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Ofer Shacham <\/p>\n
(Yonatan Bloom)<\/p>\n
What was so challenging about it?<\/p>\n
\u201cThis meant taking hardware that exists in server farms and cramming it into smart glasses without the battery inside the glasses overheating and burning the user\u2019s ears,\u201d explains Shacham (48), now co-founder and CEO of the startup Majestic Labs, in a first and exclusive interview with Calcalist. \u201cAll that Mark told me and the team recruited by Facebook as our mission statement was: \u2018All-day wearable, socially acceptable.\u2019 This sounds concise and simple on the surface, but in practice it is almost impossible to implement, because the smart glasses he envisioned also had to look good, be suitable not only for geeks, and be lightweight. Regular glasses weigh about 40 grams, so glasses that weigh more than 80 grams are too heavy. As a result, during the development process, every gram in the battery or chip had to be carefully considered. In the five years I worked on the project, I built a team of more than a thousand people from scratch, and with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, we developed 15 chips for this project.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presumably, one of the reasons Zuckerberg\u2019s smart glasses did not become a hit is that his definition of \u201csocially acceptable\u201d differs from that of the average person. Still, Shacham\u2019s team, where he served as Vice President, Head of Silicon, met the technological mission it was given and brought Facebook into the field of chips needed to run artificial intelligence applications. Shacham led the silicon team expansion in Israel. About a year after his departure, the operation was shut down and most of its employees were laid off. <\/p>\n
“Sergey and Mark didn\u2019t get where they are by chance” <\/p>\n
Shacham, a man without the ego-driven mannerisms that characterize many entrepreneurs, has accumulated quite a few Brin hours and Zuckerberg hours over the course of his career. And as happened at Google, even after he moved to Facebook (now Meta), Zuckerberg tried to keep Shacham at the company every time he considered leaving. Among other things, when Shacham and his family decided to return to Israel after the coronavirus pandemic subsided, Facebook allowed his role to move to Israel with him. It was that important to Zuckerberg to retain the humble Israeli engineer rather than look for a replacement in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
Do you enjoy working with Zuckerberg? He\u2019s considered a difficult person.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know it\u2019s going to sound like a clich\u00e9, but Mark is one of the smartest people I\u2019ve ever met. He can walk into a conference room in flip-flops and a T-shirt, go over to an engineer and talk about code as if he were one of the junior programmers himself, and then sit down at the executive table with ten other VPs, of whom I was one, and ask a really smart question about a footnote on page 13 of a document that he\u2019s probably one of the only people who read in full in advance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who is more impressive: Zuckerberg or Brin?<\/p>\n
\u201cSergey probably has higher emotional intelligence than Zuckerberg. The first time I met him at Google was when I was sitting at lunch in the cafeteria and he just walked up to me without knowing me, asked if he could sit next to me, and then inquired a bit about what I do. What I can say about both of them is that they are very impressive people who didn\u2019t get where they got by chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two of the world\u2019s top industry executives are courting you, and yet you decided to return to Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the pandemic, we were in isolation for 364 days, and at one point my wife told me: \u2018Enough, it\u2019s time to go back.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The Shacham family, with its three children, all born in Palo Alto, settled in Hod Hasharon, the city where he and his wife grew up, and had to adjust to the new environment in the midst of war. \u201cIt takes some time to get used to the intensity and aggressiveness of Israel, especially for the three children who were born in the United States and were therefore new immigrants in every sense of the word,\u201d says Shacham. \u201cThe differences are in the small things in daily life. The children were mostly shocked by the noise in the classrooms when they entered them in the morning, and by the students\u2019 attitude toward the teachers. But in the end, the Israeli roughness is actually good preparation for life.\u201d<\/p>\n
And how did you feel during the transition?<\/p>\n
\u201cFacebook informed me that the position would move with me to Israel, but after a period of work that started at 4 p.m. and ended at 2-3 a.m., I felt exhausted. In the background, I also saw what was beginning to happen in the field of AI and realized that I had to act.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next chapter in Shacham\u2019s career sounds like the beginning of a joke: an Israeli, an Iranian, and a Japanese woman decided to establish a startup to develop processing chips tailored to the massive computational demands of artificial intelligence, without consuming electricity on a country-wide scale. During 2023, Shacham, Sha Rabii, and Masumi Reynders, who had worked with him in senior positions at Meta, resigned from the company, and in August they began working together on their ambitious project, designed to challenge Nvidia\u2019s hegemony in AI processors. