Alon Chen joined Google in 2006, at age 23, with no experience in marketing and no contacts at the company. At age 28, he was already CMO — overseeing marketing for Israel and Greece, building a $2 billion product line across 30 markets, earning an annual salary in the high six-figure range and a seven-figure stock package.
For most people, he got there absurdly early — and he says it was also “easy.” Not because of mentors, internal politics, or any formal promotion track. In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Chen claims that he simply ignored all the rules given to him.
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“Climbing the career ladder was quite natural and easy,” he told Fortune, “simply because I ignored all the status quo and the rules, identified what was the right thing to do, and went through with it.”
Chen isn’t just paying lip service: When a senior team at headquarters blocked his plans to launch Google Partners internationally, he launched anyway—in foreign languages, in foreign markets—without telling anyone in North America.
“After we proved it was extremely successful, they came to us asking, ‘Oh, can you launch this in North America too?’”
Likewise, getting a promotion was just a matter of demanding it before the deadline.
At Google, the general rule was to wait at least two years before applying for a promotion — he says most employees accepted that time frame without question. Chen completely ignored it, went to her manager in less than a year and presented an impossible case to refuse.
“I just told my manager, ‘Look, I know this normally takes a year. Look what I’ve been able to accomplish. It’s so much more than anyone else. Let’s put me up for promotion now.'” And she did.
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“We have all these rules, all these parameters, all these processes,” says Chen. “That’s what’s going to happen for most of you.”
But for high performers, he adds, they’re almost just a formality. Especially when, like him, you work around 12 hours a day and have results to support your early progression demands. “You will be like me, promoted more often.”
“Companies can put you in molds that discourage you”, he adds. But he says the most successful ones “just ignore that and say, ‘I’m going to do it my way and take risks, internally.’”
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In the end, he took this career advice literally, opting to become his own boss and do it his way: With a seven-figure stock package on the table and a career most people would protect with their lives, he quit his job—and left without any financial regrets.
Before Google, he was already running a thriving business at age 15
Chen didn’t suddenly wake up one day as a rule-breaking Google executive. Long before the top job, he had been forced to think like a founder. Growing up in a “small, lower-middle-class town south of Tel Aviv,” his father was in a motorcycle accident, which left the family in financial difficulties.
“I wrote code when I was 12 years old, and every year I had to change computers… The software I created wouldn’t run because it needed more memory”, he recalls. “But my father couldn’t pay.”
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So, at the age of 15, he went directly to importers and negotiated parts so he could update his own computer.
“It was my first entrepreneurial adventure”, he adds. “I started selling computers to thousands of different small and medium-sized businesses during high school… It turned into a very big business.”
His next venture took a completely different form. Chen became head of digital for an LGBT activism nonprofit, creating one of the pioneering activism websites at the time.
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It was this experience — not a degree in computer science, nor a corporate internship — that, he says, caught Google’s attention and landed him his first role at the company in 2006. “At that time, it was very innovative,” he adds.
Given this background, it’s perhaps less surprising that the dream job at Google has started to feel like a “golden cage.”
When he resigned, his family thought he was “crazy.” His mother, an Iraqi Jew, he recalls, was especially alarmed. Ironically, she inspired the idea for his next venture.
Financially, he is worse off as a startup founder — but he has no regrets
The concept of Tastewise, the AI-based food and beverage intelligence platform that he would later create, came directly from the family’s WhatsApp group, where his mother sent messages every Thursday asking what stage everyone was in before spending the day cooking traditional dishes.
She saw the logistics of dinner. He saw a moment of insight—and a gap in the market that the world’s biggest food companies hadn’t yet addressed: predicting what people really want to eat before they even know it themselves.
Today, the startup’s technology is used by giants such as PepsiCo, Nestlé, Mars, Kraft Heinz, Campbell’s and Givaudan, and more than half of its customers are Fortune 100 companies. The company has already raised more than US$71 million in investments.
Financially, he openly admits that he still hasn’t gotten over his time at Google. “Not yet,” he says. “I’m still building, I’m completely focused on the business.”
But considering his shareholding, a future transaction involving Tastewise would likely establish him as a multimillionaire.
And he doesn’t hesitate when asked if it was worth leaving. “It didn’t matter,” he says of the seven-figure shares he left behind. “It’s like that wasn’t even a factor to consider.”
He continues: “I used to wake up in the morning thinking, ‘This isn’t enough’… I loved my job. I loved my colleagues. I was extremely satisfied with my achievements. It’s just that it wasn’t mine — it wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t my project. There’s enormous satisfaction in creating something from scratch.”
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