It happened two years ago, on March 4, at a Calcalist conference celebrating Israeli high-tech at Rockefeller Center in New York. Barak Regev, CEO of Google Israel, which sponsored the event, was standing onstage before dozens of senior technology executives from the American and Israeli industries.
Regev: “I went up to speak after the mayor of New York at the time. In my view, it was a very important event, certainly after October 7. Throughout that entire period, we met all of Google global’s targets. I even jokingly asked my managers not to get used to the fact that we manage to survive under any circumstances. Eventually they’ll kick us out of the offices and say, ‘You manage just fine without them.’
Barak Regev, CEO of Google Israel
(Photo: Oz Mualem)
“I started the presentation and then I saw someone at the back, at the edge of the room, wearing an orange shirt and waving his arms. It made me stop for a moment. I thought he was part of the production team, but then the man began shouting, said he was a software engineer at Google and that he refused to build technology that promotes genocide and apartheid through Project Nimbus.
“Security guards restrained him within a few minutes. I stood there fairly calmly onstage. I felt compelled to tell the audience that one of the things I’m very proud of at Google is the value we place on diversity of opinion — that within the company you can express your views on any issue without fear. But I think this employee got a little confused about the appropriate place and way to do it.”
Google employees protest against the company in San Francisco
(Photo: Reuters)
The protester was Eddie Hatfield, a software engineer in Google Cloud’s New York division and one of more than 600 Google employees who had signed a letter to the company’s leadership before the conference demanding that it withdraw its sponsorship. He was fired a few days later.
“I can say that at that moment, something clicked within the company,” Regev says. “The message was conveyed to all employees: You can express your opinion. You’re against Nimbus? Write a post about it. But you cannot disrupt another employee. And if you do, you’ll be fired. Once that was made clear, relative calm returned.”
So perhaps you can clarify this once and for all: Is Google helping the Israeli government, through the Nimbus cloud services project, conduct military operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon?
“I think we’ve been very clear about the Nimbus contract, what it is intended for and its terms of service and policies. None of that has changed. Google Cloud, Google’s cloud division, provides services to many governments around the world, including Israel. All customers must agree to our terms of service and policies. And regarding Nimbus, we also stated explicitly that this agreement is not intended for highly sensitive, classified or military uses involving weapons or intelligence services.”
Do the protests have no effect at all on your bosses?
“I know this may sound strange to you, but the answer is ‘no.’ At the end of the day, look at what has happened at Google Israel over the past four years. It has increased its investment here, acquired Israel’s Wiz for $32 billion — the largest acquisition in its history — and at the height of the instability, in the summer of 2024, announced Google Israel’s planned move to a new headquarters in the ToHa2 building, with twice the space of its current headquarters and an investment of hundreds of millions over 10 years.
“This is a project that requires the highest levels of approval within the company, and it anchors our presence in Israel for at least the next decade.
“Add to that Google’s massive investment in its chip division operating in Israel. It employs a large number of people and continues to grow — we’re constantly recruiting more employees for it.”
Is it possible that Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his counterparts at other international technology companies would happily give up the headache called Israel were it not for Israeli talent — the exceptional capabilities we offer?
“I’m not going to get inside Sundar Pichai’s head. But after October 7, there was a meeting of senior business leaders with leading government officials, including the governor of the Bank of Israel. There was a great deal of panic.
“And I said, ‘Guys, when an international organization considers doing business in a particular country, it doesn’t ask the questions you’re raising here. It asks: Do I have high-quality talent there? Is the cost of that talent reasonable? And is it a stable environment?’
“Our talent is amazing, outstanding and highly sought-after. But it’s important that there be stability here so those questions don’t arise.”
Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport, who heads the group of high-tech executives
(Photo: Omer Hacohen)
Barak Regev, 54, is married with three children and lives in Ra’anana. He has worked at Google for 16 years, nine of them as CEO of Google Israel.
He is probably the only CEO in Israel with a basketball coaching certificate. “I always say that if high-tech doesn’t work out for me, that’s my Plan B.”
In his youth, he played for M.M. Givat Shmuel and, as recently as 17 years ago, was still playing for Maccabi Kramim Rishon in Liga Bet. Today, he swims and runs regularly and settles for playing padel. A devoted Arsenal fan, he visits London frequently.