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n 5 View gallery <\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg. <\/p>\n (David Paul Morris\/Bloomberg)<\/p>\n You didn\u2019t set out on this new path with perfect timing.<\/p>\n \u201cWe officially launched Majestic Labs AI in November 2023, already in the midst of the war in Israel. We raised $100 million in two almost consecutive rounds that were in high demand, and we could have raised double that.\u201d<\/p>\n Didn\u2019t the partners ask you to return to Silicon Valley in light of the war raging here?<\/p>\n \u201cThe partners didn\u2019t say anything. We\u2019ve been working together for 15 years and they\u2019re like family to me, but other people kept asking questions. There were venture capital funds that explicitly made their investment conditional on my moving to Palo Alto, and that\u2019s why I didn\u2019t take money from them. Beyond that, it was important for me to have Israeli funds on the board so I would have support for staying here,\u201d says Shacham, explaining the combination of Israeli funds Grove Ventures, managed by Dov Moran, Lior Handelsman, and Renana Ashkenazi, Hetz Ventures, Tal Ventures and QP Ventures. The first round was led by one of the hottest funds in the United States today, Lux Capital, which specializes in hardware and defense investments. The second was led by the relatively new Bow Wave Capital fund, managed by former Israeli Itai Lemberger.<\/p>\n Today, Majestic is registered in the United States, but Shacham is far from the only Israeli working for it from Israel: about half of the company\u2019s employees live here. Rabii, Shacham\u2019s Iranian partner and the company\u2019s president, can relate to the issue of homesickness. He was born in Iran and came with his family to the United States as a child on the eve of the revolution. When the Shah\u2019s regime fell, they decided not to return.<\/p>\n Was it difficult to run the company together during two years of war here, including tensions with Iran?<\/p>\n \u201cThere are the countries of Israel and Iran, which have complex relations, and there are the people who live in them. In the United States, I worked with many employees of Iranian origin, and we also have investors of Iranian origin in the company. When missiles started falling from Iran, they were the first to contact me, by any means of communication. I received dozens of messages from them, and I also asked how their families were doing, because it wasn\u2019t easy in Tehran during that period either. Ultimately, these are relations between people who want to live in peace. Iranians are very similar to Israelis: they take great pride in their cultural heritage, and it\u2019s clear that the vast majority don\u2019t like the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n So you\u2019ve founded a company and you\u2019re serious and ambitious people, but let\u2019s be realistic: the idea that a small Israeli startup will defeat Nvidia\u2019s hegemony and compete head-to-head with it isn\u2019t crazy to you?<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Win\u2019 is a big word for a small startup facing trillion-dollar companies that built the chip sector. Even with the word \u2018compete,\u2019 I\u2019m cautious, because Nvidia currently controls about 90% of the market, so any activity in the processor space inevitably competes with it. That said, we identify areas where Majestic has an order-of-magnitude advantage over Nvidia. We\u2019re solving a problem that no one else has a solution for today, just as we did when we worked on chips at Google and later on the glasses at Meta. In AI, there is a once-in-a-century opportunity right now to build a company in the midst of a transformation that affects everything in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n And you know the key figures in the field very well.<\/p>\n \u201cWe built a one-of-a-kind team, which currently numbers several dozen employees, because we had access to the best minds in Israel and Silicon Valley. Over the years in the United States, I\u2019ve recruited about 1,500 engineers, so I know a lot of people in the field. Recently, Google did a great job breaking new ground with its TPU chips. This is no longer just a crack in Nvidia\u2019s hegemony, but an entire pipeline, and we intend to expand it.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 5 View gallery <\/p>\n Sergey Brin. <\/p>\n (CraSH\/imageSPACE\/Sipa USA)<\/p>\n “We thought it would be nice to see a little of the world”<\/p>\n It is likely that if Shacham had read these words 25 years ago, he would have had difficulty imagining that the man at the center of the story could be himself. Unlike many entrepreneurs and executives in the Israeli high-tech scene, Shacham was not a computer geek, did not serve in a technological unit, and in fact came to his impressive career largely by accident. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a doctor, and while others were programming or playing computer games, he volunteered with MDA (Israel\u2019s national emergency medical, disaster, ambulance, and blood bank service). His military service in the naval commando also did not bring him closer to his future career. \u201cI can\u2019t count to 8200, only to 13,\u201d he jokes about himself.<\/p>\n After being discharged from the IDF, Shacham was close to enrolling in medical school, but at the last minute changed his mind. Seven years of study seemed like too long, so he decided to change direction and study electrical engineering and computer science at Tel Aviv University. He had no idea that, without any detailed planning for the future, this choice would set him on a 12-year path that ended with a doctorate at Stanford University.