When I joined Dalet just over a year ago, it felt like the company’s mission and its reality were pulling in opposite directions. On paper, Dalet stood for innovation, agility, and customer value. In practice, we were operating like a consulting shop with a product bolted on. Multiple teams were maintaining legacy approaches, and complexity had grown over time; as a result, customers were left wondering whether Dalet could pivot to where they needed to be.

I told the team then: we will change this. And we have.

Transformation Isn’t Hard. It’s the Fear of It

People sometimes say media is “too hard” to transform. In my experience, transformation itself isn’t the difficult part; it’s the fear that surrounds it.

In most companies, deep expertise lives with a few individuals, and it’s natural for leaders to wonder what might happen if long-standing ways of working are challenged. But when fear of disruption leads to hesitation, it becomes the biggest barrier to meaningful change.

But the reality is simple: you cannot build the future by clinging to the past. You cannot drive forward by staring into the rear view mirror. If you try, you will eventually veer off the road.

At Dalet, we stopped looking backwards. We took a hard look at our teams, our portfolio, and our operating model. We made the changes required, reduced risky dependencies, and rebuilt our product and technology organization from the ground up. The mandate was clear: build for the future, without the past holding us back.

Lessons From Breaking Things

This wasn’t my first transformation. Early in my career, as part of integrating a large acquisition, I pushed change faster than the organization was ready for. I introduced a new way of working that I believed would benefit customers, but I misread the internal dynamics. The company already had a direction in mind, and it didn’t align with mine. The result? The change didn’t land.

I learned a critical lesson: you can’t abandon continuity while you’re building the future. At Dalet, I made sure we didn’t. We kept serving customers with the reliability they expect, while accelerating into new territory. Transformation isn’t about tearing down what exists. It’s about continuously balancing the present with the possible.

A Startup Inside Dalet

Strategy alone doesn’t transform a company. Culture does. That’s why I created a startup inside Dalet.

From my very first day, I was scouting. Who had that fire? Who wanted to win, not for themselves, but for the team? Who had the sharpness to cut through politics, and the persistence to keep pushing when things became difficult?

There were people from every corner of the company.

I built a “skunkworks” team: cross-functional, curious, and determined. We worked in sprints measured in hours, not months. We re-wrote backend engines and prepared demos in days.

With every iteration, we became faster.

That speed and energy created belief. It changed the narrative inside Dalet. Suddenly, people saw that innovation at startup velocity was possible, even in a 30-year-old company. And once people believe, they move faster, think bolder, and stop hanging on to the past.

Dalia: The race car, not the faster horse

The most visible outcome of this cultural shift is Dalia, our new interface. Dalia feels like a consumer app: simple, intuitive, and even enjoyable to use. Yet beneath the surface, it harnesses 25 years of enterprise-grade Dalet technology.

With Dalia, you can spin up micro-apps in hours, not months. A task that once required a seasoned expert can now be handled by just about any team member. It raises everyone’s ability, turning the “bystander” into a contributor and removing the bottleneck of the “wizard” who used to hold all the knowledge.

This isn’t just a “faster horse.” It’s the car. The industry has been polishing keyboards when the world is ready for touchscreens. Dalia reimagines enterprise media software. It takes the full power of our platform and makes it accessible for everyone.

Spark for change

When the CTO of a major broadcast organization came to see Dalia for the first time, he stayed far longer than planned. He later described it as one of the most energizing sessions he’d had in years. That kind of reaction matters more than any marketing copy we could write. It shows that Dalia isn’t just a product launch; it’s a spark for change across the wider industry.

Coach, Not Boss

The real story here isn’t me. It’s the team.

My job isn’t to be the boss. It’s to be the coach. Every day, I measure myself by one thing: did I help something move forward today? That could be a line of code, a design, a demo, or a person’s confidence. If we’ve moved forward, it was a good day.

Coaching means stitching together the right people, giving them direction, and then stepping back. It means building belief, winning hearts and minds, and letting people do the best work of their careers.

There’s a scene in The Shawshank Redemption that stays with me. Andy gets the guys a few beers on the roof after a hard day’s work. He doesn’t drink one himself; he just takes satisfaction in seeing the others enjoy them. That’s how I see my role. My pride isn’t in the product itself; it’s in watching the team deliver, rejoice, and believe in each other.

Too many leaders want to be the hero. I’d rather be the coach. Coaches build winners.

Startups as Training Grounds

Inside Dalet, the skunkworks wasn’t just a way to build Dalia. It is a training ground. When you give people the experience of a true startup (the ups and downs, the hustle for resources, the late nights, the adrenaline of making something work hours before a demo), you prepare them for bigger things.

Some of the people who rose to the top in this initiative could one day run their own startups. Now they have the confidence, the experience, and the belief. That’s a gift a long-standing company can give if it’s willing to let teams operate like startups inside its walls.

Stop Looking in the Rear View Mirror

One of my favorite stories comes from a drive in Scotland. I was going fast down a country road while my passenger tried to film. The photo is blurry, but I use it in presentations because it captures the essence of transformation.

If you’re going fast and only looking in the mirror, you’re going to crash. Yet this is what so many RFPs in media still look like. Long lists of requirements that replicate the past. Transformation is not about rebuilding yesterday’s system with shinier code. It’s about asking: what could the future be?

Dalia is our answer to that question. It’s not just an interface. It’s a way to liberate the value of our entire platform, empower everyone in an organization, and open the door to what’s next.

The Road Ahead

Dalia is just a few months old, but it’s already changing the conversation in the industry. Customers see not just a product, but a framework for limitless innovation. Partners see new ways to collaborate. Teams inside Dalet see proof that anything is possible.

We’ve proven that a 30-year-old company can act like a startup without losing the continuity customers rely on. We’ve shown that enterprise power and consumer simplicity can live in the same product. And most importantly, we’ve reminded ourselves that transformation is about people, their energy, creativity, and belief.

I said we’d change Dalet. We did. And now, together, we’re changing the industry.