Yanky Rottenberg // EzCloud

I was born in Williamsburg and am one of six siblings. My father is a rebbi in the Satmar kindergarten in Williamsburg, and he is the rav of the Salka shul. My great-great-grandfather was the first Salka Rav.
“I didn’t grow up with lots of money. In fact, we only had two bedrooms in our home. I went to Satmar mosdos throughout my elementary and high school years.
“Since my father had a small shul, I became the mikvah Yid, managing the money for the mikvah and selling items for Shabbos, including wine. When I was in eighth grade, I printed out Excel sheets to organize the system. We didn’t have internet then, but I handled all the ordering.
“As I got older, I was involved in ordering things from other countries, and I also tinkered with the first MP3 players. My family in general is like that. We’d take a phone or any other device and quickly figure out how it worked. When I was in yeshivah, someone showed me an iPhone, and I was able to hack it and switch the carrier name from Verizon to Beis Samech Daled; this was before the smartphone awareness movement. I liked to tinker with things.
“In yeshivah I was sort of an askan and managed the keren chasanim. It was a big yeshivah, so there were about 50 gabba’im and I managed them.
“After I got married, I learned in kollel for a few years. My first job was working for Meshimer filtering. I also had a part-time job managing a pre-Pesach store. Before Pesach there was a store that rented out the Armory building in Brooklyn and sold things at wholesale prices. I worked there as the project manager. It was a two-week project; then I started working for Meshimer.
“When phone filters came out, I learned how to remove internet access from phones. Before it became commonplace like it is today, you’d have to hack the phone to be able to remove it. I used to volunteer for TAG and Meshimer and was very busy with that. After the famous asifah, I volunteered, and then I was officially hired by Meshimer.
“In high school and even after my wedding, for some reason, people used to ask me where to order things. I became more familiar with the phone industry because I was filtering phones, and I started to buy refurbished phones wholesale and sell them on Amazon. I opened a seller account and started selling. I sold mostly electronic devices—phones, headsets, or whatever good deals I found, but mostly electronics. At that time, there were high markups, and there wasn’t as much FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) as there is today. I used to ship around a hundred orders a day, and I had a few employees.
“As it got busier, I hired four or five employees. Some of them did the shipping, and some of them did the listings. At one point, my Amazon account was shut down, and that’s when I shifted. I went through a tough time when basically everything went in the wrong direction. There were certain problems with the phones, and Amazon returned a few pallets.
“It was crazy. I was buying things for $10 a piece and selling them for $50. I had just made my first really large investment, buying a trailer for over $100,000. I figured that if I stayed on the high end, I could make another $300,000, and even at the extreme low end, I’d still net $30,000.
“I remember my father telling me, ‘Don’t jump in on these numbers,’ but I was young and thought I was smart and that I knew what I was doing. And that’s when everything started going south.
“I mistakenly listed an electronic item as having Bluetooth instead of wireless, and they shut me down. The business went through one bad thing after another. Eventually my account was reopened, but the damage was done, so I shifted to software.
“When I was doing Amazon, I liked figuring out how to use automation—for example, taking an email, automatically forwarding it and creating an Asana task. I also used Zapier and other programs, and people started to hire me.
“My specialty is analyzing websites to identify loopholes and issues. I’m very good at coming up with ideas to enhance workflow efficiency, which saves people a significant amount of time and improves overall processes.