Yaniv

Yaniv

[Yawn-IF] noun., person

Yaniv is a unique professional with over 15 years of finance, accounting, business, and strategy experience in complex technical industries exhibiting rapid growth.

Like his name, Yaniv’s success in education, business, and life categorically unique - and he wouldn’t want it any other way. Yaniv is proud of an accelerated and robust 20-year career in finance, technology, and corporate development. His propensity for learning and new ideas combined with a love for his work has earned him a robust and glowing reputation.

A new and necessary type of finance and business executive, Yaniv has the unique aptitude of an engineer and physicist, while pursuing the knowledge and experience of finance - to create an odd specialization that can weave together intricate strategies at increasingly complex technological organizations. Using this obtuse combination of an engineer, accountant, and investment banker, he propelled himself to executive leadership though the high demand vacuum of this niche set of skills. He did not do this by himself but with the invaluable and critical help of great mentors and good culture. Yaniv deeply believes in the power of doing good work through constant challenge and insatiable learning. He strives to grow human capital and business value through honest and bold engagement; cultivating strong relationships; staying vigilantly open to new ideas / skeptical of old truths.

Fiercely competitive bolsters by a natural aptitude for learning, Yaniv graduated top of his class in high school. He excelled at math and science, and loved to challenge the status quo both in the classroom and outside. He founded, resurrected, and participated in more social clubs than any other student.

To continue his insatiable need to learn as well as constantly challenge himself, he chose to go to the University is California - Berkeley, raising the stakes by choosing a large, competitive, extremely-intelligent student body and faculty, well-known diverse and extremely-unique thinking. He took on the challenge and thoughtfully learned how to think differently, open to new ideas while remaining skeptical old truths, and the value of strong relationships, diversity, and connections.

He majored in business with a finance focus, as well as pursued minors in computer science and classic literature. He started social and professional clubs at Berkeley, including a simple yet powerful student group called “dinner for twelve strangers” which brought alumni, professors, and students together for dinner and discussion. He also developed and taught one of the most demanded business courses on an introduction stock market to non-business students for 3 years. He is particularly proud and keeps in touch with student, some who have used the simple value investing principles to later make a fortune in the incoming hypergrowth tech stocks, and some of whom used the principles to endure the further financial crisis. Yaniv also worked at the center for economic development, interned at an investment bank, as well as a small hedge fund, and finally a big four public accounting firm.

Yaniv returned to San Diego to work for Deloitte, was promoted quickly by seeking out a unique niche around complex valuation accounting and analysis - mostly with financial firms - which was a low supply, high demand focus in the San Diego market of the large public accounting/consulting firm.

After refining his professional skills Deloitte and achieving all he could in the San Diego office, Yaniv sought out more challenging and robust business knowledge - and stumbled upon a small mid-cap company called Viasat.

Viasat, whether through serendipity or a perfect alignment of culture, skills, and demand, noticed Yaniv’s unique ability and hired him into a role created specially around his skill set. At Viasat, Yaniv quickly became one of, if not the quickest and youngest stars by combining his love and understanding of technology with a very hard to find robust financial and business knowledge. He gained the adoration of key executive mentors and fed those relationships with constant hard work and little regard for job definitions and their known speed and capabilities. He quickly became the star finance analyst, sought after by technology leadership, and began building a corporate development and strategic finance program/team necessary for a high growth company.

After refining his professional skills Deloitte and achieving all he could in the San Diego office, Yaniv sought out more challenging and robust business knowledge - and stumbled upon a small mid-cap company called Viasat.

Yaniv was one of very few privileged with a skill set to be able to work almost every major deal, investment, acquisition, and financing that created a virtual a learning cycle of success. He was privileged to be a key party of an incredible growth story - starting at a company of 300 people, 100 customers, 2 offices, and $100M to a $5B dollar, 5000 employee, global powerhouse with millions of customers in a variety of mission-driven industries from government defense programs to bringing consumer connectivity and internet to millions of unconnected houses/businesses across the United States, and soon globally. The growth and increased value of the business would have been more than gift enough to the ambitious Yaniv but it was further compounded by the value of a product/mission that will bring connectivity to those desperate for the valuable economic and cultural commodity some of us take for granted. Yaniv also attributed much of his serendipitous success so far in business to his extremely gracious mentors, and a founder/CEO who created a culture and strategy which supported this virtuous cycle of professional development.

Below is a brief, very abridged outline of specific deals and experience while at Viasat. Beginning with financial modeling, scenario analysis, market/competitive analysis, cross functional leadership, sharp purposeful contract negotiation, value derivation and game theory, cultivating scaling of teams and deal flow, internal and external partnerships and relationships, as we’ll as internal mentorship combined with business and financial leadership.

Investment Analysis and execution- Viasat-1, Wildblue Aquistion

The kickstart into corporate finance was a company-betting billion-dollar investment in a new highly-specialized satellite to deliver high-throughput connectivity. This combined with the complimentary, and brilliantly-timed synergistic $500M acquisition of liberty global’s wildblue internet, bolstered a “rocket launch” into the commercial and service growth market. It was the appropriate start of a rapid serious of complex finance learning and career growth.

Large RFP Financial analysis, Contract Negotiation, and Relationship Management .

NBN and government contracts - worked on, cultivated over 3 years, and won, the single biggest contract win, RFP, and program for viasat to the National Broadband Network in Austrailia - strategically aligning Viasat with the 40 billion dollar broadband effort in geographically-complex austialia. Also worked on many, large government proposals - some as pathfinder, some won, some and not won - but honed skill for negotiating, game theory, pricing, and large exhaustive proposals.

Strategy, FP&A, Investor Relations

Aided in the company-wide business financial modeling, stock price analysis, communication to investors, and development and testing of strategic scenarios. The complex models valued six analyze business value creation, strategy, and risk. Adding an order of magnitude more complexity was the addition of several hundreds of millions of dollar investments, partnerships and the follow-on launch of Viasat-2, and the groundbreaking productivity and financial complexity of the Viasat-3 constellation. The brand new technology required extremely creative and thoughtful thinking around the creation of complex multi-demential, geospatial, financial models - that could validate investment returns and corporate strategy while maintaining structural ease-of-use and simple KPIs/result constructs for communicating investment theses quickly and confidently.

Executive Organizational Leadership and Development

Tapped to rear and manage the financials and financial teams in several new global entities, laying the foundation of separate and new financial systems for these new and separate businesses. In a ode / coup de grat to the experience obtained during hypergrowth stage, Yaniv used his knowlegr to manage manage all financial reporting, analysis, communication, strategy, and forecasting of the $100M Texas enterprise group who’s independence mimicked closely a CFO role. Treating it as such, all financial targets were met or exceeded. Further, financial processes were modernized and integrated, new business was developed using financial templates, KPIs and metrics. Financial analysis and reporting, forecasting were combined with analytics and data warehouses share between businesses. Finance played a leading role for the first time in market entry, analysis, negotiation strategy, and decision making. Organizationally cultivated and led a team of staff accountants, junior and senior financial analysts and managers to refine existing processes, modernize analysis and forecasting, as well as learn the new and complex workings of the large-investments in shared space assets and infrastructure. This leadership was prudent, and had combine with the ongoing and concise communication sad co-decision making with executives in the business. The challenging and arduous organizational task was overcome by the increasing value created by strong CFO / financial leadership to the employees and colleagues of the growing business.