Holy Land: Startup Nations (Full Documentary) | Future Cities

so Jerusalem the Holy Land a will Palestinians and Israelis are sharing the same city I think it's the only city in the world where you have all the religions in one city here we are in differential differential it's on the eastern mountains of Jerusalem where from the other side we can see now the Jordan Valley and we can see a man and Jordan then we have here Mount Scopus Mount of Olives and on the right half we have here the amazing city Jerusalem you can see the two parts the old city and the new city there is huge differences between the tech sector in Palestine and in Israel we as a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem I can't be as a part of the startup nation I want to be but I'm not of that nation so my idea was if we can be a startup region by giving others the Arabs Palestinians the Jordanians and everyone from the Middle East and yes we can do it here take the Holy Land again on the technology level and how we are going to change them all [Music] the best startup which was created in this part of the world is the State of Israel which was a fantasy which made no financial or no economic sense whatsoever in many ways innovation for us has always been a necessity we had to be global before the war global existed just like you have mining cities fabrication cities we're a startup nation that's what we are gaza is amongst the most innovative that i've seen you know when the fuel shortages start they start running their their cars on cooking oil I think because of the repeated shocks of the conflict they're innovating to survive for tech startups there's many many challenges the majority of them I can say are due to the occupation we don't have to wait for the end of the occupation to start improving the economy we could start there there the occupation is gonna end if this conflict someday is resolved the potential of what this region can build together is nothing short of massive I truly believe we live in a unique time in history from a technological perspective because of the convergence of exponential computation growth and decline in prices and because of the fact that the capital required to get in the game is very low we no longer have paradigms we live in an era of a permanent revolution cost of certain types of sensors has gone down so much and their capacity is exponentially grown because of phone makers having the pressure to make amazing cameras that are so tiny so that we can take selfies and send them to our friends this pressure creates situation that this sensor that was created for the camera of the iPhone now can play a role in the ecosystem now a guy in Israel can look at that sensor say hey 4k capability in a seven dollar chip I can revolutionize agriculture because if I can look at the variance of color of an apple in different stages instead of losing 30% of the produce I will lose 10% of the produce another person in India looks at exactly the same thing and said hey $7 chip I can generate an innovation in automotive two years ago Kickstarter provided liquidity of half a billion dollars in one year without taking equity from anyone the biggest venture capital funds in the world don't do that you have this era of permanent revolution on the technological sense it meets massive reduction in price and then everyone can afford it at least at the entry level this is a tremendous period and that's where you see immunotherapy and you're seeing so many interrelated or converging fields I think Israel is very very well-positioned to leverage the opportunities of the Arab Herman it's not gonna get slower from here on it Israel is second only to Silicon Valley in terms of startups and VC investment I think there are several main factors that lead to Israel today being known as the startup nation as this nation of entrepreneurs my name is Saul singer I'm the co-author of startup nation to the book about what made Israel innovative Shimon Peres of course is the person we quote most in the book entirely but perhaps my favorite quote is defining Israelis or Jews in one word in that word is dissatisfied he used to call Israel for attempted under dissatisfaction nation and when you look at the history of the country it makes a lot of sense was were the builders of the country there were people who were dissatisfied from where they were they had to flee and they came here and that they had to make this place work because this was their final station this was our final stop this were the refuge the people here the very small community which was in decided they want to create a country which they had in their mind will need buildings and pipelines and electric lines and railroads and roads but not only that they understood the importance also of sociology and philosophy etc so they created not only the Technion in the Hebrew University they created the Philharmonic Orchestra's so they went and decided just to go and do it you know to go and build a state and actually the best start up which was created in this part of the world is the State of Israel which started as a crazy fantasy and this was by creating by many many startups not in the high tech not in the internet but in agriculture in job creation in developing cities the founding of the state in 1948 by David ben-gurion Israel's first Prime Minister the first thing he was worried about is the survival of the country so that required a military that was going to defend against five other countries around it with much bigger militaries a bunch better equipped so the only way to do that was with superior motivation and better technology throughout history the military and unfortunately warfare has been such a driver of civilian technology so for example you know computer vision to find intruders who are trying to get through to your borders eventually trickles through to the civilian space and that leads to for example autonomous vehicle technology companies like Mobil I and OTO which is a driverless truck company which was recently acquired by uber drones computer intelligence artificial intelligence a lot of what is driving the tech industry starts in the military one thing that's interesting about Israel's innovation story is a lot of factors converging together the fact that the whole country is a start-up the military aspect effect over a country of immigrants all these things feeding together are important when we wrote startup nation first of all we didn't realize we were branding a country but we also didn't realize that we were touching sort of a global nerve we're living in a world that's changing all the time and not only changing but the pace of change is increasing and this is kind of quietly causing a panic I think in companies and individuals in countries where they say we have to become innovate that's the only way we can keep up and they're right but the tendency is to think okay we want to do that we want to be like Israel we want to do it like Israel did but Israel kind of has a unique story we have our story but what's happening actually what's exciting is that around the world everybody is doing this but they have their own story and gorian once said in israel in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles sometimes the greatest miracle is recognizing that the world can change [Music] through talent and hard work Israelis have put this small country at the forefront of the global economy already we see how that innovation could reshape this region over 100 high-tech companies have found home on the West Bank which speaks to the talent and entrepreneurial spirit of the Palestinian people now one of the great ironies of what's happening in the broader region is that so much of what people are yearning for education entrepreneurship the ability to connect to the global economy those are things that can be found here in Israel this should be a hub for thriving regional trade and an engine for opportunity [Music] for most people who are in the technology space if you talk about startups Palestine is not at the top of the list it's probably not on the list at all right we were starting to think about something that for all intents and purposes was impossible to do start a venture capital fund in a place where something like this has never even been heard of you layer on top of that sort of the political and geopolitical complexities of the place and we really have the official definition of mission impossible over the last five plus years there has been explosive growth in what will become the arab digital economy we raised thirty million dollars to create these business opportunities despite occupation at the end of the day we as Palestinians need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and we need to think of ourselves as people who despite of our situation can actually offer something to the world you've got this opportunity in the Middle East mobile devices are being used at some of the highest grades in terms of penetration across globally even compared to developed markets in e-commerce in media gaming business-to-business so the startups that we are actually investing in are looking at these markets welcome this is suit tell we have staff in Jordan in Berlin in Washington DC and we have staff in Canada but the developers sits here so the tag is actually Palestinian tech and they said over there in 2006 there were jobs out there and there was at the same time a 40% unemployment rate among Hugh's the first solution that we developed was a platform matching jobseekers to job providers now suit tel has developed such that we design and deliver digital solutions from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe spanning some 30 countries so for example using a basic mobile phone Syrian refugees living in Turkey context and questions to lawyers to get legal advice we have also last month a six of us were actually in Egypt for ten days working with farmers now we're building a platform that would help deliver messages to these farmers to try to enhance their productivity and yield of course Palestinians have faced a variety of challenges and a great adversity so it makes perfect sense to me that we're using Palestinian technology to answer these same questions for people globally I've spent about 19 years abroad and among my my circle of friends a lot of people would be talking about coming back but there's always the question or you know what would I come back and do right now that has completely changed our portfolio is employing 200 people about 33% of that are female employees that are primarily in technical positions and you know we're reading those