Aoifinn Devitt: This podcast was made possible by the kind support of Emmanuel Arbib of IAM Capital, a global alternative investment group based in London, as well as the individuals Alissa Bayer and Avatel Oisgild. The world of online behavior and the power of online advertising is a burgeoning area ripe for analysis, reflection, and action. Let’s hear what our next guest has discovered. I’m Aoifinn Devitt and welcome to Welcome to this 50 Faces Focus series, which showcases inspiring Israeli women in tech and beyond. I’m joined today by Rachel Zalta, who is Global Lead at the creative shop Atabula in Tel Aviv. She originally studied psychology and has a strong interest in online trends and persuasion and is an expert on online behavior. She was born in New York City and moved to Israel when she was 6 years old. Welcome, Rachel. Thanks for joining me today.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited about this, and I’m also pretty flattered to be falling under your inspiring category. I don’t know how inspiring my story is, but I’m definitely happy to share.
Aoifinn Devitt: And not only inspiring, but we are all intrigued, I think, by psychology, online behavior, particularly as it seems to be evolving at such a fast pace. So I’d love to start with talking, having you talk us through your career journey. And whether it took any surprising turns along the way.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, sure. I guess my career journey starts back in university or before university. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to study, and I actually, I took it really seriously. So I went to university, to the university I wanted to go to, and I just like sat in on different classes to see what’s interesting to me. And I originally signed up for law and economics, and then I sat at like a a psychology class, and I was like, oh my God, I need to study this. I was really, really interested in, in what was being said, and I didn’t even understand half of what was being said. And I guess I was trying to figure out, like, okay, I’m studying psychology, but I kind of knew from the beginning that I don’t want to be a therapist. And it was like, I’m going into this world where I am really passionate and excited about studying it, but I have no idea what I’m going to do afterwards. So yeah, that’s kind of how I started doing this.
Aoifinn Devitt: When did you know that your insights in psychology might be useful in the tech world? When did you kind of make that leap?
Rachel Zalta: Okay, so basically I knew that I really wanted to study psychology and I didn’t really know what I was going to do afterwards. And at a certain point, I found myself asking a lot of questions, things like, what makes us click on different things online? Why am I scrolling and why am I stopping to scroll on an infinite I was— I feed? Got— now I think about these questions because I have like an Alexa and I thank her after she helps me and I ask myself, wait, why am I thanking her? And you then, know, I think about Google a lot also because, you know, there are secrets that you don’t share with anybody but you will type in Google. And those kind of questions really fascinated me and I always thought that the answer lies in psychology. So, you know, as I was studying, I’ve been thinking about these questions. And I was trying to figure out what my next career step is. And I found myself applying to like every company in the world. So I’m applying and applying and no one’s really taking me seriously because no one’s really expecting a psychologist to kind of apply to their job if it’s in a tech company or in an advertising company. And I was really kind of lucky to have seen a job at Taboola. And Taboola is an online advertising company which basically gives the right person, the right ad at the right time. And at the time, I didn’t know anything about Taboola. I just knew that they were doing, you know, online advertising and that they were open to kind of hearing my story and what I have to offer. And I started at Taboola 6 years ago as an intern, and my job there was to write titles and choose images for big clients of ours. The way I saw it as a psychologist was like, I get to understand the behavior of these like millions and millions of people. And the role started like that and kind of developed into a research role. So I was able to run different experiments on, you know, what attracts people’s attention online. We got an eye tracker and we were able to, you know, follow eye tracking behavior. We worked with, you know, companies that were doing neuroscience and, you know, I really enjoyed that journey and I’m continuing to enjoy that journey.
Aoifinn Devitt: It’s so interesting what you said about people will type things into Google that they would never ask a person in real life. What I’ve also read is that there can be some racist behavior or beliefs that might be revealed through a Google search that would also never be shared in real life. So clearly there’s some kind of cloak of anonymity or perception of safety in there, but that even analysis of some of these searches can actually be quite interesting to reveal some undercurrents perhaps of human sentiments that are, are not politically correct to be open about.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, totally.
