The Accidental Unicorn

Yoni’s path to technology hadn’t followed any conventional blueprint. During his army service in airborne intelligence, computers weren’t part of his daily reality. Math and physics in high school, yes, but nothing that screamed “future tech entrepreneur.” Like many young Israelis at the height of the 1999 tech bubble, he and his childhood friend Guy Stolero had dreams of striking it rich in New York.

Guy went first, as he was released from the army four months before Yoni. After meeting a man in the tech scene, Guy convinced Yoni that acquiring a Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSME) certification was their ticket to getting into tech. Picture six massive books ordered from Amazon, parties at night, studying during the day. On repeat.

They passed! It was time to get a job. Leaving NYC, Guy and Yoni got a bachelor’s apartment together in Tel Aviv.

At ANC, Yoni discovered something unexpected: he loved the intersection of hardcore technology and human connection. Citrix wasn’t just about servers and virtualization. It was about making end users happy. When a Citrix project succeeded, you could see it immediately. Five seconds to log in instead of two minutes. Applications that actually worked. People who could focus on their jobs instead of fighting their computers.

“It’s all about the end user experience,” he would later reflect. “You’re not working on some back-end database that nobody sees. You’re on the front lines, making people’s workdays better.”

After eighteen months, ANC began to collapse, and Yoni moved to Commart, a well-known Citrix reseller. There, working with Israeli enterprises across retail, pharmaceuticals, and government, he honed his technical skills while completing his economics degree at Tel Aviv University. He climbed from individual contributor to team lead to CTO, all while maintaining his hands-on approach to customer problems.

In 2006, Yoni decided to test his skills in the broader market. He wasn’t actively job hunting, but curiosity got the better of him. The interview was with Asaf Ganot, CTO of a small Israeli startup competing with Citrix. The technical conversation was electric; that feeling when two minds collide, two people who understood both the deep technical challenges and the human element of enterprise computing.

Nothing came of that first meeting, but they remembered each other.

A year later, Asaf reached out again. This time, he had started his own company, Smart-X, with just three or four people. They met at a coffee shop near Yoni’s apartment.

“Join me,” Asaf said. “Let’s build the ultimate Citrix boutique company.”

But Yoni felt loyalty to his current boss, Eli Lior, at Commart. Instead of jumping ship, he made an introduction. “Let me connect you two,” he suggested.

Eli and Asaf hit it off immediately. By January 2008, they had founded a merged company with Yoni, Asaf, and Eli as co-founders. Unlike most Israeli startups, they didn’t need to raise money immediately; they had real revenue from established professional services. Their vision extended beyond consulting: they wanted to create and sell software utilities over the internet.

The idea that would become ControlUp emerged from a problem so simple it seemed almost trivial. Working with a tourist agency client—a call center with 1,000 employees logging into Citrix terminal servers—they needed to answer a basic question: How many users are working on each server right now?

“It sounds so easy,” Yoni recalls, “but there was nothing out there that could show us this in real-time.”

Frustration became innovation. So, between 2008-2010, they wrote and perfected a small utility to solve this specific problem. ControlUp version 0.1, initially called PowerAdmin, was a real-time vision of server usage that went far beyond what anyone else was offering. It was revolutionary because it could be deployed in minutes by downloading a single utility that automatically installed agents on servers without requiring database setups or complex permissions.

This product-led growth (PLG) approach eliminated the need for traditional agent deployment and database infrastructure, ultimately helping ControlUp stand out in the market during Citrix Synergy demos.

But the real breakthrough came when they expanded their thinking beyond simple user counts. What if they could show CPU usage, RAM usage, and process-level data across hundreds of machines simultaneously? What if a Citrix administrator could see everything happening across their entire infrastructure in real-time, updated every three seconds?

Aha, a spark.

Their main developer, Shlomi, built something that would fundamentally challenge how enterprise monitoring worked.

Traditional monitoring solutions in 2010 followed a predictable pattern: install agents on machines, set up databases and web servers, configure dashboards. The process could take weeks and require approvals from multiple teams. Database administrators, security teams, infrastructure teams… nearly everyone had to sign off before you could even begin a proof of concept.

ControlUp shattered this model, rewriting the rules and starting a quiet revolution.

Their unofficial motto became, “Download. Double-click. You’re done.”