percentages in Silicon Valley so Palestine has been able to to beat Silicon Valley on one end at least [Music] the great thing about innovation is that it transcends borders it transcends cultures transcends religion you can basically be sitting across the table from somebody who never met who comes completely from a different background then almost instantly speak a common language not to say that if a Palestinian sits across the table from an Israeli that means oh you know now we have peace and everything is fine and dandy and we can you know hold hands and sing Kumbaya it's not about that the funny thing is that if you were talking to somebody from Europe or from the states and they would come here and are positively surprised but what's happening here because they never see some looks something like this in the news you can understand this but when it's somebody that's less than an hour drive from you you start understanding that the political situation is standing in the way we are at the heart of Rothschild Avenue also known as the tech mile of Israel about a hundred years ago would have been standing on a sand dune because there was nothing here you could have seen Chavez gates from here two buildings to the right is Israel's independence hall where about seven years ago the founder of the country David ben-gurion decided to declare the State of Israel within a hundred years we've been able to get to a point that in the skyscrapers we have the world's top R&D companies Facebook and Google and Autodesk and other companies in buildings at the heart of Tel Aviv a lot of the Israeli talents find this way to center around here this is where the top of the startup industry is it speaks highly that the energy of the city is here the creative guys which are doing all the startups don't want to live outside of the city they want to live in downtown they want to have urban life they want to have coffee shops they looking for cities which are liberal which are embracing people with all kinds of tastes you know television you can remain you can be female you can be gay you can be lesbian you can be transgender nobody give a [ __ ] [Music] Tel Aviv is providing this kind of atmosphere it's an open city liberal city embracing city celebrate the diversity add to it you know the blue sky a great restaurants the beaches the beautiful people and this is why we every such a concentration of creative people you see more and more young people becoming involved in high-tech aspiring to develop their own startups doing really fantastic jobs alright so first of all welcome to healthy i/o we are based at the heart of Tel Aviv on Rothschild Avenue and this is where we turn smartphone cameras into clinical grade medical scanners every day millions of people across the globe get their urine tested pregnant women diabetics people with high blood pressure urine testing is the world's second most frequently conducted diagnostic test but now there's a new way we use image recognition and artificial intelligence to transform smartphone cameras into clinical grade scanners the way to transform an embedded smartphone camera into a clinical-grade scanner goes obviously for two big buzzwords big data and neural networks we built a very sophisticated way of generating well tag data we design we bring in phones we put them in a system we then get the data that it is very well tagged we see we allow for the neural network to improve different layers of the algorithm I think we we possess now a set of big data which is unparalleled worldwide this is us in different generations and we have a lot of jokes about you know where smartphones were about 10-15 years ago and we're super happy to have the huge bulky device in our hands that we can call or wherever you know if you think about the fact that an iPhone is only 10 years old you know it Goethals you it's a pretty exciting revolution to be to be part of we no longer live in an era where there are subsequent paradigm shifts because healthcare for me working for the President on you know Israel's neuroscience by informatics was always like this big field where you know big penicillin moments are gonna happen in the 21st century right before and after immunotherapy is gonna kill cancer stem cell research is gonna create organs for transplant big things they might happen but I was really shocked that the dynamics we see in this era of permanent revolution also operate in healthcare as the healthcare system goes into being heavily weighed up against because of obesity because of the abilities because of a kidney disease it is recalibrating its path towards urine that's a standard urine test that's done today in the lab we wake up in the mornings and in line they give the prescription we get an old cup we go and pee in a cup and then at the end of the day they dip a stick which is thirty thirty five-year-old technology changes colors accordingly ten different parameters measured in our urine very important ones tips and put it in this big scanner and does the scan and we get very accurate reads 150 million people in the US are doing this test every year why on earth are we still consuming it in to say in efficient way instead of waking up in the morning and going to the lab the Box gets to your home and in the Box you have the same dipstick we don't know the lighting condition we don't know the phone the camera but the interaction between the phone camera and the kids and ultimately the cloud obviously delivers clinical-grade accuracy scanning it with a phone within the app and you're good to go this company is not about urine testing it's about generic color reconstruction in the service of healthcare right the idea of transforming embedded smartphone cameras into clinical grade scanners it will be relevant for skin care it will be relevant for eyes to urine and others so the vision behind what we do is to have people who consume it on a mass scale enjoy highly simplified version of exactly the same tests when you think about what an entrepreneur is it's basically someone who sees the world with slightly different eyes most of us often we don't even see the big problems around us because we take them for granted if you have to ask what is the main trait of the startup ecosystem it's a different attitude towards failure than exists elsewhere failure is the only way to success if you can't fail you can't succeed nobody likes to fail I cannot tell you it's very pleasant you know from my experience I will tell you a secret don't share it with everybody it's much nicer to win than to lose but if you don't fail you limit your downside but you also limit your upside you know these things are coming together otherwise everybody would be in the industry where the upside is high and the downside is low doesn't exist you know I was part of the Israeli negotiation team to Camp David so is this a big enough [ __ ] to share with you how do I talk about failure how do we do it in a way that it's fun 97% of startups fail we keep talking about the 3% that actually did it then made it and made the exit somebody bought them they made a big sell they're now in stock exchange but we're not talking about the 97% that fail basically thing we bring foreign true preneur is once a month to talk about the biggest failure and it's kind of incredible we said like it's gonna be extremely ironic if we fail because then we can say that we failed at [ __ ] of night but somehow is just really successful there's this Yiddish word called chutzpah which I think also exemplifies a lot of the Israeli spirit if you meet Israelis they are very honest some people would say brutally honest it can come off as a little bit brash but a lot of Israelis have it it's this attitude that I can be my own boss and do their own startup [Music] I'd like to believe modern Israeli culture is certainly influenced by Jewish culture we study the Hebrew Bible here and we also devote time to Talmud study Talmud is really composed of two documents one is this code developed in the third century called the Mishnah and the discussions that built around that text and the 200 years after what we call the Gemara the relevance goes on we have to constantly reapply and rethink but there's wisdom there that seems to transcend time the Talmud itself is a 600 year argument of the rabbis where they argue about what the law should be based on the Bible and then how you study that argument is through argument that seems to make more complicated the issue of the six Ybor when you come from a textual tradition that says well read it differently read in a new way what else can we learn we're not going to assume that the guy who's been here for 40 years has all the answers we're not going to assume that my job is simply to do what I'm told we're not going to say that as long as we all say the same thing then we'll be okay but we're gonna bring those values of questioning and complexity and creativity the process of debating and arguing was partly how do you apply these ideas to the world as it gets more modern this seeds of it are in the Bible itself let's say just for example the story of Abraham God's about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah just wipe them out kill everybody that Abram starts arguing with him what you know you're gonna destroy these cities what if there were 50 righteous people God says oh no I wouldn't do it if there were 50 well what about what if there were 40 and so on they keep I'm not just arguing which itself arguing with God that's pretty radical but but over morality I mean God is the source of morality here he's our cocoon with God over morality so Abraham can argue with God so of course we're gonna argue with the CEO from Intel or whatever you know we won't be afraid of that it makes perfect sense to me that there's this marriage between innovation and ideology because I think people need a vision they're not just doing something for themselves but they're helping build the country there's a vision of making society better of improving life of doing something meaningful making money is not enough you know people are trying to explain what's going on in Israel referring to the technology or to the military or to budgets or education all of it it's true but all of it are the fuel the question is what is the spark plug because you have all these components all over the world you know you have them in Germany rather than in Japan it's not enough something you need something else and something else has to do with things like culture virtues aspirations the human component and I think this is something which is very special to Israel they wake up in the morning they