Aoifinn Devitt: You work with research groups all around the world. What are some of the interesting areas of research that you’re working on right now?
Rachel Zalta: Okay, so I have a lot of really cool studies and I think we need like 2 hours to share all of them. I guess one of the first studies that I worked on was watching the same video ad and watching it on different, in different places, different placements. And seeing how that actually affects us differently. So in theory, you would think that the same stimuli or the same video would affect you in a similar way, but what we found is that the environment actually plays a really strong role in that. I’ve actually— I started a project a few years ago partnering with top universities around the world. So I worked with a professor from Wharton on the difference in behavior between mobile and desktop. I’m working right now with a professor from Cambridge on different colors in ads and how if the background is green, it somehow for some reason works better and is getting more clicks. I’m right now actually working on a bunch of different studies with professors from Columbia. So I’ll give you a few examples there. For example, if we’re, if we’re looking at ads, does a product shot or you just as a picture of a product work better than someone holding that product? And do those work better than somebody that’s like a selfie, right? Like somebody smiling next to the product. And so that’s another study that we’re working on. And I think one of the most interesting studies that I’m working on right now with Columbia is actually a study on diversity, which kind of brings me to your point. So what we did is we looked at all of the ads that were running on Taboola for a period of, I think it was 6 months, and this was last year back in February. And we wanted to see in the images that had 2 people, which kinds of images were getting more clicks. Images of people with similar ethnicities or people with different ethnicities. And what we found was that, you know, more diverse images or images of people with more than one ethnicity actually were getting more clicks. And then we followed that behavior throughout 2020 to see if there was anything that, that changed. And what we found was that during the summer in the United States where, you know, Black Lives Matter was definitely something that everybody had in their mind, during those months we saw that people were clicking much more on more diverse images. So that was a really, really interesting finding where, you know, real life events were actually affecting online behavior. And another interesting point was that when we looked at the advertisements, advertisements weren’t more diverse. So like the ad agencies weren’t thinking to themselves, oh, let’s make more diverse images. No.. It’s just the clicking behavior that people were clicking on more diverse images. So there’s kind of like a really interesting gap there where advertisers need to kind of learn these behaviors.
Aoifinn Devitt: It’s absolutely fascinating. One thing I’m also interested in is how our online behavior changed since COVID when we spent perhaps more time online. I did a podcast with a group of university students, including my daughter, and you know, for them, social media had become their only means of communication. Whereas previously it might have been just one of many means of communication. And many were in isolation, it was the only way they had. It kind of became the good, the bad, and the ugly, not just the good scenes that were depicted. Have you detected any difference in online behavior over the past year with respect to maybe COVID lockdowns, different socialization behavior?
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, absolutely. So like in terms of images, a lot of different platforms, including our platform, we found that images of people that were too close, that were touching, actually weren’t doing as well. So that was pretty interesting. We also saw like a spike in clicks really early in the morning. So if usually we would see like a spike in clicks around like 9:00 AM, you know, when COVID started, people were online all the time, but the second they woke up in the morning, we saw that click behavior. If in the past it was affected by the day of the week, so like depending on if it was a weekday or a weekend. Now people were clicking all the time. They were always on news sites, always reading the news. And of course, you know, people are buying online, of course. So they’ll buy everything online, anything from food to clothing. And, you know, if I think about my own behavior, I’ve never really shopped online too much before. And now I was kind of forced to do so. And, and I think it kind of taught people that there is another way. And in the end of the day, I’m very optimistic about this adaptation because for me personally, it’s saving me a lot of time. It’s saving me money. It’s saving me traffic and gas to get to these places. So I’m pretty happy about this specific change.
Aoifinn Devitt: And in terms of online advertising and how it shapes our behavior, one other thing I’ve heard is that everybody thinks that they’re not influenced by online advertising, that they can kind of spot the targeted advertising just at them. But actually it’s the ones they spot are only a fraction of what’s actually been shown to them. So there’s probably some subliminal effect that they’re not aware of. How do you think online advertising is changing the way we buy goods and behave?
