By Sophie Shulman
Publication Date: 2026-01-15 10:55:00
On a winter day in 2018, Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, invited Ofer Shacham for a personal conversation. When the two sat down, Brin opened a new file and asked Shacham, then Head of Silicon Design and Implementation, Consumer Hardware, a simple question: “Write down the next thing you want to do at Google, and we’ll start running it.”
The number of times people receive offers of this kind, in any industry, can usually be counted on one finger or less, but the then 40-year-old Israeli engineer had to refuse. Just 10 kilometers from Google’s headquarters, an even more tempting offer awaited him, extended by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “Google tried hard to keep me, and I had an open ticket from Sergey, but what awaited me at Facebook at that time was a crazy engineering challenge, setting up the company’s AR (augmented reality) silicon activity,” he says.
What was so challenging about it?
“This meant taking hardware that exists in server farms and cramming it into smart glasses without the battery inside the glasses overheating and burning the user’s ears,” explains Shacham (48), now co-founder and CEO of the startup Majestic Labs, in a first and exclusive interview with Calcalist. “All that Mark told me and the team recruited by Facebook as our mission statement was: ‘All-day wearable, socially acceptable.’ This sounds concise and simple on the surface, but in practice it is almost…