Regev was born in Neve Monosson, but spent most of his childhood in the United States, first in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father, an Air Force officer and aeronautical engineer, underwent advanced training, and later in Dayton, Ohio.
In Dayton, the family lived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, one of the U.S. Air Force’s most important technology centers. “To this day, I can sing the American national anthem by heart.”
His father, who reached the rank of colonel, served in his final position as head of the engineering project for the ill-fated Lavi fighter aircraft.
When Regev reached high school age, the family returned to Neve Monosson.
“My older brother, who is seven years older than me, is an entrepreneur at heart. When I was just 6 years old in Ohio, I found myself accompanying him every weekend on my bicycle as he delivered newspapers.
“When we returned to Israel, I was 15 or 16 and he had finished his military service. He decided to start a business offering fresh oranges directly from the orchard, without a middleman.
“That’s how I got to know every resident of Neve Monosson, because every Thursday I knocked on everyone’s doors. There isn’t a longtime resident who doesn’t remember us.
“From a business perspective, I was very creative: You could only buy oranges in bags of three or five kilograms. Not individually.
“Over the years, we expanded the business. We distributed three tons of citrus fruit a week, and I even employed classmates. On Thursdays, we’d drive to the wholesale market at 4:30 in the morning to buy additional fruit, which we sold alongside the oranges.
“The business continued until my brother graduated from university and I enlisted in the IDF. We weren’t able to sell it.”
After five years in the IDF in combat intelligence, Regev moved to Los Angeles at age 23, where he completed two degrees in five years.
Before taking his current position in Israel, he was based in London and responsible for building and growing Google Cloud’s business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, or EMEA. Before that, he headed Google Enterprise for emerging markets in the region.
You’re a citizen of the world. For at least 15 years of your life, you didn’t live in Israel. Your children also moved with you from country to country. I have to ask: Were there only advantages, or did you also pay a price?
“Not long ago, we counted as a family how many homes we’ve lived in with the children since they were born. The eldest, of course, experienced the most. This is her eighth home.
“In my view, my diverse background is one of the main reasons I’m CEO of Google today. It allows me to be much more adaptive and to understand the people I’m speaking with at a deeper level.
“On the other hand, for years I was the only Jewish child in a foreign environment. I experienced quite a bit of antisemitism. My brothers and I were always ‘The Hebrew boys.’ As innocent children, we didn’t understand the context at the time.”
Is there a connection between your affinity for sports — competitiveness, achievement and loyalty to the team — and your job at Google today?
“Absolutely. One of the most popular trends in high-tech today is coaching, meaning business coaching. It starts with prominent basketball coaches like the legendary Pat Riley, who decided to share their philosophy with others.
“Because what is sports? It’s the pursuit of excellence, teamwork and the ability to overcome obstacles, deal with ups and downs and recover.
“For management workshops at Google, I’ve brought in figures such as coach Pini Gershon, judoka Peter Paltchik and Linoy Ashram’s coach, Ayelet Zussman.
“I especially love team sports — the ability to create a group of people focused on a single goal. When you understand how to do that with a basketball team, you know how to bring it into your workplace as well.
“Over the past five years, between COVID, wars and missiles, we’ve talked a lot at Google about ‘resilience.’ People mistakenly think resilience is about how you stay alive in the storm. The truth is that resilience is about how you recover afterward.”
Google Israel celebrated its 20th anniversary less than a year ago. Today, its broad umbrella also includes its chip operations, headed by Uri Frank, and Waze, managed by Guy Berkowitz, both Google vice presidents.
Its presence in Israel has largely been built through acquisitions over the years. The best known were its acquisition of Waze in 2013 and its dramatic acquisition of Wiz in March last year, but the company has also acquired Israeli firms specializing in apps, 3D mapping, cloud migration, cyber automation, air quality monitoring and other fields. All have been absorbed into the company.
Google Israel now employs about 2,500 people, or 3,000 including Wiz. Most are based in Tel Aviv at Electra Tower and several other nearby office towers, as well as at the MATAM complex in Haifa.
In about two years, most of the Tel Aviv workforce will move to the nearby ToHa2 tower now under construction, which will include 60,000 square meters of space — double the current area — and house about 2,000 employees across 20 floors.
Google will begin paying rent in 2027, totaling 115 million shekels a year.
Google. Will it remain an internet giant?