Rachel Zalta: I think it’s just more effective because it’s the only way, right? Like we’re not seeing billboards as much. So, and because we’re online all the time, as you said, we are exposed to online ads all the time. So it’s definitely more effective these days. I think so.
Aoifinn Devitt: I think you made a really interesting point about being aware of our online behavior. For example, I work in the finance industry and there’s a lot of nudges or prompts to say, well, why did you buy the stock and why are you selling the stock? And there’s been, you know, just in this way, kind of prompt you just in a very low friction way as to why you’re making certain decisions. I haven’t yet seen, maybe they exist, these kind of tools online that kind of prompt you, well, why are you navigating to the site now? Did you just see that ad? Is it a kind of an impulse purchase? Is it something that you’ve always planned? I don’t know whether those kind of behavioral tools exist, but it seems to me from what you said, we should be doing a bit more reflection as to why we travel where we do online and how much of it is influenced, how much of it is needed.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, that’s that’s a, a really interesting point. And I mean, it’s not something that I’ve seen, like, I haven’t seen it online. I haven’t seen these nudges or these questions, but it is something that like university professors are interested in. So something that I’m sure they’re testing in their labs and we’ll probably see some really fascinating studies coming out soon about these kinds of things.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’d like to just pivot now to your experience in the tech world as a woman, and maybe just if you could share your impressions of the experience of women in tech in Israel?
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, so I, I’m specifically in the marketing department, and of course there are more women in marketing departments and in HR departments. So from that perspective, I I don’t, don’t feel like— I feel like there are more women around me than around me. My personal experience with like women in tech or women, you know, in these, in these kinds of jobs is like I’ve never felt discriminated against from that perspective, and I was always like, I was raised on like Sesame Street, but I like very much remember clearly like a Sesame Street episode that said that like I can be anything. And I like, I kind of believed that. Also like my dad always told me that if I’m smart and I work hard, then like no one will actually care if I’m a woman or a man, like they’ll accept me. So that’s been always my experience and my upbringing. And that’s what I see. But I will tell you that like when I was in high school, I had the option to choose different topics. And I didn’t have the option to choose computers or anything that is tech-related. So, from that perspective, I do feel like I didn’t get certain opportunities as a woman. So, I was in an all-girls high school, and as opposed to that, in the all-boys high school, they did get the option to study computers. So, that is one difference, and I’m hearing that it’s changing, so that’s definitely a good thing. Another difference is that, or another thing that I noticed is that You know, there are definitely still salary gaps. So even if women are hired, salary is definitely something to keep in mind. And I think that when women start a family, that things change a lot too. So I didn’t start a family yet, but that’s definitely something that’s going to impact their career. I think it’s more from the woman’s perspective, from like the employee perspective, like she’s not sure how she wants to divide up her time. I find that from the employer’s perspective or the companies that I’m exposed to today, companies are in Israel and in the tech world are actually very flexible with regards to, to anyone in terms of how they want to split their time and what their working hours are. So that’s a, I’m pretty confident and happy about that.
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s really good to hear. Are you a member of any kind of women’s groups in the industry, any networking or support groups?
Rachel Zalta: I am. So there’s like a Facebook group that is very active that’s called Ima Kadima. If you’re interviewing women in Israel in the tech world, I’m sure you’ve heard of this group before. And there are a lot of groups. I would say that like most of my support that I’ve gotten throughout my career has actually been from like more mentors. So I’ve had mentors and friends throughout the years, and these have like, these people have been really helpful to me.
Aoifinn Devitt: Sounds— That they are so important, these people who help us along the way, who believe in us. Has there been any kind of one piece of advice that any of them have given you that you’ve really used to your advantage in your career, or any creed or motto that you refer to?
