Etgar Bonar

Revenue · GTM · General management

I start with the commercial problem.
Then I build the system and run the organization the business needs to win.

Diagnosis starts with the customers, not with the funnel or the org chart. In each of my last three companies I carried the revenue number that depended on getting that right.

My current focus is the part of the customer journey your dashboards barely register: how buyers increasingly use AI to choose, adopt, and get value.

Explore the record Read the point of view

Built across

How I work

Diagnosis before doctrine.

Sometimes the answer is a new system. Sometimes it is a targeted change to one that already works. The job is to identify the constraint, make the proportionate intervention, and connect it to a commercial result.

  1. 01

    See where value is moving

    Read the technology shift, the buyer behavior behind it, and the commercial consequence before choosing a playbook.

  2. 02

    Make the bet

    Decide what must change, what should stay intact, and where the company can build an advantage early.

  3. 03

    Build the operating system

    Form follows function. Positioning, people, process, product surfaces, pricing, channels, and measurement all take their shape from the commercial job, not from an org chart template.

The arc

I started carrying a personal quota, moved to running commercial organizations, and for the last decade I have owned revenue numbers at company scale. Nineteen years, four continents, four industries: Medtech, Adtech, Fintech and B2B SaaS.

The constant is not a playbook. It is starting with how customers choose, adopt and get value, and building the commercial system accordingly.

How the results happen

Acquire the right customers.
Help them win with your product.
Make getting value easier.

The rule underneath it is one I have used since Amazon: bring a person in when automation and mass communication are not enough. Done well, the cost of serving a customer stops tracking the revenue they produce.

At Taboola it took the unit from about $130M to $500M without scaling the team at the same rate. At Rapyd it became automated merchant onboarding. At Lokalise it became being the answer a buyer's AI gives.

Helping customers win, and making value easier to get, are exactly what AI now does more cost-effectively. That is why the shift below is a commercial problem, not just a technical one.

Selected track record

Commercial scope, not a functional lane.

My work spans general management, sales, marketing, partnerships, self-service, pricing, product-led growth, and the systems that connect them.

The same few interventions keep recurring: changing how customers are covered and served, building a channel, repricing and repackaging, and installing the operating cadence that holds it together. I have done each at least three times, across Medtech, Adtech, Fintech and B2B SaaS.

2024 to 2026Lokalise

Chief Marketing Officer

Co-owned the company revenue goal with the sales counterpart and led a broader AI-era GTM modernization across positioning, teams, tools, pricing, channels, CMS, attribution, and operating foundations.

  • Built the AI-discovery operating model that helped establish Lokalise as the measured number one company in AI visibility for its category across approximately 1,000 high-value prompts.
  • Reset the partner motion, growing partner-sourced revenue roughly 7x year over year.
  • Did it with a smaller organization: the team shrank by more than a quarter while the budget stayed flat.
  • Grew sales-accepted opportunities 97% year over year at a falling cost per opportunity.
  • Rebuilt lead qualification around fit and intent, lifting sales acceptance of marketing-qualified leads from 35% to 59% as the pipeline mix moved upmarket.
Lokalise and Claude logos
Anthropic customer story, where Etgar is quoted.
2021 to 2024Rapyd

Vice President of Sales, previously VP of SMB and Product-Led Growth

Reporting to the CEO as an Executive Team member, I ran several business units: the core offering in selected markets, with sales, account management and referral partnerships under it; the acquired Hong Kong business; the acquired UK point-of-sale business; and the sales development function that qualified for the whole company. About 35 people across the UK, Israel, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

  • Turned an acquired Hong Kong book from loss-making to several million dollars in gross profit inside a year, repackaging it as an off-the-shelf business account and introducing Rapyd's first subscription billing flow.
  • Shifted inherited books of business from growth-at-all-costs to disciplined, profitable growth, holding the core business at its revenue target while driving profitability.
  • Built the Rapyd referral partner program to 74 partners generating more than 40% of new opportunities, turning founder-led conversations into a repeatable qualification, contracting, and revenue channel.
  • Launched UK online card acquiring, card-not-present, growing customers by 600% in the first year through product-led activation.
  • Created the sales development function from zero; it became the lead qualifier for all of Rapyd, not just my own remit.
  • Automated merchant onboarding and KYC decisioning with Product and Compliance, sorting applications into auto-approve, auto-reject and manual review, so a person was needed only where judgment actually was.
Aerial view of Rapyd's rooftop workplace and basketball court in Tel Aviv
Rapyd rooftop, Tel Aviv. Photography: Amit Geron.
2019 to 2021Taboola

Global Head of SMB, General Manager

Ran the global SMB and Product-Led Growth business through Taboola's Nasdaq IPO, with the remit scaling from approximately $130M to $500M in revenue.