(Getty Images)
The claim against Google has always been that it is essentially an advertising company, with most of the enormous sums flowing into it coming from paid links alongside search results. Is that still true in the era of AI search?
“According to Google’s latest reports, advertising is still the most significant component of revenue, but the trend is clear — cloud and AI are gaining momentum.
“If you ask Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, he’ll tell you that the AI revolution is more significant than the Industrial Revolution. He compares it to the invention of electricity.
“Cloud is growing at a rate of more than 80% a year, largely because of growing AI use and data products.”
Regev describes the new challenge but is careful not to concede that it poses a problem for Google.
For a quarter-century, we searched and Google directed us to websites through links, earning money from advertisements displayed alongside them. Today, it already provides a summarized answer directly at the top of the search page, without any need to click a link.
The impact is not only on Google’s business model but also on content and news websites — including, in the interest of disclosure, ynet — as well as small businesses that rely on Google search to bring users to their sites.
If Google AI search now provides a complete answer, users do not enter the website itself, meaning websites lose ratings and user traffic and, as a result, revenue.
Beyond that, the question now is whether, when and how Google will incorporate sponsored content into the searches we conduct using AI. It appears inevitable, but it raises complex ethical questions: Will the answers we receive be influenced by commercial interests that paid for that exposure?
Your advertisers’ ads are now being pushed further down the page. Studies show their click-through rates have fallen. Is traditional search dead?
“Absolutely not. The search engine, Search, is more than 26 years old and it’s still with us. AI has injected new capabilities into it.
“Two of the most prominent features on the search page today are AI Overviews and AI Mode. The first often gives you a short answer to your query right at the top of the search page. The second, AI Mode, breaks complex queries down into subtopics and searches across different sources, among other things.
“AI Overviews is without a doubt the most widely used AI product in the world today, with 2.5 billion users every month.
“The economic model of Google Search hasn’t changed. A business owner running a marketing campaign can still promote it through paid advertising and thereby reach more than 2 billion users.
“Incidentally, the all-time search record came during the last World Cup, during the dramatic Argentina-Egypt match, when Argentina mounted a remarkable comeback to win 3-2 after trailing 2-0. People wanted to know whether comebacks like that had happened before, but they were also searching for where to buy jerseys, souvenirs and all kinds of other things. Merchants made a lot of money from that.
“In general, I think small businesses have the biggest opportunity in AI. It gives them superpowers.”
Children and teenagers search for information on TikTok and Instagram, not Google. Aren’t you concerned that you’ve lost the next generation?
“You forgot YouTube — Google’s second-largest digital platform. We launched YouTube Kids less than a decade ago.
“‘Concern’ is a little too strong a word for me in this context. ‘Competition’ would be more accurate. We’re in the most competitive era we’ve ever experienced in these fields.
“First, many users today are doing more visual searches. We’re seeing a very significant increase in searches around YouTube, and I would remind you that we also have YouTube Shorts, which lets users scroll through short videos.
“Second, Google’s search engine has reinvented itself. I constantly see young people around me searching with Lens or Circle to Search.
“And third, at the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves: You don’t reach 2.5 billion users without young people.”
AI Mode in Google Chrome
(Google)
Give us a glimpse behind the scenes at Google in Israel. I understand you do both sales and development here. Those are very different worlds.
“Completely, but at Google they’re intertwined.
“Google viewed Israel first and foremost as a source of talent. The company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were great admirers of the Technion. When the company began to develop and grow, Israel was one of the first places they chose for expansion and for establishing a development group.
“Today, we’re first and foremost a strategic research and development center, one of the largest in Europe. We have especially large development teams working on the search engine, and of course Waze, whose product is now managed entirely from Israel, from A to Z, as well as Wiz, which we acquired this year.
“Four years ago, we established the chip division. It’s currently our fastest-growing division and the biggest source of growth for Google Israel.
“In addition, the research division operates from here under Prof. Yossi Matias’ leadership, in a range of fields from quantum computing to models for forecasting and issuing warnings about wildfires and floods.
“We also have development groups in communications, large Cloud development teams and more.
“At the same time, there is the sales and business management division. We provide services and support companies across everything from search and advertising tools to YouTube, cloud services and Android.
“Until recently, Google had 13 products with 1 billion users each. Now we have 14 because Gemini has entered the picture.”
At your core, you’re a software company. Why suddenly get into chip development?