Rachel Zalta: Yes. So being myself is definitely a motto that I keep in mind and that has helped me throughout my career. And it like— it sounds just sounds like a saying. Something that’s maybe a little easier, but I think my personality is like a very excited, very bubbly personality. And it was hard for me to kind of express that personality in the workplace. And in the beginning, I used to be like very serious when I met clients and trying to show that, like, I know all the answers. And, and when I realized that, like, I could be myself, then I was able, I was comfortable with saying, I don’t know, when people would ask me questions that weren’t in my expertise. And I was comfortable with being really excited to meet these clients. And I found that that was, that created stronger relationships between me and my clients. And it was actually much better, like it had better results than me pretending to be like somebody who I’m not. So that’s something that I’ve definitely taken throughout my career journey. And that’s definitely served me well.
Aoifinn Devitt: And if you were to look, and I don’t think you’re looking back very far, to your younger self, maybe your, to as a graduate from university, Now that you’ve been in the industry for a few years, is there anything that you— any advice you would give to your younger self? Anything you wish you had known a little earlier?
Rachel Zalta: Yes. So I think trying and not being afraid of making mistakes, just like if I see an opportunity, just like try it, just see what happens. So that’s like one thing I would definitely tell myself. And the other thing is like to say yes. And that’s something that I’m, I’m definitely doing a lot now. So anytime somebody asks me, you know, can you speak at this event or can you do this or can you participate in this, in this podcast? I kind of like try to always say yes unless there’s a strong reason to say no. And I found that like I learn a lot from these experiences and I meet amazing people during these experiences. So definitely continue trying and saying yes to everything. That’s what I tell myself.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, we are delighted that you said yes to us here. So thank you very much. You have really opened a window or shone a light, whatever metaphor you choose, on the area of online behavior, which I think is really mysterious to most of us. But I think perhaps because it’s just moving at such a fast pace, how online tools affect how we live, how we behave. So thank you for revealing some of the really interesting things you’re working on and for sharing your insights here with us.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, sure. It was so nice to speak to you today.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to our 50 Faces Focus series. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring Israeli women in tech and beyond, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitt: This podcast was made possible by the kind support of Emmanuel Arbib of IAM Capital, a global alternative investment group based in London, as well as the individuals Alissa Bayer and Avatel Oisgild. The world of online behavior and the power of online advertising is a burgeoning area ripe for analysis, reflection, and action. Let’s hear what our next guest has discovered. I’m Aoifinn Devitt and welcome to Welcome to this 50 Faces Focus series, which showcases inspiring Israeli women in tech and beyond. I’m joined today by Rachel Zalta, who is Global Lead at the creative shop Atabula in Tel Aviv. She originally studied psychology and has a strong interest in online trends and persuasion and is an expert on online behavior. She was born in New York City and moved to Israel when she was 6 years old. Welcome, Rachel. Thanks for joining me today.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited about this, and I’m also pretty flattered to be falling under your inspiring category. I don’t know how inspiring my story is, but I’m definitely happy to share.
Aoifinn Devitt: And not only inspiring, but we are all intrigued, I think, by psychology, online behavior, particularly as it seems to be evolving at such a fast pace. So I’d love to start with talking, having you talk us through your career journey. And whether it took any surprising turns along the way.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, sure. I guess my career journey starts back in university or before university. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to study, and I actually, I took it really seriously. So I went to university, to the university I wanted to go to, and I just like sat in on different classes to see what’s interesting to me. And I originally signed up for law and economics, and then I sat at like a a psychology class, and I was like, oh my God, I need to study this. I was really, really interested in, in what was being said, and I didn’t even understand half of what was being said. And I guess I was trying to figure out, like, okay, I’m studying psychology, but I kind of knew from the beginning that I don’t want to be a therapist. And it was like, I’m going into this world where I am really passionate and excited about studying it, but I have no idea what I’m going to do afterwards. So yeah, that’s kind of how I started doing this.
Aoifinn Devitt: When did you know that your insights in psychology might be useful in the tech world? When did you kind of make that leap?
