It is very hard to leave this cycle and do something out of the ordinary. “There is a certain cycle which most people are in all their lives – finish a degree, begin working, live a normal life. The next changes after that, with the sale to Twitter, with Compass, did not feel as dramatic,” Allon explains.

“It changed my life on a personal level, to go from being a student to someone who sold a company to Google. Orion was officially acquired by Google for a year for an undisclosed sum, which Allon split with the university. Ultimately, Google’s offer was the highest, and a personal connection with the company’s culture also helped. “I figured, this is how it’s done and I don’t to fly any other way,” he answers and laughs.Īfter returning from San Francisco to Sydney, Microsoft also expressed interest. A lot of students used the engine, and Google also flew me to San Francisco first class.”Īnd how does it feel to be a student flying first class for the first time? The university had also issued a patent for Orion. But there were also facts in the field that showed me that my confidence was based on something. How does a 25-year-old kid have the confidence to talk like that to a row of experts? “When I went in I told them: ‘Come, I’ll show you the future of the world of search’ – I was a 25-year-old kid,” he tells us with a smile. Google invited Allon to the company offices in San Francisco, for a meeting in a closed room with the most senior experts at the time in the field of search. I told them, ‘ok let’s talk about it and we will consider’, but already there, at Yahoo, I told the people that were with me that we would sell it to Google,” he recalled. “I knew for sure that Yahoo wanted to buy it. This all happened after Yahoo also showed interest in acquiring the algorithm. Several seniors from Google met him at the campus, and within a short time, the young student found himself in a meeting at the company’s offices. “I did not know that I would start a company and hire employees – but I did know that I want to invest in my own idea and company and not to go to work from nine to five for somebody else.”Īs part of his doctorate, Allon developed an algorithm called “Orion”, and improved the search of general Google queries, which did not focus on a particular site.

“I believed that if I’m really good, I’ll have the opportunity to be more my own boss,” he says. Allon | Photograph: Compass From student to billionaireĪllon (38) grew up in Jerusalem and upon finishing his military service, went to study computer science at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, completing his doctorate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. But there are more and more new employees to meet every day. But Allon? Wandering through the hallways, giving high-fives to employees, and trying to maintain as little “distance” as possible. We are directed to his office by his personal assistant, who is part of the team of assistants surrounding Allon every day, and she tells us that the amount of time allotted for the meeting in advance. While he is worth nearly 2 billion shekels, Allon is meeting us in shorts and a T-shirt in his New York offices, as though he as still a student. And that is not the only surprising thing about him. “I am doing this in simultaneous translation.” And indeed we had to translate many of the words used by Allon, for whom Hebrew is his mother tongue. “I never talk about this stuff in Hebrew, by the way,” Ori Allon warns us at the beginning of the interview.

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