have madness in their eyes so when you look on the startup nation or when you look on the explanation you're this is part and parcel of our DNA and our neighbors from behind the green line the Palestinians they also go in these roots and I think it's very good very important for their economic development the mixture of nationalities in Israel and the Diaspora who came back the talented who came back from the state and all worldwide to Israel to build this ecosystem we have the same opportunity now for the Palestinian side we are counting on the Diaspora to come back and to start their ideas from here and creating an equally consistent ramallah has become a de facto capital right so you have the incubators and the accelerators and the training programs right and so that I think also led to a hub for tech startups and Palestine for investors today 80% of them are Palestinians both within and outside Palestine I think there's certainly a desire to to show that this can be done in Palestine Palestine by nature is in and the culture community we all came from farming families but what happened with Ramallah is that when the political situation changed more work opportunities occurred within the city and the young people came to live in the city where we ended up with an environment which is less conservative more open to new opportunities and people who would like to live in a less traditional way than other cities within Palestine Ramallah is mostly a city for the young people the gems the nightlife the theater the art everything this generation they're at a point where they want to see changes you know history repeats itself and I think that there are some things that you need to repeat themselves and some things that we need to avoid we know that there's not much we can do for the political situation or their economy but we can do something with our own two hands and create a product mass riser is basically a platform that helps real estate investors in America looking for our property so that investors can see ok where are the best cities for real estate investments and then where are the best neighborhoods and then where are the best properties when I make more money renting out the property traditionally like with a one-year lease or as the vacation rental by listing out an Airbnb a research process that should take three months now takes about 20 minutes 15 minutes and we also minimize the time it takes for them to calculate their own returns people are a little surprised to know that we serve the US economy in the US market because we're completely based in the one law as you've heard before all you need is you know good internet and a laptop and there you go if the car looks to invest in web and mobile-based businesses also given again the limitations happening in Palestine Tech and Internet is a good way to answer that our companies so far are really exciting I think our first investment is a mass riser but we also have red crew I started working the normal after I got my degree in the US and in 2011 Sarah and I started this project in our market what we look at is how threat level is rising in a specific location hour by hour in a very complex political situation you used to look for the one contact person that can confirm a specific piece of information to know what's happening in Syria for example today it's millions of people reporting constantly what we rely on is the information that people put on their accounts like Twitter and Facebook the variation between these people are extremely marginal that you can actually take the exact alert from the people that have entered it on their social media we created a system that collects this information simultaneously it goes through them and ranks them is it a reliable source or not and it makes it easier for us to put it on the map and pinpoint exactly where the incident has happened for example we have a specific event happening here so you have the location within two kilometers it's a high threat which means it might be very violent and affect safety and security the last the circle here is only security complications so you might be facing checkpoints and the high security measures within a specific area and to be harder for you to move these are the locations of all the clashes that happen since the beginning of September in the West Bank there was for instance 74 in Gaza - and Israeli controlled areas is zero and Jerusalem twenty-nine clashes our target market consists of non-governmental organizations in both the developmental and humanitarian sector who operate for example in the medical sector and not being stuck on a specific checkpoint is very important today they can just open their mobile and see where incidents have been happening during the last 10 minutes [Music] I'm very proud of what's happening now in Ramallah and you can see that real community real ecosystem is very powerful ecosystem we started to bring the people back to start creating their circle and start succeeding from their homeland [Music] working on Palestine is not easy for anyone really and it's definitely not for tech startup for a fund like ours there's many many challenges and those the majority of them I can say are due to the occupation and I think we have to be completely honest and and forthright about those challenges in terms of you know people getting in and out Peter who is a CEO of mass risers you know last time spent two days just trying to get back into the country we don't have 3G still and honestly I don't think it's gonna happen soon you know so that technology when we're developing apps is really hindering us right if you can't test it easily then you know it's very hard to develop an app the legal system is not much oriented with the venture capital culture and the startups culture therefore most of the investors ask startups to register their companies in the US when you exit all the tax money that you have paid you haven't paid an entire country if they did somewhere else just because the laws of your country do not apply to your company which is a pity hopefully they'll be able to fix it before we exit [Music] is there a reason why you've chosen to do it [Music] I know home oh I wish we had more of an interesting interesting answers Samia [Music] you want various delights minister in Israel in the world are honoring Shimon Peres as a visionary and a fighter for peace the Nobel prize-winning former president and Prime Minister of Israel died overnight and in Syria was an in salalah C of C Mon tell President Obama gave this tribute a light has gone out but the hope he gave us will live and burn forever in my first meeting with president Paris when I first went into the office we had a conversation about the power of fantasy and he said something that stuck with me he said remember Yanni people without fantasies don't do fantastic things president Peres in a recurring manner was able to look 10 15 20 years into the future see the development and then ask the very tough questions and then taking very tough actions in making sure that Israel is well equipped to reach that goal so in the 50s you know there were hardly 10,000 cars on the road he would already imagine the aeronautic industry of Israel so that Israel in 1970 would have its own airplane capability it's only electro-optic capability things that at the time really seemed like fantasies so he did with aeronautics L was industry number one he did it with nuclear capability and nuclear research he realized that having a strong nuclear research capability something at Israel cannot afford itself to to leave behind [Music] his third understanding I think was when he is a prime minister in Israel has a four hundred percent inflation per year and so president Peres understands that you know as they say a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and puts Israel so repositions reframes Israel on a path to growth and essentially paves the way to the tech industry as we know today I mean what is the tech ecosystem ultimately it's not that Israel is the best in the world in universities it's not that it has the best IP law or the best access to capital it crosses the critical mass on all of those dimensions of the ecosystem and there aren't many ecosystems like that in terms of culture in terms of willingness to fail in terms of access to capital a lot of those were born in 1985 when again he paid political capital to put in place very innovative public policy initiatives like backing VC venture capital losses to attract venture capital in the late 80s that's where nanotechnology started playing a role Pyron dramatics neuroscience order he was smart enough and incredible visionary to understand things that we didn't even conceive of as younger people who you know live in the industry how does exponential growth in computation allow us to understand the brain better understand neural networks then design AI artificial intelligence that would then learn better about the brain he saw it he somehow understood it who is what you'd call the serial entrepreneur and this country is very grateful for that so think about it the country which is seventy years old with eight million people which seventy years ago had barely a university here has three of its six which are publicly funded three of the Israeli universities are in the top hundred most innovative universities in the world I think that's a that's a fantasy that was that was realized we are here at the media Innovation Lab at IDC Herzliya we're looking very honestly and directly on the 21st century and we understand the trains and we understand what's going to happen and we believe that if we're not going to do what we do you know it's not going to be the type of roads that we want to leave it we have BA we have MA computer science communication and psychology students they work in collaborative groups and they produce projects throughout the year in an iterative process where they produce something that quickly tested and then produced something more advanced one of the trends that is already happening from many many years is a physical digital interaction so we think about digital technology we all know what it is we think about the physical world we all know what it is but what is the convergence between them what we do here is what's called the humanistic technologies and yes technology is great and technology is fun and we love innovation but technology is just technology it's a means to an end and we believe that that IOT or this type of smart objects should become you know active participants in our lives they should behave and that's why we look very much on gestures if we're not