Rachel Zalta: Okay, so basically I knew that I really wanted to study psychology and I didn’t really know what I was going to do afterwards. And at a certain point, I found myself asking a lot of questions, things like, what makes us click on different things online? Why am I scrolling and why am I stopping to scroll on an infinite I was— I feed? Got— now I think about these questions because I have like an Alexa and I thank her after she helps me and I ask myself, wait, why am I thanking her? And you then, know, I think about Google a lot also because, you know, there are secrets that you don’t share with anybody but you will type in Google. And those kind of questions really fascinated me and I always thought that the answer lies in psychology. So, you know, as I was studying, I’ve been thinking about these questions. And I was trying to figure out what my next career step is. And I found myself applying to like every company in the world. So I’m applying and applying and no one’s really taking me seriously because no one’s really expecting a psychologist to kind of apply to their job if it’s in a tech company or in an advertising company. And I was really kind of lucky to have seen a job at Taboola. And Taboola is an online advertising company which basically gives the right person, the right ad at the right time. And at the time, I didn’t know anything about Taboola. I just knew that they were doing, you know, online advertising and that they were open to kind of hearing my story and what I have to offer. And I started at Taboola 6 years ago as an intern, and my job there was to write titles and choose images for big clients of ours. The way I saw it as a psychologist was like, I get to understand the behavior of these like millions and millions of people. And the role started like that and kind of developed into a research role. So I was able to run different experiments on, you know, what attracts people’s attention online. We got an eye tracker and we were able to, you know, follow eye tracking behavior. We worked with, you know, companies that were doing neuroscience and, you know, I really enjoyed that journey and I’m continuing to enjoy that journey.
Aoifinn Devitt: It’s so interesting what you said about people will type things into Google that they would never ask a person in real life. What I’ve also read is that there can be some racist behavior or beliefs that might be revealed through a Google search that would also never be shared in real life. So clearly there’s some kind of cloak of anonymity or perception of safety in there, but that even analysis of some of these searches can actually be quite interesting to reveal some undercurrents perhaps of human sentiments that are, are not politically correct to be open about.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, totally.
Aoifinn Devitt: You work with research groups all around the world. What are some of the interesting areas of research that you’re working on right now?
Rachel Zalta: Okay, so I have a lot of really cool studies and I think we need like 2 hours to share all of them. I guess one of the first studies that I worked on was watching the same video ad and watching it on different, in different places, different placements. And seeing how that actually affects us differently. So in theory, you would think that the same stimuli or the same video would affect you in a similar way, but what we found is that the environment actually plays a really strong role in that. I’ve actually— I started a project a few years ago partnering with top universities around the world. So I worked with a professor from Wharton on the difference in behavior between mobile and desktop. I’m working right now with a professor from Cambridge on different colors in ads and how if the background is green, it somehow for some reason works better and is getting more clicks. I’m right now actually working on a bunch of different studies with professors from Columbia. So I’ll give you a few examples there. For example, if we’re, if we’re looking at ads, does a product shot or you just as a picture of a product work better than someone holding that product? And do those work better than somebody that’s like a selfie, right? Like somebody smiling next to the product. And so that’s another study that we’re working on. And I think one of the most interesting studies that I’m working on right now with Columbia is actually a study on diversity, which kind of brings me to your point. So what we did is we looked at all of the ads that were running on Taboola for a period of, I think it was 6 months, and this was last year back in February. And we wanted to see in the images that had 2 people, which kinds of images were getting more clicks. Images of people with similar ethnicities or people with different ethnicities. And what we found was that, you know, more diverse images or images of people with more than one ethnicity actually were getting more clicks. And then we followed that behavior throughout 2020 to see if there was anything that, that changed. And what we found was that during the summer in the United States where, you know, Black Lives Matter was definitely something that everybody had in their mind, during those months we saw that people were clicking much more on more diverse images. So that was a really, really interesting finding where, you know, real life events were actually affecting online behavior. And another interesting point was that when we looked at the advertisements, advertisements weren’t more diverse. So like the ad agencies weren’t thinking to themselves, oh, let’s make more diverse images. No.. It’s just the clicking behavior that people were clicking on more diverse images. So there’s kind of like a really interesting gap there where advertisers need to kind of learn these behaviors.
