Yuval Ben-Itzhak and the art of finding the friction

Yuval Ben-Itzhak had a persuasive offer from AVG and a less persuasive weather forecast. During his first week in Brno, he recalled, the temperature was minus 20 degrees Celsius. The apartment he had left in Tel Aviv was on the beach, where it was 18 degrees. His wife would join him later. Explaining the advantages of their new home required some salesmanship.

He had already waited 18 months for the Czech visa process. Years later, he still kept the bulky file of documents. For someone who made a living helping technology work, entering the country had been an impressive demonstration of how a system could resist its user.

The move paid off. He joined AVG in 2009, helped lead it through a public listing, and went on to run Socialbakers before becoming president and chief of strategy at Emplifi. Today he invests at Evolution Equity Partners. Read the titles in order and you get a career. Look at the problems beneath them and you get something more interesting: a persistent curiosity about the place where useful machinery becomes difficult for people.

A factory floor before the boardroom

One of his early lessons in machinery came with Charlie Chaplin. Growing up in the 1970s, Ben-Itzhak enjoyed the silent films, particularly Modern Times. His father, an engineer working with communications equipment, saw something beyond the comedy. The film gave father and son a way into a conversation about factory work.

Ben-Itzhak later visited a factory with him and watched people repeat small assembly tasks. On another visit, he saw robots doing the work. The machines were fascinating. So was the question of what happened to the people whose tasks they performed.

He used that childhood recollection in his TEDxUNYP talk about artificial intelligence and human potential. Long before AI agents became a boardroom topic, he was discussing how technology could extend what people could do. His interest had a human starting point: a child following his father through a workplace and trying to understand it.

Learning to look where the firewall ends

Ben-Itzhak graduated from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Information Systems and Engineering, with honors. His early career included Intel and Ness Technologies. In 2000, he co-founded KaVaDo, a company concerned with protecting web applications. Protegrity acquired it in 2004.

There was a specific opening in that market. As he explained in 2007, security companies had concentrated on encrypted connections and network firewalls while giving too little attention to threats inside the applications businesses were putting online. The perimeter could look reassuring while the application remained exposed. A locked front gate is a modest achievement if the delivery entrance is open.

His work brought recognition from InfoWorld in 2004. At Finjan, where he became CTO, he also led a research group looking for new vulnerabilities. He credited his military intelligence experience with teaching him to anticipate dangers and consider technical possibilities beyond the immediately obvious.

In 2007, his concerns included securing employees who connected to corporate systems while travelling. He was working on ways to apply security policies beyond the office network. The practical question was already familiar: people wanted to work somewhere else; the software needed to accommodate them.

“It turns yesterday’s dream into daily reality.”

Yuval Ben-Itzhak on technology, 2007

Recognition accumulated alongside the work: Computerworld included him in its 2007 group of innovative technology people under 40, and GeekTime named him CTO of the Year in 2017. His professional biography now records 26 granted U.S. patents. The range is useful context for the later job changes. He arrived in marketing technology with years of experience turning technical ideas into products, and with the commercial questions that follow an invention out of the laboratory.

AVG expanded the scale of the task. Its corporate filings record his progression from senior vice president of engineering in 2009 to CTO in 2010. The job included product strategy, technical development, partnerships and identifying acquisition opportunities. When AVG listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2012, he was part of its leadership team.

He moved to Outbrain as CTO in 2015. Content discovery brought another setting for recommendations and data. By the time he took the Socialbakers CEO job in 2017, his experience crossed security products, large engineering organizations and the machinery that decides which content people encounter online.

The security engineer in the marketing meeting

Socialbakers had begun with social media analytics. Under Ben-Itzhak, its proposition extended across understanding audiences, identifying influencers, planning content and measuring business results. In conversation with Daymond John, he discussed the less glamorous work behind social media visibility: listening, competitive reporting and building a path from attention to a customer relationship.

