Those dates matter because they keep the chapters distinct. The founder’s operating years preceded the combined company’s public-market life.

A chief executive, seven time zones away

There is another piece of Stern’s working life that makes his teaching more interesting than a collection of exit announcements. He led Massachusetts-based ZoomInfo while living in Israel. In a 2016 account of the experience, he described a separation of 5,500 miles and seven time zones, complicated by the Israeli Sunday-to-Thursday working week. A calendar could have developed its own opinion about the arrangement.

Distance required him to reconsider control. He emphasized giving capable employees room to act, allowing the team a substantial role in hiring, and explaining decisions well enough for others to judge them. He also connected profitability with the freedom to make mistakes and described quarterly profit sharing as a useful incentive. The management details are ordinary enough to be easy to overlook. They are also the details that decide whether a business can function when its founder is elsewhere.

“Risk-taking is overrated and costly.”

Yonatan Stern, 2016

That sentence is an unusually restrained souvenir of a serial entrepreneur’s career. It helps explain the teacher’s recurring interest in reducing avoidable uncertainty. Who buys? At what price? Through which channel? What must be spent before those answers arrive? His preferred questions make room for ambition while demanding that someone work through the arithmetic.

The bill arrives before the software

Return to Opster, where those questions acquired a price tag. Its early team was developing a business around making Elasticsearch and OpenSearch operations easier to manage. The $25,000 annual offer made a limited customer base economically plausible: the team could concentrate its support effort and learn from real problems. Opster’s early team reported $500,000 in contracts in the first year and profitability within two years. The figures belong to that particular company’s experience.

Elastic completed its acquisition of Opster on November 30, 2023. It welcomed the team behind AutoOps and related tools for getting more from Elastic deployments. Investor JAL Ventures lists Stern and Ziv Segal as Opster founders. This was another business in which his involvement connected an operational problem with an offer people could buy.

The later acquisition gives the episode an ending. The early offer explains the decision. Selling support before mature software meant the team had to encounter the customer’s difficulty directly. A price also imposed obligations: responsiveness, competence and a service worth renewing. The customer was already part of the company’s daily work.

A classroom with consequences

SmartUp dates its founding to 2019. Stern’s biography places the launch of its entrepreneurial internship program in 2021. Its present structure moves from foundations teaching into company workshops and a residency. At each step, the relationship gets closer to the decisions a founder must make with actual money and actual colleagues.

The Companies Workshop is organized around nine three-hour group mentoring sessions. Founders bring their companies’ problems, receive feedback and return to examine what happened next. Pricing, hiring, funding and sales all enter the discussion. Following up matters. A clever answer delivered on Tuesday may look rather different after a customer has considered it on Wednesday.

In the residency, SmartUp joins selected companies as a co-founder. Stern and the team take part in recurring management meetings, with the frequency adjusted to the business’s stage. Residents can draw on the academy’s professional staff and teaching resources. The arrangement brings his educational argument into the work itself: a founder learns while making decisions whose consequences will still be there at the next meeting.

His colleagues supply complementary experience. Libby Molad is SmartUp’s co-founder and COO; Ayala Turgeman is its co-founder and CFO. Financial reports, priorities and operating choices belong alongside the founder’s product idea. A business has several ways to become difficult at once, and a curriculum organized entirely around inspiration would leave rather a lot of homework uncovered.

The next lesson is already scheduled

Stern also teaches brand building as work that can begin before a finished product exists. His branding lectures range beyond search traffic into competitions, useful information and content about prospective customers themselves. The common thread is giving people a reason to pay attention before asking them to buy. A technically accomplished founder must learn to become recognizable, too.

He brought his company-building argument to TEDxTechnion in November 2025; the talk appeared on YouTube in February 2026. By October, SmartUp was listing another free foundations course in Ra’anana, scheduled to begin on October 11, with six Sunday sessions and admission subject to review. The syllabus includes profitability, pricing, branding, business models and sales. The career continues in the weekly timetable.

Stern wants the approach to become ordinary practice. He has expressed an ambition to raise the proportion of companies that succeed from one in ten to six or seven. That is a hope for a different entrepreneurial culture, rather than an established outcome for his program. The ambition deserves to be read alongside the unglamorous work he prescribes.

There is something appealing about a founder with several acquisitions behind him returning to the question of the first customer. The stories can end with a buyer for the company. His lessons begin with a buyer for the work. Somewhere between those two transactions sits the business itself, waiting for someone to make the numbers behave.