Aoifinn Devitt: It’s absolutely fascinating. One thing I’m also interested in is how our online behavior changed since COVID when we spent perhaps more time online. I did a podcast with a group of university students, including my daughter, and you know, for them, social media had become their only means of communication. Whereas previously it might have been just one of many means of communication. And many were in isolation, it was the only way they had. It kind of became the good, the bad, and the ugly, not just the good scenes that were depicted. Have you detected any difference in online behavior over the past year with respect to maybe COVID lockdowns, different socialization behavior?
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, absolutely. So like in terms of images, a lot of different platforms, including our platform, we found that images of people that were too close, that were touching, actually weren’t doing as well. So that was pretty interesting. We also saw like a spike in clicks really early in the morning. So if usually we would see like a spike in clicks around like 9:00 AM, you know, when COVID started, people were online all the time, but the second they woke up in the morning, we saw that click behavior. If in the past it was affected by the day of the week, so like depending on if it was a weekday or a weekend. Now people were clicking all the time. They were always on news sites, always reading the news. And of course, you know, people are buying online, of course. So they’ll buy everything online, anything from food to clothing. And, you know, if I think about my own behavior, I’ve never really shopped online too much before. And now I was kind of forced to do so. And, and I think it kind of taught people that there is another way. And in the end of the day, I’m very optimistic about this adaptation because for me personally, it’s saving me a lot of time. It’s saving me money. It’s saving me traffic and gas to get to these places. So I’m pretty happy about this specific change.
Aoifinn Devitt: And in terms of online advertising and how it shapes our behavior, one other thing I’ve heard is that everybody thinks that they’re not influenced by online advertising, that they can kind of spot the targeted advertising just at them. But actually it’s the ones they spot are only a fraction of what’s actually been shown to them. So there’s probably some subliminal effect that they’re not aware of. How do you think online advertising is changing the way we buy goods and behave?
Rachel Zalta: I think it’s just more effective because it’s the only way, right? Like we’re not seeing billboards as much. So, and because we’re online all the time, as you said, we are exposed to online ads all the time. So it’s definitely more effective these days. I think so.
Aoifinn Devitt: I think you made a really interesting point about being aware of our online behavior. For example, I work in the finance industry and there’s a lot of nudges or prompts to say, well, why did you buy the stock and why are you selling the stock? And there’s been, you know, just in this way, kind of prompt you just in a very low friction way as to why you’re making certain decisions. I haven’t yet seen, maybe they exist, these kind of tools online that kind of prompt you, well, why are you navigating to the site now? Did you just see that ad? Is it a kind of an impulse purchase? Is it something that you’ve always planned? I don’t know whether those kind of behavioral tools exist, but it seems to me from what you said, we should be doing a bit more reflection as to why we travel where we do online and how much of it is influenced, how much of it is needed.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, that’s that’s a, a really interesting point. And I mean, it’s not something that I’ve seen, like, I haven’t seen it online. I haven’t seen these nudges or these questions, but it is something that like university professors are interested in. So something that I’m sure they’re testing in their labs and we’ll probably see some really fascinating studies coming out soon about these kinds of things.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’d like to just pivot now to your experience in the tech world as a woman, and maybe just if you could share your impressions of the experience of women in tech in Israel?
