Entrepreneur Tips: Yonatan Maor, Shaker

“First and Foremost, Build the Right Team”

Yonatan Maor is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shaker, whose Facebook app for interacting and meeting in virtual rooms (and bars) made them the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 Startup Battlefield. In an interview at the Disrupt conference, Maor told us his thoughts on what it takes to build a startup.

Shaker's story begins in Tel Aviv, Israel where Maor was a philosophy professor prior to going into the startup world. He says philosophy is his first love, but since philosophy teachers know how to work without having money as a motivation, he thinks it prepared him well to build and persist with a company for the right reasons.

Maor believes that good ideas to build companies around aren’t too difficult to find. “I know many people think that they have to wait for the right idea to come,” he says, “but ideas are out there and basically they’re out there simultaneously at many different points in the world at any given moment.” Instead, Maor asserts that building a good team is a far bigger challenge and is the main key to building a working startup.

As for Shaker’s team, Maor founded the company with his brother and brought on mainly cousins and friends to live together and incubate their product. He credits this “natural incubator” setting as part of their success, as he does launching the app in Tel Aviv where they grew up and were in their best element for launch. He regrets, however, that they took as long as they did to relocate to the United States and recommends other international startups take the initiative to make that move more quickly.

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