An Interview with Entrepreneur Noam Weisman

Noam Weisman is a cyber and telecom industries veteran that held multiple senior sales, BD and product positions with startups and large corporates.
Noam’s last position before he started his first company, VACA – an AI-based online travel app, was with Cisco, leading product and BD for the IoT Security group.
Based right outside NYC, Noam started Hunterz.io at the beginning of 2018.

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Devathon has built software for companies backed by the world’s leading investors like Betaworks, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, KPCB, Lightspeed and many more.

In the following interview, Noam talks about his entrepreneurial journey, struggles and the lessons learned along the journey.

When did you first discover your entrepreneurial spirit and How is your entrepreneurial career developing so far?

I think that first, it’s important to understand that the definition of an “entrepreneurial spirit” is not the same for everyone. To me, it is a constant urge to build great products coupled with the (sometimes delusional) belief that everything is possible.
I always had a passion for working in a start-up like environment. I was fortunate to be in such an environment even when I worked for large corporates and I guess that this is why I only started my first company when I was 40 years old.
How is it developing so far? Like an episode of “Breaking Bad”, and I love it.

Tell us something about Hunter.io

The idea behind Hunterz is to democratize market reach for every vendor around the globe.
To allow a startup with 20 employees to go to market with the same efficiency as a 20,000 employees vendor.
Startups usually have 2 big challenges – building a product/ solution/service and taking it to market. We help with the latter.
Hunterz.io is a marketplace for enterprise introductions utilizing people with established connections within the organization.
We are building this database of Hunterz to cover every region and major industry, and essentially allow every vendor to quickly start multiple sale processes with the enterprises that are on their wish list.
Our Hunterz are paid per introduction made. When the Hunter is a freelancer, we see that many of our vendors ask him/her to continue leading the sale for an additional commission.

What are your growth plans for the near future?

We are bootstrapped today, our HQ is in NYC and we have a presence in Europe and Asia.
We are planning to raise our first round of funding until the end of the year and funnel that money to scaling up our activities both on the marketing front and on the business development front.
We expect to triple our size by the end of 2019.

What has been the biggest success and biggest failure stories you went through?

I don’t measure my success by the size of an exit, a big sale that I made or a new product that I launched.
To me, my success is measured but the fact that the people that worked with me over the years, would be happy to do so again in the future.
As for my failures – I fail all the time. I believe that if you are not failing, your goals are just too easy.

Looking back, what did you learn and what would you have done differently?

With many failures, come many lessons learned. One thing, however, is more important than the rest and that is your team.
Choosing the right team is key and it does not matter if it’s for a startup or your team within a larger company.
Take your time and choose people that compliment your skills, are the right fit for the tasks ahead, and most importantly, you would want to spend most of your time with knowing that it is not always going to be easy.

In your opinion, what are the hurdles that keep people away from starting an entrepreneurial career? What advice would you give to the new entrepreneurs?

Looking at fellow entrepreneurs, the most common hurdle they have to face is a financial one and that is no surprise. However, I feel that attitude is another big one that is not mentioned enough.
We have so many talented people that have been “trained” to think about their limits and accept them and I think it’s a shame.
So many schools, universities, and workplaces are geared towards templates when they actually need to do the opposite.
We need people to believe in their ability to do the extraordinary – why not me? – this will bring another wave of entrepreneurs that we don’t have today.
An example that I like to give is the NBA. It is safe to say that 95% of every American that has the ability to play in the NBA, does.

Can we say the same thing about entrepreneurs? We need to have a better system starting at a very young age, that will find them, train them and support them, just like we have for the NBA with minor leagues, scouts, etc.
For the new entrepreneurs I would say, don’t give up at the first sight of adversary. I have had a few occasions where I would sit with my team discussing a new, huge, obstacle that we didn’t foresee and someone would ask me why I am smiling? The reason for the smile is that at that point I know that we are trying to solve a truly hard problem which made other teams quit thinking that it is too big of a challenge. This is where we separate ourselves from the everyone else and this is why we will succeed.

Are you an entrepreneur looking for your MVP built? Get in touch with us at hello@devathon.com

Devathon has built software for companies backed by the world’s leading investors like Betaworks, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, KPCB, Lightspeed and many more.