going to make sure that these objects of the future are going to be more intimate and more empathic and you know eunuch ate with us in this very social way it's just gonna become a very depressing 21st century this is the greeting machine we purposely designed it and the simplest most abstract form that there is in order to show through expressive gestures and movements how just a simple movement can communicate so much so the idea comes from for example if we have pets at home who are waiting for us and they're shaking their tail so our idea is to have this on one's table or and the entrance to one's home and welcoming you making you feel wanted basically if something is closely resembles a human but it's not exactly moving like a human it start to looks very creepy and you know we have enough lovely humans around and we think that we should give this you know abilities to objects not trying to imitate humans but makes these objects become you know more expressive in that way exactly we have our own mythology that really emphasizes on going out to the field to really go into details this is really important for us so we believe innovation is in the details we set with animators and theatre experts actors choreographers so it's not something that's scientifically based on some other discipline but it's inspired from people that already deal with expressive motion all of their lives and we asked people to tell us which emotions they see in each of the gestures whenever it looked forward the perception was of a positive emotion and whenever the robot was withdrawing there was perception of a negative emotion very clean and interesting results this humanistic way of thinking comes from social science it comes from many other you know disciplines it's about philosophy and how you know people interacted with technology over the years and what does it mean to give away agency to the technology and let the technology make a decision for me they can't just say you know no technology is just technology it has no you know responsibilities in the world's a user makes their own decision and that's not true that's very naive to think this way technology is very influential and we have to put much more thinking into the type of technologies that were creating one of the aspects of our startup the culture is kind of a lack of hierarchy we don't like discipline we don't like we don't respect authority and that's I think a very important part of Israeli ethos that I think just plays out all the way going through the army the military was seen to be the opposite of start up the opposite of innovation very big very structure very hierarchical very top-down not innovative and yet the military has been a huge part of our story basically the Israeli Defense Forces look at hierarchy different than other militaries around the world to begin with specifically with regards to um tech I think we had to understand that we could still tell people where to go from anytime we cannot tell them how to get there when simply because nobody has done it ever or even worse sometimes you have to tell people to try to achieve something that somewhere in the back of your mind you think is almost impossible in this kind of environment hierarchy has to change can you work in a collaborative environment can you control your ego so that you can achieve things with the larger group of individuals and so in many ways organizations like 8200 are the closest to meritocracy Dadaab see and when you create this kind of environment sometimes magic happens the army here doesn't look like that I mean the movies we give them a lot of responsibility and they know that they have the freedom to say to me anything and almost in any way they concern me that I talk [ __ ] and they can tell me that I'm wrong and I accept it and this what makes this place so great I never really knew what it meant for me until I was like 17 years old like I wasn't truly excluded from social life I just had a rough time fit again I felt like I should be able to do this by am I not able to do this it was really frustrating for me as someone who is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome on the autism spectrum I was exempted for my mandatory military service but despite the exemption I did still want to serve my country that's the standard and I wanted to not stick out or be different than anyone else having Asperger's syndrome there are disadvantages and difficulties that are involved in that there are also other things other strengths is very high precision attention to detail the analytical skills that is very valuable and important when you're doing this this kind of work to me it was very much insane it was a completely different experience from what I went through until then because suddenly I felt like I had a social life it's very refreshing it's an absolutely great experience [Music] the people that really make the difference in innovation the people that really make the difference in cyber in artificial intelligence in Big Data and so on and so forth are pretty unique people they're difficult to find these young people 2122 are being given tremendous amounts of authority that there's no way they could get them civilian life and you come out and you've had all this management experience in dealing with real word dilemmas and decisions so you're ready to take on the challenges of startups I had no background in drones whatsoever I just I went into electronic shop in Toronto to buy a juicer and I saw this drone toy this was like I know seven or eight years ago so I bought it instead of the juicer ended up to be the best investment I ever made there is a definite advantage hiring an engineer that has a background in the army and almost everybody in Israel goes on the army you know the person is responsible you know they're independent they can work in a team those are the things that you look for in a person and we get those things for free [Music] we saw that there was a big gap that could be fulfilled and you know maximizing the potential from these aircrafts if we took it and made it out into a tool where this thing actually does work one of our big projects was a giant oil spill in Israel very quickly we were the ones managing the entire operation because we could fly non-stop and we just took regular pictures of the area and send it to everybody's phone and if surveyors in the field would walk around with this fresh aerial of what's going on and they could better manage I was going on it was a good example of how Jones are used for good things in that bad our vision was to create a box that sits somewhere and you know can launch and land missions by itself not just in security or mapping or Emergency Response but everything combined the docking station serves several purposes it protects the drone from the outside environment whether it's really hot really cold it's dusty or it's corroded or it's raining second is replacing the batteries and also the sensors thus creating different applications that can be used in different scenarios if you're flying on a mission and you're running security with a video camera and then you want to switch and go to do mapping with the drone lands itself in the docking station and then you have the sensor replaced and then you have a different tool turning it from a toy to a tool there's a lot of technology involved in most of the components in the market that they are not fitted for for an aircraft that doesn't real work but everybody is an engineer in Israel I mean we don't really have anything else to do here if you're in the desert we don't have a lot of natural resources so that's our resource innovation if you're able to find the people who are interpret oriole is period then there really can do this almost anywhere in the world because if you think about it interpreter ship is about solving problems and the bigger the problems are the more substantial the solution [Music] I've been saying this for years and I believe that because of the characteristics of Palestinian society that for me it's obvious that the economy of the future here should be a knowledge base technology focused economy there's a 99% literacy rate high percentages of people who speak foreign languages the fact that people are very tech savvy and and capable and so we've been steadily working at that you know since 2007 Mercy Corps is a global relief and development organization that works in about 40 countries around the world helping out in the post crisis response area and helps to transition things toward development and we've been here since the mid-1980s and in Gaza since about 2006 in both places they have a lot of challenges but you know the most obvious ones are political you know in the West Bank you you tend to have constant friction and often clashes inside the West Bank between cities whereas in Gaza it's a totally closed economy there is the threat of war every two years or so we tend to have a large-scale conflict between the Israelis and defections inside of Gaza you know there is that but you can be in Gaza City and you feel at times like you're in any other place any other city in the world [Music] young people in Gaza are hungry for opportunities they're hungry to have some possibility for creating a better future for themselves and Gaza is amongst the most innovative that I've seen you know when the fuel shortages start they start running their their cars on cooking oil right so I mean they're innovating to survive I think because of the closure because of the repeated shocks of conflict because they've been disconnected from the world for the last 10 years and because of a certain structural issues in the education system they're several years disconnected from what's happening at the cutting edge of technology beyond that as things like you know electricity shortages are a major challenge in Gaza internet is surprisingly not one of the the challenges we sit on top of a high-speed Internet line and so all of the people inside of our community you know able to access Internet consistently [Music] so Gaza sky geeks is an initiative that we started back in 2011 together with Google we did lots of events hackathons startup weekends to really generate buzz and energy around the idea of creating opportunities for yourself we saw that technology would create this this window to the world around them and create opportunities for income and for a more sustainable future for themselves [Music] what has been done with Gaza sky geeks is nothing short of defying that possible they will challenge the limits of what enterpreneurship can do in some of the toughest places in the world I think