His own social habits were neatly divided by purpose. LinkedIn maintained professional connections. Twitter supplied news. Facebook and Instagram were for friends and family. Asked for a favorite network in 2019, he declined to choose. This was sensible diplomacy for a social media CEO, but it also reflected how differently people use apparently similar products.

His reading preferences mixed technology and management. TechCrunch and Harvard’s business publications appeared in accounts years apart. His 2007 list also included the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Some people browse property listings. An inventor has other temptations.

The CEO work went well beyond selecting software features. In a later account of a pricing project, Ben-Itzhak described arriving at a marketing software business whose commercial model had failed to keep pace with its growth. He brought several departments into the examination, researched alternatives and studied lost deals. Buyers and users did not always value the same things.

He reported a 48 percent increase in average sales price after the packaging changes. Moving most customers onto the new model took 18 months. It was a useful reminder that a decision made in a meeting still has to travel through contracts, renewals and conversations before it becomes revenue.

A customer does not care whose department it is

Astute acquired Socialbakers in 2020. The next year, the combined business launched the Emplifi name, with Mark Zablan as CEO and Ben-Itzhak as president and chief of strategy. The ambition was to connect social media marketing, commerce and customer care. At launch, the company described a customer base of 7,000 global brands.

There was a recognizable customer problem underneath that combination. A person could discover something in a social feed, buy it, then need help. Inside a business, those moments could belong to separate teams using separate tools. To the customer, they were consecutive parts of the same afternoon. Nobody buying a pair of shoes expects to study the seller’s organization chart first.

Ben-Itzhak’s commentary became wonderfully specific about the obstacles. In 2021 he described the difficulty of keeping inventory, pricing and shipping coordinated across social shops. An appealing storefront on another platform added another operational responsibility. Discovery was only the beginning of the purchase.

Even an emoji could earn his analytical attention. Discussing brand communication that year, he argued for understanding the feeling conveyed by the symbols, including them in sentiment analysis and using restraint. The advice was characteristic: a small interface choice deserved to be understood in terms of the person receiving it. A sparkle still had a job to do.

The question he forgot to ask

His move into investing returned him to cybersecurity. Evolution announced his appointment as a general partner in March 2023, with responsibility for its Centers of Excellence for Cybersecurity Growth Companies. The assignment joined capital with practical help on tools, knowledge and strategy. Richard Seewald, the firm’s founder and managing partner, welcomed his operating experience.

That experience now appears in advice to founders. In his 2024 essay on pitching, Ben-Itzhak observed a mismatch: founders said the team mattered most, then spent very little presentation time on it. His framework covered team, market and competition, product, traction, and financial terms. He wanted the presentation to explain the business risks, including the people responsible for handling them.

A 2025 essay went somewhere less comfortable. He recommended asking an investor for a direct assessment of what the founder was doing wrong. He admitted that he had never asked his own investors that question. It is an unusually useful admission from someone now occupying the other chair.

“What am I doing wrong, in your opinion?”

The question Ben-Itzhak urges founders to ask investors

Security remains a live concern. Evolution led Sweet Security’s $33 million Series A in 2024, and Ben-Itzhak spoke about its approach to protecting running cloud environments. At a later industry panel, covered in January 2026, he emphasized how AI was accelerating attacks and increasing the need to understand what was happening inside systems as they operated.

He has also kept experimenting with the tools himself. In March 2026, he described building AI agents and reducing the volume of material sent to language models. The post concerned summaries, stored state and repeated information. The subject was contemporary; the instinct was familiar. Open the system, measure what it consumes, and look for the waste.

For all the changes of company and title, there is something appealingly continuous about that habit. The engineer who studied vulnerable applications became the CEO examining software packages, then the investor inviting founders to expose a blind spot. He still seems interested in the awkward part of the mechanism. The paperwork folder from his Czech arrival would make a fitting keepsake: a substantial reminder of what friction feels like from the other side.