Datarails CRO Aviv Canaani has an unusual vantage point. He runs the full revenue engine of the financial planning and analysis platform for Microsoft Excel users — sales, marketing, partnerships — from New Jersey, while his marketing team operates out of Israel.
He relocated to be closer to the North American customer base as the marketers stayed put. And after years of sitting inside both ecosystems at the same time, attending CMO sessions in Tel Aviv and building pipelines in the US, he’s reached a verdict most people in his position wouldn’t say out loud: the Israelis are better.
It’s a claim that cuts against the instinct of almost every Israeli founder he’s encountered - and every company I’ve spoken to over the years. “Normally, when I speak to startups that are born in Israel, they want to send their sales and marketing overseas immediately. [It’s] the first thing they want to do,” I told him during our conversation. But Canaani’s experience runs the other direction.
The Israeli edge, he claims, comes down to a cultural obsession with output. “When you talk with people in Israel, marketing leaders, it’s about how they built machines, how much the cost per meeting, how they’re running campaigns on Facebook and Google and all that.” American counterparts, he finds, often arrive at the conversation from somewhere else entirely. “A lot of CMOs and people in marketing I talk with in the US or Canada… can talk more about the brand, how things take time, like it’s a long-term investment.”
“Tachas mentality” explained
He traces this back to something structural in Israel’s tech DNA: The concentration of adtech companies and the performance-marketing culture they seeded, and also what he calls “tachas mentality”. He explained that this requires teams to be focused on results above everything else. The blend of that mindset with an unusually international talent pool (many ‘Olim’ from Britain, the US, or Europe) produces something Canaani finds hard to replicate in America.
But there’s a catch - and one worth remembering. The same intensity that makes Israeli marketing so effective in the early stages carries a structural weakness as companies grow. “In North America, things are much more organized. It’s clearer how they create the messaging and the product marketing and how to make sure there is alignment between marketing and sales,” he told me. Israel, by contrast, tends to run so fast that alignment becomes a casualty. “It seems like sometimes it doesn’t even matter if marketing speaks one language and sales speaks another. Let’s just run fast. It’s speed above everything else.”
The American advantage, then, is less about raw marketing talent and more about institutional discipline. “In North America, maybe it’s hard in the startup phase, but once they’re a bigger company, they have better processes — how to run things, how to stay on point.”
So what Canaani is describing is a stage-mapping problem. Israeli performance marketing is almost perfectly calibrated for the zero-to-one phase: find the signal, iterate fast, fill the pipeline before the runway ends. But American marketing discipline becomes the dominant advantage once you’re scaling and when the team is distributed. Move fast and break things, but then slowly mold them into greatness.
The companies that figure out how to sequence both are the ones most likely to build something that lasts. Datarails, with teams operating on both sides and a CRO who has lived inside both cultures simultaneously, is running that experiment right now.