they want to prove that they can succeed and they want to prove that they have the rights to be part of this global world so they know now what this technology gave them the ability to bypass all the stage and all the barriers from the Israeli side you know the vast majority of the people in Gaza which is a tiny territory most people have never left it and have no prospects ever of doing so so you can imagine when you can visit websites who engage on social media in something held in the palm of your hand that's a massive change at the same time as it's become more possible for people to talk to each other virtually it's become actually more difficult for them to have day-to-day contact one thing that Palestinians will accuse other Palestinians are sometimes is talking about normalization normalization is making the relation between the Palestinian and the Israeli as normal so as there is no conflict there's nothing you can do business you can deal with you can go with you can shop with this is not accepted there is a contract to desert we are not dealing with them we are not doing business with them but if you are living the same city what are other opportunities do you have [Music] this is the area where you can say east and west mix this is the imaginary boundary on the right or the Arab neighborhoods that's saying and on the left is the Israeli neighborhoods if you look at the buildings look at the streets here you can see a huge difference we and Israelis pay the same municipal taxes we do pay the same taxes on work everything we receive the same benefits in terms of health but not in municipal services the situation is getting better great efforts are being achieved from the economy to Jerusalem municipality but it's not enough it's complicated beyond description residents of East Jerusalem should receive the Guinness World Book of Records of surviving and now we've arrived at our destination it's jump the community is Jerusalem they are placed in Ian's and they are staying in Jerusalem as residents are not citizens we don't have an Israeli passport we are living with travel document at the same time we have a kind of Jordanian passport where the nationality at that passport is none so you are not a Palestinian you are not an Israeli and you are not a Jordanian so this is why Palestinian community in Jerusalem felt between the cracks you can't get support from the Palestinian government because they can support you and that Israel is due they can support you because you are not an Israeli resident like a Palestinian trying to contact an Israeli company or Israeli venture capitalists you get asked a question and it was asked to me did you serve in the Israeli army like come on seriously is that a question you asked a Palestinian so the answer was no and they said sorry we can't fund you we went also to Ramallah right with the B C's in Ramallah which is the West Bank in Palestine and we got the same nice answer every time you're not a Palestinian resident how can we help you how can we support you so among the years there was pressure on this community in Jerusalem and yes all the talented all the capable all the investors all the professionals they are not here anymore they just left the city we as a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem I can't be as a part of the startup nation I want to be but I'm not of that nation I'm not part of that nation so my idea was if we can have the second edition to be a start-up region by that the whole nation and all other part is like Palestinian we can all start our working together to boost and to develop the region today for them just as the home so if you want any kind of support he will go to his home and will ask for the service and there is someone will try to do its best to enter giving them the capacity-building opportunity and the training and the professional trainers to be part of an ecosystem and giving them the network so he can't go and join an activity in the western part of the city and they were asked from where you are I'm coming from just so I said now I have an identity to go and to join and succeed only 17 percent of women in East Jerusalem are participating in the workforce I was very frustrated all my colleagues they don't work so I started the idea of my pink electronics to train women on certain skills that will allow them to work from home even men did not succeed in this city to take their chance from just I had now a mentor who is mentoring my my business and helping me to grow and this will help them in their own businesses too today we can feel that the community is more connected they are looking at the Israeli market how they can succeed in the Israeli market how they can integrate in the Israeli market and how they can explore their capabilities to the Israeli market [Music] Israel is known as the startup nation it's not because of the army or because they're smarter or anything I think in my mind because there is a like a huge ecosystem of encouragement they have so many accelerators in the west side we don't have an accelerator we have an incubator one just and and that's it unless we show some success stories then things will change but you cannot show success unless you have an ecosystem and you cannot have an ecosystem unless you have success so that's that's the deal the idea whether you can actually kind of plan an ecosystem is something that many countries in the world are grappling with there's a fundamental kind of contradiction because government operates top-down and startup ecosystems come from the ground up there they were ganic I think we've gone through enough iterations on the critical path of how ecosystems are built where is the fine line in balance between planning and echo system from a government perspective and then trying to quote unquote own it ben-gurion said that the ultimate test of the Zionist movement will be in the Negev and so the country is now trying to face up to that challenge we're taking a lot of best practices from the last 30 years starting from 1985 and trying to leverage them in in Belgium and in the Negev one of the strengths that we have as a nation is the fact that the military is very central to everything that we do and so if you take that organization and put it in this other place that will push everything from beyond the probably 10 kilometer radius that has it about 80% of the startups in Israel right now which doesn't make sense from a national point of view the plan is to leverage the fact that top-down there's things that we can do like health and education and housing if you put all that together you'll get a new excellence innovation center around bear Sheva which is essential to Israeli like view increasingly the Israeli government is trying to trickle this startup nation effect into other cities but it's it's very difficult most Israelis work in high-tech and in the startup world prefer to be in Tel Aviv and its environs what's interesting is this need to build a place from an idea that's very related to startups and entrepreneurship for the first you know 40 years of our history we weren't startup nation our big pride was we grow our oranges we made the Desert Bloom and there was a lot of innovation in that but it wasn't high tech it wasn't what we think of a startup nation the ethos of the country was very much socialist and they were trying to manage this whole thing from the top down in a way it was totally impossible in a modern economy people say well you know the Russians were communist that wasn't real communist so the real communism in a way was the kibbutz so the kibbutz is basically a radical social experiment they were primarily agricultural only later they started getting involved in start-up nation this kibbutz was one of the three settlements in the south of Israel this is a shared community we act like a cooperative so we don't own anything all the cars are for the kibbutz members and when we need a car we just come and we take a car basically that's how things run here you have an apartment and free education for your kids and health everything you need basically we'll stop here for a second we need to remind ourselves all the time that were in the middle of the desert we're very far from the city I lived in New York I lived in Tel Aviv for many years I've been in advertising companies and I'd start up and I understand the pressure and I understand all the [ __ ] that you need to deal with in the city it's all around you so you deal with that and you deal with that and you go to that and you win the skills and you take out money and at the end you don't take off your product you don't do what you have to do so coming here and setting up my business here I realized that we have a big advantage being apart from all the what I call the [ __ ] the idea of the hatchery one of the main point of the hatchery is to get entrepreneurs isolated a bit to get them away from the city away from temptations that the city holds get them in a isolated environment where they can really really concentrate on what's important a start-up maker if you're still in college or just graduated and got an idea that you think the conquer the galaxy that's great you can join the mod gonna a three-month technological bootcamp in Israel get rid of distractions and daily concerns get expert guidance on all aspects you need and essential skills even bakery if needed all you need for your idea to conquer the galaxy cutting here it's not like a regular accelerator it's not like a course if you come to the hatchery you move here and you live here when you stay here you don't go to traffic you don't stand you don't waste time so if you need a mentor he comes here what I'm selling is peace of mind if you know that you have breakfast lunch dinner you have laundry you have a house you don't need to pay bills my mind is not distracted for a startup it's worth more than money part of the miracle of the Israeli tech scene throughout the years is even more impressive when you understand how small of a group it is Israel ultimately is about 8 million people these days out of which almost million people is above the age of 65 the population here under the age of 22 23 is also pretty big around two and a half million people 3 million people so they don't participate in the workforce they don't participate in the creative classes you would call it and so you end up with working-class if you will of about four and a half or five million people out of which the participation rate is around 60% a very small part of that is actively engaged in hi-tech and science what do we need to do for this to scale [Music] initially in the book