Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Day 7


This was the last academic day, which was kind of a relief because we had been on the go since we arrived in Israel even though the trip has been very interesting so far.  We went to a venture capital firm in Herzeliya, this town is known as the silicon valley of Israel.  The meeting was in a very nice building and we could tell that there was a lot of money in this area. 
Here we had presentations from two entrepreneurs about their start-ups.  The first person that presented, Noam Band, explained two of his software-based start-ups.  The first company was a personalized banner advertisement company, and the second was a program that his team put together to monitor problems when implementing enterprise software.  The idea and implementation for both companies was very impressive and I asked him a lot of questions.  A great thing about the Israelis is that they have no problem answering plenty of questions, they actually seem to enjoy it. 
The next presenter was Amir Milo, another software start-up guy.  I enjoyed this story especially because they did not raise any money for this company, also known as bootstrapping.  He made some interesting points about market segmentation and business models.  I really learned a lot from these presentations.
Then we went to the last academic part of the trip, a class on technology and entrepreneurship at Tel Aviv University.  Here we heard from Ed Mlovsky who talked about the start-up scene in Israel and how it began.  He actually played a pretty big role in the development of the start-up ecosystem in Israel.  Then we had another presentation from Bruce about tech and entrepreneurship. 

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