In Israel, the arguable startup capital of the world, you might be fortunate enough be a startup founder and attract investor funding, or just join a promising venture in any capacity. But rarely do you have an opportunity to do both, or act from both ends of the startup spectrum. Introducing Amir Konigsberg, in a candid interview, he sheds light on unseen corners of the startup game and the recipe he’s conjured for commercializing deep tech innovations and becoming a trusted advisor to many in the process.
In reverse chronological order, Konigsberg most notably co-founded Twiggle, an e-commerce search technology growth startup with more than $35 million funding, with investments from the likes of Alibaba, Yahoo and The Naspers Group, wherein he acted as CEO for the first four and a half years of the company but recently relieved himself to President. Twiggle, originally conceived by Konigsberg and his co-founder Dr. Adi Avidor, marries Natural Language Processing (NLP) with e-commerce to embed human context into internet search. What was once largely limited to strict matching of keywords and conformation to search engine’s architecture became enabled by intuitive free language expression. Like searching for a 'brown formal jacket suited for mild weather', which would accurately return relevant results as opposed to a randomized order of jackets. The magic of it stems from a breakthrough in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) conceived and supported by the 25+ patents filed by Konigsberg, Avidor and their diligent Twiggle algorithm team. But equally, from a fundamental understanding of human behavior and psychology, since both psychology and technology contribute to building powerful information retrieval systems.
“All my life, I’ve been interested in the intersection of human psychology and deep technology” explained Konigsberg. “I’m interested in the information systems that understand human thought processes and language, and can improve people’s belief formation, knowledge acquisition, and decision making. More generally, I’m interested in designing and tailoring automated solutions to interface with humans.”
Konigsberg earned a PhD from Princeton University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Rationality and Interactive Decision Theory, combining the fields of Philosophy, Psychology and Game Theory. His doctorate covered how to update one’s beliefs based on changing information, a Bayesian approach to belief updating inspired by Robert Aumann’s seminal Agreeing to Disagree. He completed his dissertation under game theorist and behavioral economist Eyal Winter, but drew inspiration from Israeli Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, to whom he owes gratitude for guidance in his Princeton admission. But Kahneman’s work didn’t consummate with Artificial Intelligence.
His professional momentum took motion in 2005, working in strategy for Google, first in London and then in Tel Aviv, under Meir Brand, as the second Google employee in the Emerging Markets, and later proceeded to join MySupermarket as the Chief Commercial Officer. “The startup was truly unique at the time. It allowed consumers to shop in aggregate through multicart shopping. It provided multi-product shopping comparison, which is something shoppers need in order to compare the price of a cart in aggregate across different stores. But it is very difficult to do because retailers sell similar products by different manufacturers and brands, which is a challenge for software to identify due to the lack of common criteria by which to compare. This required an algorithmic supplement inspired by the decision making process that humans apply when comparing for related items.”