No servers required. No database setup. No complex permissions. The Citrix administrator could simply download a utility, click to see all their terminal servers, and within five minutes have complete visibility across hundreds of machines. The software would dynamically deploy agents directly from the console, lighting up the entire infrastructure in real-time.

At Citrix Synergy, the company’s major conference, other monitoring solution vendors would spend their demos explaining complex architectures and lengthy deployment processes. ControlUp’s approach was so different that other vendors began incorporating it into their own presentations. “Look how everything lights up,” they would say, “and you see everything you need in just minutes.”

For the first year, ControlUp was completely free. Yoni and Asaf had achieved success with Israeli customers, but going global seemed daunting. They launched a simple webpage with a download link and waited.

Nothing happened.

“We forgot about marketing,” Yoni laughs. “We had no marketing at all.”

Then, in September 2011, Asaf started calling Yoni repeatedly during a customer meeting. “We have hundreds of downloads from all over the world!”

The explanation came later: Yoni had been working with a Citrix escalation engineer, a French developer named Etienne Jeanneau, who created his own solutions and had become a friend. During a screen-sharing session, Yoni had casually demonstrated ControlUp.

“Can I take a few screenshots?” Etienne asked.

Without anyone knowing, he published an article on Citrix’s official blog. Two paragraphs describing “a cool solution from my friends at ControlUp” with a download link.

Within a month, they had secured 1,000 trials from companies across the energy, healthcare, and banking sectors worldwide.

They had gone global by accident.

The accidental blog post-turned-overnight sensation taught them something crucial about their market: the Citrix community was tight-knit, passionate, and hungry for solutions that actually worked. But success in this community required more than good technology. It required authentic relationships.

Yoni and his team began attending conferences with a different approach than other vendors. While competitors focused on formal presentations and corporate booths, ControlUp brought the party.

At E2E VC (originally called Pubform), a gathering of 150-200 technical influencers in the enterprise computing space, Yoni convinced the organizer to give him the keynote slot. But… how do you make a Citrix monitoring presentation memorable at 10 AM on a Friday?

Walking through Rome’s duty-free shop en route to the conference, Yoni and his colleague Eugene spotted tiny bottles of alcohol. They bought 100 of them.

“Anyone who asks a question gets a free bottle,” they announced from the stage, arranging the bottles in front of the podium.

The crowd was initially shy. Then someone raised their hand, received a bottle, and Yoni joined him for a toast on stage. Suddenly, questions poured in from all directions. Instead of a dry presentation, it became a live discussion among 200 technical experts, with people taking selfies with their bottles and talking about ControlUp.

The tradition stuck. Every E2E VC event since has featured ControlUp’s bottle giveaway. Years later, customers would email saying, “The first time I heard about you guys was at that E2E presentation.”

Rumor has it, some still say they founded the company just for drinks.

While other companies focused on easier problems, ControlUp tackled the most technically challenging aspect of real-time monitoring: collecting process-level data from any device every three seconds and making it immediately available for visualization, triggers, and analytics.

“By far the number one technical challenge we solved,” Yoni emphasizes. “Nobody else wanted to deal with the complexity of real-time data at that scale.”

This technical foundation enabled use cases that seemed impossible with traditional tools. Healthcare organizations running electronic medical records on Citrix could instantly identify performance bottlenecks. A bank’s trading floor could see exactly which applications were consuming resources during market hours. Retail chains could troubleshoot point-of-sale systems in real-time across hundreds of locations.

The impact was immediate and dramatic. Customers who previously took days to identify and resolve issues could now fix them in minutes. IT administrators went from firefighting to strategic problem-solving.

As ControlUp grew beyond its Citrix roots, Yoni maintained his hands-on approach to product development. Even today, he can’t resist diving into technical problems, earning him popularity with the QA teams but sometimes exasperation from colleagues who found him debugging edge cases at 2 AM.

“One of my favorite things is troubleshooting,” he admits. “Whenever I see an issue with our product, I can’t help but dig deeper and try to find the root cause.”

This obsession with technical excellence drove ControlUp’s expansion into a comprehensive Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution. The company extended coverage to endpoint devices, developed browser plugins for SaaS applications, and built compliance and security tools into a fully unified platform. But the mission remains the same: make it simple to deploy, provide real-time visibility, and focus obsessively on the end-user experience.