one of our big questions was is startup nation sustainable is it here for good I think that the big challenge going forward is a growth challenge this is Jewish country I'd say 80% Jewish 20 percent Arab and they're basically two big minorities that are less connected to start-up nation Arab Israelis don't serve in the military generally and the ultra religious Jews they kind of opt out they believe they should be studying and not take time off going forward it's critical to bring in these these minorities and not have them left out just because they're not serving in the military the Israeli high tech today lacks over 6000 engineers and it is consensus today that the main a human capital resource for to bridge this gap is the Arab community and the ultra-orthodox Jews since this country established we are citizens of Israel and have an equal rights here in Israel but our community don't involve into the Israeli military so we don't have the culture of the technology industry in the Arab community the infrastructure in the Arab cities and villages is like 20-30 years behind the Jewish cities Arab family earns half as much as a Jewish family earns 68% of Arab kids in Israel live under poverty line and out of 120,000 engineers working in high-tech in Israel only 4,000 are Arabs in 2007 I met Madonna and Yossi cotton we are three founders and we build the top an organization the idea of Safin was we should build share society between the Jewish and the hub through technology in terms of our objective we are seeking about integrating 10,000 terrible engineers by the year 2025 and having for high-tech centers in Arab cities today we are located in Nazareth there we have an accelerator for startups and today employ over 900 engineers more than 100 of them are Jews that are coming every day to work in Nazareth for a nun Israeli this may sound very normal but here this is a real revolution if we can bring it together I think that's that's the next high-tech boom I grew up here neighbor karate ultra-orthodox the education system all-girls no SATs or any exam that wouldn't allow you to go into higher education we have a very unique way of life there are a lot of guidelines a lot of ways of things that we do keeping of the Shabbat from Friday night to Saturday night you don't use electricity very often and in the last few decades it will be the men will keep on going to learn and then the women would still take care of the income and actually working I started writing for magazines in Israel one publisher told me I don't believe that if you believe in God it can be an intelligent human being so being an entrepreneur and already and a woman and a mom is I guess it's challenging so this is my home office this is actually a prototype with his roommate life which was really cool we really try to help companies provide mentoring and advice on demands from employees from all levels and all backgrounds inside the company so we just create internal apps for them that help them get the most relevant people specifically relevant to your issue you can go into it you can ask a question or just write about a situation you'd like advice with and get some really good advice from them konna tech is an amazing organization started by Moshe Fremont contech is integrating uranium inside established high-tech companies like Google and Microsoft we for example lean on we sit inside Microsoft ventures so I can actually go to someone who works in sales in Microsoft or in development if I have a problem and really get a lot of advice and help from them it's so successful they're going to take it and actually apply itself to Arab startups now and afterwards to startups in Israel in general I do think like integration is the key but I've been told for a year now oh if only all hunger game would have been like you and I'm sure that's the case for people of color and for Arabs and for like maybe people of the gay community but you know if you've known like my whole family in my old community you probably think yeah okay I do you might ever like that in my dream and I'm sure in comics dream even more I see like an integrated society but sort of like an immigration takes like a generation or so back that immigrants are always the best entrepreneurs they can gain a lot from becoming Tappan Aaron can lose little because we don't have usually anything go much in any case and this country is crucible of immigrants for the last 120 years and the interesting thing is our to current immigration sources are from within us these are the ultra-orthodox and they are of Israelis they are immigrating you know from their way of life into the high tech and introduced lots of good and fresh power into this pool at the end of the day were very small country even if we bring in minority groups we're still a small country so I think the the critical thing we need to do is connect more with ecosystems around the world Israel it's so small that it should it should be a global player so be part of the big decisions be part of where the flow of brains and data and finances goes you know year-on-year in double digits in terms of trades and investment a big player in the Israeli venture capital domain today's Chinese private investors and institutional's to an interesting degree the Chinese and these Raley's or the Jewish culture have a lot of things in common in terms of the fact that there at the same time ancient people who are interested in making contribution to the world so this is a bizarrely Kingdom this is where we have software engineers and hardware engineers few engineers in QA and this is where the magic happens making a smart product is a complicated and painful process we decided that we are going to build a platform that will make it easy for every company to make their product smart fifteen years ago it was difficult to develop a website today it's much easier it will take someone and will put them in front of weeks they will get an amazing website within an hour today it's difficult to develop any product soon it will be much much much easier you will be able to make a smart ceiling fan or a smart mattress or a smart baby walker or a smart dog collar we want to measure the heartbeat of the dog we want to measure the location of the dog the motion of the dog and the temperature of the dog so simple so far found for me 36 different solution so I can use the left hand filters just to say guys I don't want it to cost more than 12 dollars to order a prototype using the system we are giving you the ability to bring the product to a state that is ready for production the quantity that we will produce it all depends on you we are at the moment 50 employees we have three centers around the world the R&D center is here in Tel Aviv we have the assessment marketing office in San Francisco and we have the supply chain office in Shenzhen in the last few years many Israeli startups are really starting to shift their focus from the u.s. to China and they're getting much better at knowing and understanding the Chinese investment culture and also what Chinese consumers are looking for the US and China is almost opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of individualistic versus collectivists and Israel sort of in the middle and the kibbutz was obviously the epitome of the collectivist mentality so it's it's an interesting kind of hybrid it's as if China's discovered Israel and at the same time you have this kind of political fight with Israel the disinvestment movement globally it basically hasn't had much impact because of investment from Chinese funds in Israeli funds and it seems to be going the direction of innovating here China translated the book first and later on the European countries with less sense of urgency so you could kind of see where the biggest hunger for innovation was they see something successful and they want to learn from it I think actually preferable to the Western tendency at seven was still negative about success sometimes this is just kind of at the beginning we should be building actually startups together we should be co-founding companies that are designed to solve Chinese problems same journey is obviously the center of manufacturing so it's C Bo won't be completely an Israeli company I believe that Alan D will stay here forever but the cells will obviously be in China and in the US and the supply chain will be obviously in China we are here to build huge company we are here to build the largest IOT development platform in the world there was the frustration for a while that all this amazing startup nation brand wasn't actually creating a lot of value for the average Israeli because many of these startups were being sold at a very early stage but I think that's that's changing and just since 2013 you already have 15 Israeli companies that reached the 1 billion dollar valuation statistic wise you see how few unicorns they are so the risk to try to aspire to be unicorn is very very high you increase your risk like can I'm being a higher mountain is more difficult than to climb a hill the reward also is is higher but the risk is much higher the things which are very good in startups you know that everybody has an opinion everybody is committed everybody make decision you know everybody run on its own way this is good when you have small groups when you have big groups you have to give marching orders this is not the kind of culture that you can have the same things that make a screen startups tend to make it's bad if they're companies the innovation process and one of experimenting of trying and failing taking risks and being able to move quickly the scaling process is one of sales marketing management and the people are good at one aren't necessarily good at the other I think where the world is going billion dollar companies are not what they used to be so should there be scale at the billion yes there should be that's a good indicator that we have matured some of our ecosystem has matured but is that a single indicator of whether Israel made a transition into scale-up nation and is it scale-up nation by definition the desirable effect I don't think so ultimately this country doesn't have the privilege of making you know radical mistakes as we grow is this thing that at any given moment there is a silver bullet here if you don't do things right the whole thing can collapse you know America can make mistakes UK can make mistakes big countries with legacy with a lot of people with natural resources they can make mistakes for Israel for Israelis and mistakes at a greater scale can have very very bad consequences and there might not be a way back on quite a number of dimensions