  • Owned a business representing about 40% of global revenue, more than half of new business, and 80% of the company's customers.
  • Grew and led a 65-person organization across New York, Tel Aviv, London, São Paulo, and Bangkok.
  • Built a coverage model carrying two to three times the accounts per manager of Taboola's own enterprise organization, with about 15% of accounts producing 85% of revenue and the rest served by tutorials, mass communication, automation and an offshore team in the Philippines. That ratio held as the unit tripled.
  • For the self-service segment of my book of business, building the offshore customer-success team took time to first response from more than two weeks to one or two days, with satisfaction up about a fifth and net promoter score up more than fivefold. Serving more customers per person did not mean serving them worse.
  • Improved growth efficiency, with new revenue increasing at 1.8 times the rate of budget growth from Q2 2019 to Q2 2021, while acquiring customers below the planned cost per account.
The Nasdaq Tower in Times Square displaying Nasdaq welcomes Taboola, 30 June 2021
Nasdaq welcomes Taboola, 30 June 2021. Photograph: Calcalist.
2015 to 2019Amazon Pay

Global Head of Marketing Communications

Built the global marketing communications organization across Seattle and Luxembourg, spanning product marketing, brand, content, PR, partner marketing, sales enablement, customer insight, events, and social. Led the global rebrand of Amazon's payments business across more than five thousand assets, de-risked with a fifty-one day live test of the new checkout button before committing.

2013 to 2015Amazon Advertising

European Marketing and Account Management Lead

Joined to build mass account management across the UK, Germany, and France: the operating cadences, dashboards, prioritization logic, and enablement that make it possible to serve customers at volume, carrying the revenue goal for it. This is the first time I built the thing the rest of my career keeps rebuilding.

2007 to 2012Johnson & Johnson

Sales and marketing leadership, Medical Devices and Diagnostics

Started with direct revenue responsibility, then joined the EMEA leadership development program to build market strategy across 27 countries.

Current point of view

The part of the customer journey your dashboards barely register is getting larger.

Before purchase, more buyers use AI to research, compare, and plan an integration. After it, that same AI increasingly connects the product, operates it, and troubleshoots it. This is further along in some categories than others, starting with software and self-service, and it is spreading rather than settling.

The cost-to-serve line is the boundary between what your product, content, and interfaces can carry on their own, and what still costs you a person. There are five of these lines, and AI is moving each of them at a different speed.

What makes this urgent is the pace. More of the buying journey and more of the customer experience is AI-mediated every quarter, and go-to-market practices built for an entirely human journey are being disrupted faster than most teams are re-tooling.

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Hands-on

I have done every function I manage.

I can tell whether a commercial plan will hold, because I have done most of the jobs inside it. I carried a bag before I managed anyone carrying one: face to face, phone, events, negotiations and closing. The same is true across most of the other functions I run: partner deals, account plans, media buying, positioning, and the copy that goes in front of a buyer, on a screen, in print or from a stage.

The same instinct runs through the technology. I have built websites across three decades as the tooling changed: hand-written HTML, then WordPress, now AI-native. I automated my home. And after Lokalise I built and now run a personal AI operating system across family, household, travel, health, finance, writing and development workflows.

That last one was deliberate. I wanted to see what AI actually changes inside a commercial operation, so I ran one at the smallest scale: one operator, no team, real costs and real consequences. Nothing hides at that size. I have since put the same thinking to work with several companies that asked. The point of view above came out of that, not out of a deck.

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Foundation

Business, science, and solving problems, usually by building.

London Business School campus at Regent's Park
MBA

London Business School

Strategy and General Management, 2011 to 2013.

B.Sc

Tel Aviv University

Magna Cum Laude, three-time Dean's List honoree, double major in Molecular Biology and Business Management, 2004 to 2007.

Applied

Three decades of building

It started with websites in the nineties. Since then: a working clinical decision support system at Tel Aviv University, predicting the treatment course that maximizes quality-adjusted life expectancy. A bet on product-led growth before the category had a name. A personal AI operating system, and this site, now.

Contact

The best conversations start with the commercial problem.

Email Etgar Connect on LinkedIn