Today, as artificial intelligence transforms every aspect of business, Yoni sees an even bigger opportunity ahead. Just as ControlUp revolutionized real-time monitoring, AI will revolutionize how IT administrators work entirely.

“I think that very soon, in less than a couple of years, IT personnel will mainly listen to AI insights and recommendations and will need to act upon them,” he predicts.

But technology alone isn’t enough. His strongest belief—that IT is fundamentally about people and human connections—remains central to everything ControlUp builds.

“While I strongly believe in technical solutions, understanding metrics and finding the root cause for issues, I have an even stronger belief that IT and End User Computing is all about people and human connections,” he explains. “And that belief shaped a few things in ControlUp, such as our strong connections with customers, the way we built the team, and our bond with employees.”

So, it may come as no surprise that the personal connections responsible for shaping ControlUp’s origin story remain integral to the company’s continued evolution today. Asaf Ganot, Yoni’s co-founding partner from that pivotal coffee shop meeting, currently leads ControlUp Labs, the company’s innovation engine. This specialized subdivision develops breakthrough solutions like ControlUp for Compliance, which emerged from the Labs before becoming a core component of the main platform. It’s the same collaborative dynamic that created the original monitoring solution, just scaled to match the company’s growth.

Guy Stolero, Yoni’s childhood friend from those early New York dreams and Microsoft certification study sessions, brought his network security expertise to ControlUp as CISO in 2021. 

Eli Lior, who facilitated the original partnership between Yoni and Asaf, transitioned to sole ownership of Smart-X Professional Services after ControlUp’s first funding round in 2014, while remaining a board member since day one. 

Eugene Kalayev, who joined in 2010 and became the company’s first VP of Product, continues his deep dive into the data that flows through the platform, analyzing telemetry to uncover insights for customers and alliance partners. He still organizes the E2E VC events where those tequila bottle traditions live on, maintaining the authentic community relationships that helped launch the company globally.

As for Yoni? He’s still busy. As co-founder and chief evangelist, he also leads the Office of the CTO, which is four people strong and focuses on bridging the gap between ControlUp’s customers and the market, as well as product management and development teams. His latest creation, ControlUp Innovation Guild, is a fast-track engine for solving today’s IT problems with tomorrow’s ideas. With a nimble, whip-smart team by his side, early-access solutions like ControlUp Disk Monitor and AI Dashboards have launched in record time, further elevating the ControlUp ONE platform’s status.

Looking toward the future, Yoni envisions a world where checking a company’s DEX strategy becomes as routine as reviewing its Glassdoor ratings. Employees will evaluate potential employers based on whether the company has invested in tools and strategies that optimize productivity and eliminate technical frustrations.

“An employee should check if the company has a decent DEX strategy, so he knows IT will optimize his productivity and he can focus on being creative,” he says.

At a company event in Cancun in April 2022, Yoni stood before 250 employees and partners. Looking out at the sea of faces, it was a far cry from the seven or eight people who started the journey in Israel. The moment crystallized everything they had built: not just a software company, but a community of people passionate about making technology work better for humans.

“Seeing that crowd of happy people in Mexico, after the humble start of a few guys in Israel, was truly inspiring,” he recalls.

But for all the growth and success, Yoni’s approach remains remarkably consistent with those early days at Issta. Show up authentically. Solve real problems. Build genuine relationships. Whether it’s troubleshooting a customer’s infrastructure at 3 AM, sharing tequila shots at a conference, or diving deep into crash data from thousands of endpoints, the core philosophy is unchanged.

The yellow pages that started this journey are long obsolete, but the principle behind that original cold-calling campaign remains: sometimes the best opportunities come from simply reaching out, being genuine about your capabilities and limitations, and focusing on how you can help.

As ControlUp continues to grow—now monitoring millions of endpoints worldwide and helping IT administrators prevent problems before they impact productivity—Yoni’s message to his team captures both the magnitude of what they’ve accomplished and the excitement of what lies ahead:

“Embrace yourself, this crazy ride is just starting.”

For a company that began with a simple question about how many users were logged into a server, that might be the understatement of the decade. But given Yoni’s track record of turning simple questions into revolutionary solutions, it’s probably wise to take his word for it.