Author: wp_archive_user

Sharing is Caring: Tmura helps Israel’s high tech sector share the wealth

Sharing is Caring: Tmura helps Israel’s high tech sector share the wealth

Jun 23, 2013 | ,

The Startup Nation is famous for its ingenuity in the high-tech field, yet many people are unaware that Israel is also a hotbed of social innovation. The notion of community service is very characteristic of Israeli culture, one deeply rooted in Judaism. The concept of Tikkun Olam, literally translated from Hebrew as “repairing the world”, connotes social action and the pursuit of social justice. Nonetheless, for many years, Israel’s high-tech industry has been accused of being detached from society and its surrounding environment. It may be unfair to expect of early-stage startups (typically cash-poor with significant expenses) in the beginning of their growth process to think about social responsibility and giving back to the community. With no cash in the bank, how can we expect them to cough up money for charity? This is where Tmura steps in and offers a great solution for these “young” startups that want to give back to the community but can’t quite afford it just yet. Tmura: turning the Startup Nation into a charity nation Tmura – The Israeli Public Service Venture Fund, is a non-profit...

Read More
My summer internship with OurCrowd: What I learned from my first 3 weeks

My summer internship with OurCrowd: What I learned from my first 3 weeks

Jun 20, 2013 | , ,

Writing a blog entry the week following Google’s acquisition of Waze, one of the largest high-tech acquisitions in Israel’s history, reaffirms why I decided to spend my summer internship working at OurCrowd.  You may have already read about my fellow interns’ collective experiences and personal stories (Amy Sheng & Nikolaus Lawitschka).  My name is Andrew Hammer, and my path to OurCrowd’s summer internship diverges from that of my peers. The lure of Israel I grew up in a New York suburb and, from a young age, was instilled with a strong sense of Zionism and Jewish pride.  After graduating high school, I spent a year and a half studying in Jerusalem.  The non-Israeli students hailed from all parts of North America and Europe.  But even as self-centered 18-year olds, we were mesmerized by our Israeli classmates.  What is it like to have friends who divide their time between studies and army service?  How does it feel to share a meal with a table full of students each of whom are being shipped off to different army units?  While in school,...

Read More
Entrepreneurs Without Borders: Israel Prepares to Issue Startup Visas

Entrepreneurs Without Borders: Israel Prepares to Issue Startup Visas

Jun 17, 2013 | ,

Israel and startups are synonymous — the Start-up Nation ranks perennially near the top of top startup ecosystems on a global scale. And now, to solidify its role in producing and nurturing top entrepreneurs, moves are afoot to begin opening up Israel’s borders to a global tech workforce. [View the story “Startup Visas: Israel’s move to become a global startup hub” on...

Read More
Israeli M&A on fire: mid-2013 update

Israeli M&A on fire: mid-2013 update

Jun 13, 2013 | , ,

The Google acquisition of Israeli social navigation app Waze for $1.03 billion is one of the largest high-tech acquisitions in Israeli history (The all time record goes to Cisco for buying NDS in 2012 for the price of $5 billion). The interest of international tech giants in Israeli startups is nothing new. With more startup companies per capita than any other country, Israel is widely hailed as the Startup Nation. As we know, Israel is more than happy to sell its startups to large entities knocking on its door. According to the IVC Research Center, 2012 was one of Israel’s most successful years for high-tech M&A in the past decade, yielding $9.95 billion in exits – 88% above 2011 levels. When all is said and done, it’s not every day that you hear about titans like Google and Facebook going head to head in a race to buy out a company at these valuation levels. In the end, Google won the war for Waze by letting the company stay in Israel. It was reported that the Facebook tie-up fell apart over Facebook’s insistence on Waze moving its...

Read More
Zula co-founder, Jacob Ner David talks about the changing nature of team collaboration

Zula co-founder, Jacob Ner David talks about the changing nature of team collaboration

Jun 6, 2013 |

OurCrowd portfolio company CEO, Jacob Ner David (Linkedin) took a few minutes to sit with us to discuss teams and his hopes for changing the way businesses — and people — collaborate. Jacob is a serial entrepreneur who has been deeply involved in pioneering communications technologies since 1996. As a co-founder of Delta Three, Jacob helped to reshape the global telecommunications landscape and in the process built a company that reached a $1.8 billion NASDAQ valuation. Enter OurCrowd portfolio company, Zula Jacob’s newest startup, Zula,  provides an innovative cloud-based mobile collaboration platform for teams. Jacob co-founded Zula with Jeff Pulver, pioneer of VoIP, social media master and early-stage investor in companies like Twitter and Foursquare. As a telephony pioneer with years of gained experience and specialty in telecommunications, Jacob aims to recreate how teams communicate and collaborate with Zula. We’ll let Jacob tell his own story in the audio below but here are a few key points we touched on in our interview with Jacob Ner David, co-founder and CEO of Zula.   [bra_border_divider] Here are some highlights with our interview with Jacob. Internet mobility “When mobile phones first...

Read More