We meet Canadian Jimmy Levy, cofounder of Al Bawader, the first investment fund focused on Israel’s Arab private sector. After 11 years in Israel’s high-tech industry, Levy went solo, and now his Jewish-Arab, Nazarethbased software company, Galil, employs over 100 engineers, 90 percent of them Arabs. Though 23 percent of Israel’s population is Arab, this group contributes only 8 percent of Israel’s GDP, Levy says, because “the Arab sector is underdeveloped, fewer than 300 of Israel’s 30,000 programmers are Arab, and Arabs face barriers to entry in the job market. I came to Pitango [one of Israel’s leading venture capital firms] to create a pipeline for Arabs about two years ago. In a matter of weeks, we got a $50 million fund: $20 million from government, $30 million from the private sector. This shows the Israeli government’s acknowledgement that the Arab problem needs to be addressed. One million highly educated Russians [who immigrated to Israel in the 1990s] created this economy. We have 1.3 million Arabs — that’s a business opportunity as well as an issue of justice and fairness. Israeli Arabs should share Israel’s success.” In Old Jaffa Port’s Café Kapish, we’re trying to order dinner from waiters who can’t hear us. As we clumsily mimic the signs depicted on guide sheets, the deaf or hearing-impaired waiters and kitchen staff communicate deftly with each other, and with us, delivering plate after plate in the packed restaurant without uttering a word. The café, like the adjoining Nalaga’at Theater (where deaf-blind 66
actors perform) and Black Out Restaurant (where blind waiters serve dishes in total darkness), is part of the Nalag’at Center. Adina Tal and Eran Gur created the non-profit in 2002 to promote interaction among blind, deaf, and deaf-blind people from all backgrounds, and to raise awareness of their needs and rights to contribute to society. Epiphany: entrepreneurship can and does and will change the world as we know it. Heading out of Tel Aviv on the bus, I get to talking to Lara Bennett, who just graduated from the University in May. She proudly pulls her company registration document from her bag. Revolution Farmz, LLC is “ready to go!” she says happily, explaining that her company provides locally grown produce to Portland restaurants. She’s researched the project meticulously,
found a business partner, found willing restaurants and farms, and now all she needs is $15,000 for a truck, trailer, and plastic crates. She’s confident about the money and the company. “Restaurant customers want to see local on the menu. We have 400 organic farms in Oregon, but restaurants don’t have the time to get to them, so only about six percent of current restaurant supplies are local.” Passionate about good food since she was a child, Bennett chose the University of Portland over the Culinary Institute because of its E-Scholar program; as soon as she gets back to Oregon from Israel, she’ll start operations out of Albany, right in the middle of Oregon’s breadbasket. We are in Kibbutz Gonen. Established with the idea that everyone gives according to ability and receives ac-
cording to need, the kibbutz, thanks to Israel’s economic revolution, gradually lost its heavy government subsidies and turned competitive to survive. Since 1953, when kibbutz members drained these 1,000 acres of swampland, they’ve tried growing everything imaginable: apples (disastrous), red grapefruit (most successful), corn, peanuts, garlic, onions, cotton, citrus of all sorts, wheat. They ran a factory — first it made plastics, then wonderfully light sandals made of poplar wood and sold to Dr. Scholl’s, Indonesia, and Hong Kong, until the shoes went out of fashion, as shoes do, and so the shoe factory became a popsicle stick and tongue depressor factory, churning out a million sticks a day, until Chinese competition drove the kibbutz to chop down the poplar trees too. Now, says our guide, Szubik, they’re selling cars (Fords), running a hotel, and raising beef — enterprising, indeed. Epiphany: entrepreneurial ideas keep changing all the time. Stasis is disaster. Yuval Moshe directs MATI, a non-profit organization that helps launch and grow businesses in Israel’s underdeveloped northern region (population 120,000) — hundreds of businesses a year, he says, equating to 1,000 new jobs. “Those who have dreams come to us, about 2,000 people per year, though 30 percent never come back,” says Moshe. “Those who do return get help with business plans, leadership, marketing. We teach them how to do it better, and 70 percent of those we help are successful five years later.” An entrepreneur himself, Moshe started his company — an intermediary for Israeli exporters and Dutch banks — as an economics student in 1980s Holland. He ended up hiring 15 class-mates before expanding his business to South Africa, Cyprus, Russia, Britain, and Germany. In 1991, he sold up in Europe and set up in Israel, exiting the market for good in 2005, by which time he had 140 employees. “You need to be crazy to start a business. There are two types of workers, the ‘farmer’, who is happy to come to the same job everyday, and the ‘hunter’, who likes to go out and do something new. The hunter is the entrepreneur: You want more, you don’t care about the money; you want the excitement. You have to decide between family and business because you have no life, at least not initially. And you need luck — some people never find it — to find what you want to do.” Epiphany: entrepreneurship is hard, and it’s not for everyone.
PHOTO: ANTHONY BOCCACCIO / GETTY IMAGES
created something of value.” An Israeli-inspired entrepreneurial product: a converted Renault Laguna, maximum speed 140 km/hour, which we take turns driving down a road in Ramat Hasharon. It looks and drives like any car, except it doesn’t have gas or gears or energy loss, nor does it make noise or pollute. Instead, it has a battery that regenerates when acceleration stops, and when the battery dies, drivers either recharge it by plugging in at charging stations or, on longer journeys, switch the 250 kilogram lithium ion battery completely, in two minutes flat. This idea, “switching,” differentiates these Better Place electric cars from other alternative energy-powered vehicles. As founder Shai Agassi explains, the car is his answer to a question he heard at the World Economic Forum in 2005: “How do you make the world a better place by 2020?”