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, so I, I’m specifically in the marketing department, and of course there are more women in marketing departments and in HR departments. So from that perspective, I I don’t, don’t feel like— I feel like there are more women around me than around me. My personal experience with like women in tech or women, you know, in these, in these kinds of jobs is like I’ve never felt discriminated against from that perspective, and I was always like, I was raised on like Sesame Street, but I like very much remember clearly like a Sesame Street episode that said that like I can be anything. And I like, I kind of believed that. Also like my dad always told me that if I’m smart and I work hard, then like no one will actually care if I’m a woman or a man, like they’ll accept me. So that’s been always my experience and my upbringing. And that’s what I see. But I will tell you that like when I was in high school, I had the option to choose different topics. And I didn’t have the option to choose computers or anything that is tech-related. So, from that perspective, I do feel like I didn’t get certain opportunities as a woman. So, I was in an all-girls high school, and as opposed to that, in the all-boys high school, they did get the option to study computers. So, that is one difference, and I’m hearing that it’s changing, so that’s definitely a good thing. Another difference is that, or another thing that I noticed is that You know, there are definitely still salary gaps. So even if women are hired, salary is definitely something to keep in mind. And I think that when women start a family, that things change a lot too. So I didn’t start a family yet, but that’s definitely something that’s going to impact their career. I think it’s more from the woman’s perspective, from like the employee perspective, like she’s not sure how she wants to divide up her time. I find that from the employer’s perspective or the companies that I’m exposed to today, companies are in Israel and in the tech world are actually very flexible with regards to, to anyone in terms of how they want to split their time and what their working hours are. So that’s a, I’m pretty confident and happy about that.
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s really good to hear. Are you a member of any kind of women’s groups in the industry, any networking or support groups?
Rachel Zalta: I am. So there’s like a Facebook group that is very active that’s called Ima Kadima. If you’re interviewing women in Israel in the tech world, I’m sure you’ve heard of this group before. And there are a lot of groups. I would say that like most of my support that I’ve gotten throughout my career has actually been from like more mentors. So I’ve had mentors and friends throughout the years, and these have like, these people have been really helpful to me.
Aoifinn Devitt: Sounds— That they are so important, these people who help us along the way, who believe in us. Has there been any kind of one piece of advice that any of them have given you that you’ve really used to your advantage in your career, or any creed or motto that you refer to?
Rachel Zalta: Yes. So being myself is definitely a motto that I keep in mind and that has helped me throughout my career. And it like— it sounds just sounds like a saying. Something that’s maybe a little easier, but I think my personality is like a very excited, very bubbly personality. And it was hard for me to kind of express that personality in the workplace. And in the beginning, I used to be like very serious when I met clients and trying to show that, like, I know all the answers. And, and when I realized that, like, I could be myself, then I was able, I was comfortable with saying, I don’t know, when people would ask me questions that weren’t in my expertise. And I was comfortable with being really excited to meet these clients. And I found that that was, that created stronger relationships between me and my clients. And it was actually much better, like it had better results than me pretending to be like somebody who I’m not. So that’s something that I’ve definitely taken throughout my career journey. And that’s definitely served me well.
Aoifinn Devitt: And if you were to look, and I don’t think you’re looking back very far, to your younger self, maybe your, to as a graduate from university, Now that you’ve been in the industry for a few years, is there anything that you— any advice you would give to your younger self? Anything you wish you had known a little earlier?
Rachel Zalta: Yes. So I think trying and not being afraid of making mistakes, just like if I see an opportunity, just like try it, just see what happens. So that’s like one thing I would definitely tell myself. And the other thing is like to say yes. And that’s something that I’m, I’m definitely doing a lot now. So anytime somebody asks me, you know, can you speak at this event or can you do this or can you participate in this, in this podcast? I kind of like try to always say yes unless there’s a strong reason to say no. And I found that like I learn a lot from these experiences and I meet amazing people during these experiences. So definitely continue trying and saying yes to everything. That’s what I tell myself.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, we are delighted that you said yes to us here. So thank you very much. You have really opened a window or shone a light, whatever metaphor you choose, on the area of online behavior, which I think is really mysterious to most of us. But I think perhaps because it’s just moving at such a fast pace, how online tools affect how we live, how we behave. So thank you for revealing some of the really interesting things you’re working on and for sharing your insights here with us.
Rachel Zalta: Yeah, sure. It was so nice to speak to you today.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to our 50 Faces Focus series. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring Israeli women in tech and beyond, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