“Google is, in my view, the only company today offering a ‘full stack’ in AI — meaning a complete end-to-end technological solution, not just software.
“The chip division here is one of Google global’s most strategic investments. It develops the Tensor chips, also known as TPUs, which are essentially the ‘engine’ of artificial intelligence.
“That chip has not yet been integrated into all of Google’s infrastructure, but its pace of development is crazy.”
Almost all the major technology companies, including Google, have had to lay off employees over the past three years, largely because budgets have been shifted toward the enormous computing infrastructure required for the transition to AI.
“Since 2024, Google has not had companywide waves of layoffs as a result of the transition to AI. If you look at our latest financial reports, you’ll actually see an increase in our workforce every quarter.
“Obviously, all of us are now able to do more with less. My boss gets 150% productivity out of me today for the same price.”
So maybe you’re not firing people today, but perhaps six months from now you’ll wake up with 20% too many employees.
“There’s a new World Bank study that compares jobs that will become redundant with new jobs that will be created, and concludes that there will be 78 million more new jobs. I believe that. New professions are constantly being created.”
In recent years, we’ve seen a decline in the number of new companies being established in Israel.
“This year, for the first time in years, we’re seeing a 50% increase in the pace of investment in Israeli startups, alongside a renewed increase in the number of new companies.
“And what’s interesting is that the checks being written here are getting much bigger.
“We’re already at $9.6 billion in investment in Israel in the first half of the year — a 50% increase from last year — and that’s with another war in the background, elections and more.”
People have always said of the Israeli entrepreneur that he’s smart, sharp and brilliant, but doesn’t know how to manage.
“Israeli high-tech today employs close to 360,000 people, including about 95,000 at international companies. There are roughly 450 such companies in Israel. Google is one of the largest.
“With all due modesty, we helped Israeli high-tech mature. Do you know how many of my customers are former employees of mine? They learned the international doctrine here. They saw what professionalism looks like.”
That brings us to the problem of ‘juniors’ — young people graduating today with degrees in computer-related fields whom you won’t hire because they lack experience.
“I agree that it’s a challenge. But I tell all junior candidates, including my eldest daughter: You can help us solve the problem if you start working in student positions while you’re still studying.
“Sometimes you have to start at the bottom to get to the top.”
Given this week’s news about the total failure of Israeli students in the PISA tests, is it possible that in a few years you simply won’t have anyone to work with?
“If there’s one area I’m somewhat concerned about, it’s that.
“Add to that the outflow of human capital from Israel. We’re also facing a problem because of the cost of living and the value of the shekel.
“I look at companies that are our customers and see that some of their workforce expansion is taking place outside Israel.”
Regev speaks excitedly about the acquisition of Wiz. “I wasn’t involved in the acquisition, but as CEO of Google Israel I understood where it was heading. We were all bursting with happiness.
“How could you not be excited that Google’s largest acquisition ever was of an Israeli company? Through Wiz, Google essentially opened a new avenue of activity for itself in cybersecurity.
“Think about the sense of pride here — precisely at a time when we’re carrying the burden of war, hundreds of days of reserve duty and hostages.
“After three months, we held an ‘integration day’ here and it was a huge festival. Assaf Rappaport, of course, arrived with his dog.
“For employees, it’s also good professional news because engineers will now be able to move from one company to the other, creating a beautiful symbiosis.”
Who guarantees that what may have happened to Waze won’t happen to Wiz — that it won’t gradually be absorbed into the company?
“I disagree. I think Waze is in an excellent place at Google today.
“You have to remember that Waze leads Google’s strategy in navigation. Google Maps focuses more on exploration — it helps you when you arrive in a new city and are looking for the best restaurant around you.
“As for Wiz, this is a strategic investment. Read the blog Assaf Rappaport published recently. He writes that becoming part of Google Cloud has elevated Wiz even more than it expected in advance.”
And will Google continue to preserve it as an independent company?
“For now, yes.”
I’ll speak here on behalf of thousands of people: Give me one tip — how do you get hired by Google?
“We also hire people without degrees. We removed that barrier eight years ago.
“We have a brilliant sales manager, and one day I asked her what she had originally studied. She answered: literary theater.
“I was stunned. ‘How did you get hired here?’
“‘You won’t believe it,’ she replied. ‘I had a friend at Google who went on maternity leave and suggested that I replace her.’
“We need people with open minds and, above all, they need to be good human beings.”
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