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Mind the Tech NY2021

“We saw a shift in the mindset of many companies, investors, and corporations“

Itay Falb, a partner at KPMG Israel, was speaking in a discussion on the issue of scaling during the pandemic alongside Alon Bloch, the CEO of K-Health, Fireblocks co-founder Michael Shaulov, Snappy CEO Hani Goldstein, moderated by Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski

CTech 12:3917.11.21

"Consumers realized that the same way you do not go to the bank teller to take out cash, you actually do not have to go to the doctor,” Alon Bloch, the co-founder and CEO of K-Health, told to Cytactic founder, Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski at Mind the Tech NY 2021 when asked about scaling his company during Covid. “Everyone knows that when the pandemic happened things were really bad until they became really good from a business perspective for all tech companies. I think in healthcare and medicine specifically, in the U.S., changes have been quite dramatic so everybody was shellshock, focused on Covid, and then everybody realized that America has a really bad healthcare system,” he said.

 

“​​So from my perspective, what gave us a major push was Mayo Clinic and other partners like Blue Cross, but also consumers,” Bloch explained.

 

During the discussion, panelists shared how their respected fields evolved and created a chance for their companies to grow. Michael Shaulov, the co-founder and CEO of blockchain company Fireblocks, said that: “When we started the company in 2018, it was the worst year for cryptocurrency,” however he said that the pandemic provided an opportunity for the whole sector to rise.

 

“Basically what happened when the pandemic started, people remember how the stock market crashed, and there was a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “You started to see more and more institutional investors buying bitcoin and then starting to move up into more interesting stuff, so we were at a sort of a great position at that point, we already had existing customers that were institutional investors in cryptocurrencies.”

 

Hani Goldstein, the co-founder and CEO of gift provider Snappy, said that the pandemic brought an “increasing need for motivation and engagement for team members, and for ways to connect with clients remotely. People needed a new way to form a connection and show appreciation especially in crisis and people are a little bit nervous, and did not know if they will have a job. So we have seen an increasing need for more engagement, creating joy, and people taking employee and client appreciation much more seriously.”

 

Speaking on these changes and new technologies and innovations, Itay Falb, a Partner at KPMG Israel, added that “we saw a shift in the mindset of many companies, investors, and multinational corporations. And the fact they would like to adopt the technologies and innovation is why it will be valid and sustainable in the long term.”

 

Watch the full discussion in the video above.