here you know being in Israel is kind of a genetic disorder you know you always want to come back you know this is the only country in the world where there is war usually when there is war you see people running away from the country you see caravans of of refugees going Greece with other things in Israel and there is war you go to JFK then you see in front of the counter or fail all people are sleeping on the floor waiting for their they fly to fly back home [Music] I'm here every day to remind people that they have the power to change the reality they're telling us that Israel is an empire of Technology because we are in constant state of war war means profits because when you're in a state of war you can always develop new weapons because you have where the test is I think you can understand from the from this that my views about the occupation are that I'm not lacking for it it's true that in the last video we see an increasing number of Israelis opening companies overseas I think being sick of the political situation is the major reason you know people usually don't say it you know because doesn't sound good I refuse to accept that this is our reality and forever will be that way talk to people everyone's certain the whole place is going to die or to collapse tomorrow a lot of Israelis who live abroad are relieved for a few years they just near the main feeling they have is I don't have to worry about making this place work this place works Silicon Valley it will work with me or without me and for a few years that's great years later they're like [ __ ] I'm such a small cog right you know I don't make a difference I need to go back in Israel I make a difference to an extent we have this privilege that things don't work very well here because then it's always easy to challenge the status quo it's not like it's a well-functioning country that you sit around say hey you know what we're done I'm a Palestinian I grew up here I was born and raised here I know I know what occupation and I know that occupation is nothing less than evil and in 2016 to be occupied by a Western democratic nation is a black mark not for us but rather for the nation that occupies us this project is part of the State Building I'm a strong believer that the occupation will end and we will have our independent free Palestine and the question in our mind always is what shape of a nation we will have this is part of building the nation only a small part but it's an important part the pillars of an important nation is strong governance good human and civil rights and excellent economy and this project is about an excellent economy and about upgrading the standards of living [Music] I am a strong believer that a Palestinian state is in the making we don't have to wait for the end of the occupation to start fixing our lives and improving the economy we could start earlier the occupation is gonna end we deserve to live comfortably so I'm not looking for any type of people they could be any Palestinian it's obviously for Palestinians located a half-hour from Jerusalem and just 15 minutes from Ramallah is the brand-new Palestinian city of Roja being it's the first planned city in Palestine eventually it will become home to more than 40,000 residents in the city centre startups and enterprises are setting up operations they are ready to rise to meet the challenges of a new and sustainable knowledge economy the technology sector will be the key pillar of the city's future Rawabi will be a premier ICT hub both local and international high-tech firms will find Rawabi a very attractive prospect for them to base large-scale ICT businesses we are catering to young educated high tech community to accommodate these people you have to have a smart technologically advanced city the technological place is not just by technology it's also by the ecosystem you create so these are restaurants on the plaza so you could just imagine having chairs out here and people just sit down having coffee eating our target is to get high-tech companies it has not been easy we are pushing for international companies to outsource to Palestine to establish R&D facilities in Palestine to establish testing in Palestine a lot of them are afraid they think that bullets are flying all over the place but we just had some breakthroughs there's one great advantage the proximity of Israel being one of the most advanced nations technologically all the big companies are in Israel Google apples s AP Intel Cisco just half an hour to an hour away and so if we could piggyback on that and create jobs then we have a great vibrant city this could be the Marshall Plan that picks up the economy in the next 10 to 15 years we just had the elections in the neighborhoods we have three neighborhoods now so this is also democracy in the making from the grassroots of in Palestine and many countries like Palestine when you give people the opportunity they Excel what I did is open up the door to the hundreds maybe thousands of innovative Palestinians each one of them is experienced enough to build Rawabi - it's those people who came up with what kind of a stone whether to do the arches or not to do the arches where you put the I IT companies where you put the homes it's exciting now to the residents of the city which I call them the pioneers of the city literally they are the pioneers thanks to the internet they see the West they see the East they see everybody advancing and they're not advancing they're demanding better and I believe this is a good response to their demand how are we one of the amazing projects in Palestine amazing talented intrapreneur a thermochemistry I love the whole idea just being there you will feel that you can see the future of Palestine starting from Rami I think it's great you know I think you know anything which is with the Palestinians about doing for economic development I think it's very important you know because terror and hatred are growing on misery and feeling of unfairness etc so the more you close the gap the better it is but nothing will replace I think a political pact between the two countries you know to end this conflict and to let the Palestinians create their own state and anybody you think that the economic development can replace the aspiration of the Palestinian people to have their to control their own destiny is elucidating one of the biggest problem we have here is the Israeli settlements they are ideological settlers that come here believing that this land is theirs God gave it to them we should not exist here and when we started the project early on they to destroy what we're doing over time as they saw Rawabi is in Israeli news they tried to be accommodating and said hey let's do things together we told them no we will deal with Israel is in Israel proper we will not deal with radical ideological settlers at all in my personal opinion they are the biggest obstacle to peace the more radical the more organized you are but the average ordinary Israeli is not radical the average ordinary Israeli also when I live and would probably prefer to see a prosperous Palestinian state next to them the notion that we have to make it work because no one else would make it work was not adopted in the Middle East at large in the last 67 years and it is getting there now people demand accountability people like Sian and how do you say I want to make it work why not I'm not gonna wait for the political leadership I'm not gonna wait for this or that I'm just not gonna wait I'm gonna make it work to me I think that's fantastic politicians take them away and everything will be solved even keep keep the politics for the people in the street and everything will be solved all the conflicts about the political who have the case the Palestinians or the Israelis with all the globalization in this world now it's time just to join the forces together to start walking together and to make you life your family life your kids life and other lives and how you are going to channel I think that the big thing we need to do that actually isn't being addressed enough now is to open our doors I want to walk into Israeli startups and not just see Israelis in tech in startups when a demon ABB's collaborates all the time because we're facing a lot of the same challenges so I hopefully managed to both you know do amazing things in high-tech and still maintain our personality and our values entrepreneurs are very pragmatic creatures between Israelis and Palestinians I don't think it's any different but I do believe that the political reality ultimately will limit those kinds of interactions and can go only so far you know you'd like to see much more mutual understanding growing between the two sides you need real tangible political movements toward a solution then you also need Palestinians and Israelis to to not only meet each other at checkpoints I think if we take the political sensitivity aside they are not even a cousin's as I said there are two brothers you can see how they are connected they have same common behaviors on happiness on sadness winning on losing on everything even the language that common wars between the languages there are that it's connected you know I think a lot of people doubt what we're doing but diamonds are built under pressure so one of these companies is going to make a big and will have an exit and that will change our ecosystem for the better the technology advancements and the access that people have I think that's encouraging everyone to take advantage of it and do something and there's no reason why us living in the West Bank even with the occupation we can't take advantage of it [Music] president Paris who's to say that wisdom doesn't have a passport it's a global trait but in this day and age of science of being able to you know digitally transfer insights and intelligence and value it transcends a lot of political realities but we are in an interim period we're transitioning from a world of borders that was based on tens of thousands of years of agriculture there is no global government yet hopefully the positive attitude of the tech industry will prevail but they are disgruntled people who are getting the short end of that stick they also enjoyed the same trends I want to create a dirty bomb five years from now that would cost me $200 ten years ago would cost with 200 million dollars so the same mathematics apply the era for evolution applies on both ends and if we don't know how to manage that and if we don't create mechanisms to guide humanity into leveraging the positive elements of that we're headed for a bumpy ride [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: WIRED UK

