Avner ronen biography channel

Avner Ronen is the founder and CEO of Boxee, a freeware media player software platform.

Before starting Boxee, Avner founded and sold Odigo, an instant messaging service to Comverse for $20M in 2002 but stayed on with Comverse as the VP Corporate Strategy & Business Development until early 2007 and started Boxee soon after.

I had a quick chat with Avner to find out more about Boxee and the story behind it.

Can you give you some background information about yourself, were you the entrepreneurial type growing up?

I wasn’t an entrepreneur growing up, but I was working at a young age.

Since I was 12 years old I was doing odd jobs like delivering papers, cleaning buildings, work in kitchens or restaurants etc.

My first real entrepreneurial experience was in the Israeli Defence Force, when I started an Intranet project in my unit.

Tell me about your experience working with the Odigo team during its early days and some of the key thing you took away from that experienc