<\/p>\n Describe the state of mind you were in when you started your studies.<\/p>\n \u201cI was so far from this world that in one of my first classes I went up to the professor and said, \u2018I don\u2019t even remember what a derivative is, what are you talking about?!\u2019 That was my level. During my degree, I worked as a diving instructor, and only toward the end of my undergraduate studies did I start working at IBM and thinking about entrepreneurship. But I felt I didn\u2019t know enough to invent something new. Around that time, I got married, and my wife and I thought it would be nice to see a little of the world and do a master\u2019s degree abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n Stanford is one of the world\u2019s most respected universities in engineering and technology. That\u2019s a bit more than \u201cseeing the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s almost embarrassing to admit, but I only applied to universities whose names I recognized from movies and TV shows. My wife wanted us to live somewhere with nice weather, so the only university I applied to on the East Coast was MIT in Boston, because it\u2019s the most famous institution. In the end, I was only accepted to Stanford, but the embarrassing part of the story doesn\u2019t end there. During the application process, I consulted one of my undergraduate professors, and he told me, \u2018If you apply only for a master\u2019s degree, you have no chance of getting a scholarship. How are you going to pay for your studies? You have to apply for a doctorate first, and then you can decide what to do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The young couple arrived in the United States, and Shacham, who did not receive a scholarship, had to find a job to support himself during his studies. By chance, he found a position very similar to the one he had held as a student at IBM in Israel, and became a research assistant in a Stanford laboratory working on chip-related projects. \u201cThe person who hired me was Professor Mark Horowitz, head of the faculty and responsible for the entire field of silicon chip design at Stanford,\u201d Shacham says, describing one of the world\u2019s leading scientists in the field and the founder of Rambus, a chip technology company traded on Wall Street with a market value of about $10 billion.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter one quarter, I went up to him and said, \u2018Listen, the project isn\u2019t finished yet, should I look for another job, or do you want me for another quarter?\u2019 He said, \u2018Stay for another quarter.\u2019 After another quarter, I asked again, \u2018It\u2019s still not finished, do you want me?\u2019 And so, little by little, the first doctoral students I helped completed their degrees, and I inherited the project. I didn\u2019t plan to pursue a doctorate, but that, too, happened by chance, because of Horowitz.\u201d<\/p>\n How do you end up with a doctorate?<\/p>\n \u201cAt Stanford, there\u2019s an admissions test for the transition to a doctorate. About 250 students take it each year, and around 80 with the highest scores are accepted. The test is a series of interviews conducted in a single day with ten professors in your field. Each one puts you in front of a blackboard and asks professional questions. I knew I didn\u2019t want to do a doctorate, so I didn\u2019t prepare at all. At the same time, I had to take the test so they wouldn\u2019t know I wasn\u2019t planning to continue. The plan worked perfectly: I ranked 82nd, which meant I wasn\u2019t accepted. But then Horowitz said, \u2018I know exactly how much you studied, and I don\u2019t want you wasting your time taking this test again next year. I filed an appeal for you, and you were accepted.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n “In the Stanford lab, I was in the right place at the right time”<\/p>\n Two decades ago, long before anyone predicted the massive computing needs that the then-nascent AI revolution would demand, few engineers understood that it would not be possible to keep shrinking silicon chips indefinitely, as Gordon Moore, one of Intel\u2019s founders, had predicted. Shacham\u2019s research group at Stanford, which included industry figures such as Bill Dally, who later became Nvidia\u2019s chief scientist, and Kunle Olukotun, founder of the AI chip company SambaNova, was among the first in the world to challenge the doctrine known as “Moore\u2019s Law.” Their argument was simple: cramming more and more transistors onto ever-smaller chips and trying to run them fast would cause processors to overheat, or even catch fire. In other words, Shacham was at the forefront of designing processors for the AI era.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the kind of story of being in the right place at the right time. In 2010, I started working on a startup I founded, and the academic breakthrough in AI began in 2013. We started building processors for specific applications, the same direction Google is pursuing today with its AI processors, and also writing papers on the subject. That was the focus of my PhD. In 2011, Google, which had just established its first silicon group under the Android division, became my first customer, and a year and a half later it acquired my company.\u201d<\/p>\n Why did you think such computing power would be needed in mobile phones?<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I joined Google, I told people, \u2018Computer vision and artificial intelligence are going to be the next thing in smartphones.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/SJgslbTXSZg_0_313_3000_1688_0_x-large.jpg\" "\\"")
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