Views: 4,268,908

Keywords: wired video, wired magazine, wired uk, wired, pop culture, science, politics, conde nast, health, technology, new technology, robots, robotics, innovation, Holy Land, Future Cities, Wired Cities, Shenzhen, Shenzhen Wired Cities, Israel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Wadi, Jerusalem, Palestine, West Bank, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Startup Nations, Global Convergence, Tech Startups, MobilEye, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Women in STEM, STEM, Infrastructure, Urban Planning, Self-Sustaining Cities

Id: I5h8GfxIWVY

Length: 89min 21sec (5361 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Very interesting.. Israel is a beautiful place. I wish all the programmers were in charge of Israel and Palestine instead of old religious men or politicians.. I guess that would work in every country actually.

[u/peskypotato]

Date published: 28 Mar 2017

Duration: 89 minutes

Description: The second season of WIRED’s Future Cities series takes us inside one of the world’s biggest startup nations. With the most tech startups and venture capital per capita in the world, Israel has long been hailed as The Startup Nation. WIRED’s four-part series will look beyond Tel Aviv’s vibrant, liberal tech epicentre to the wider Holy Land region – the Palestinian territories, where a parallel Startup Nation story is emerging in East Jerusalem, Ramallah and the West Bank, as well as in the Israeli cybersecurity hub of Beersheba. And we will learn how the fertile innovation ecosystem of Silicon Wadi has evolved as a result of its unique political, geographical and cultural situation and explore the future challenges – and solutions – these nations are facing.

More information

[u/matthewsmazes]

I had very little exposure to that region of the world prior to watching this film. Great insight. Very cool documentary.

[u/Robertroo]

I wish the Jews could have established their state on this side of the world instead of planting their flag in a muslim hornets nest.

At the same time, its a big fucking desert...why the Arabs wont let the jews have a little bit of sand is beyond me.

Religion I reckon. Jews claim the land is 'holy" and muslims want to spread their word of god. Both religions (all organized religion) need to be abolished.