Start-up Nation

To accredit foreign education, the Ministry of Education maintains a Department for the Evaluation of Overseas Degrees. And the government conducts courses to help immigrants prepare for professional licensing exams. The Center for Absorption in Science helps match arriving scientists with Israeli employers, and the absorption ministry runs entrepreneurship centers, which provide assistance with obtaining start-up capital.¹⁶

There are also absorption programs supported by the government but launched by independent Israeli citizens. Asher Elias, for example, believes there is a future for Ethiopians in the vaunted high-tech industry in Israel. Elias’s parents came to Israel in the 1960s from Ethiopia, nearly twenty years before the mass immigration of Ethiopian Jews. Asher’s older sister, Rina, was the first Ethiopian-Israeli born in Israel.

After completing a degree in business administration at the College of Management in Jerusalem, Elias took a marketing job at a high-tech company and attended Selah University, then in Jerusalem, to study software engineering—he had always been a computer junkie. But Elias was shocked when he could find only four other Ethiopians working in Israel’s high-tech sector.

“There was no opportunity for Ethiopians,” he said. “The only paths to the high-tech sector were through the computer science departments at public universities or private technical colleges. Ethiopians were underperforming on the high school matriculation exams, which precluded them from the top universities; and private colleges were too expensive.”

Elias envisioned a different path. Together with an American software engineer, in 2003 he established a not-for-profit organization called Tech Careers, a boot camp to prepare Ethiopians for jobs in high tech.

Ben-Gurion, both before and after the state’s founding, had made immigration one of the nation’s top priorities. Immigrants with no safe haven needed to be aided in their journey to the fledgling Jewish state, he believed; perhaps more importantly, immigrant Jews were needed to settle the land, to fight in Israel’s wars, and to breathe life into the nascent state’s economy. This is still seen as true today.

CHAPTER 8

The Diaspora

Stealing Airplanes

Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, the new Argonauts [are] foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries.

—ANNALEE SAXENIAN

TODAY,” JOHN CHAMBERS SAID AS HE TOOK LARGE sideways steps across the stage to illustrate his point, “we’re making the biggest jump in innovation since the router was first introduced twenty years ago.” He was speaking into a cordless microphone at a 2004 Cisco conference.¹ Though he was in a business suit, the fifty-four-year-old chief executive of Cisco—which during the tech boom had a market value higher than General Electric’s—looked like he might break into a dance routine.

After properly building the drama, Chambers walked over to a large closetlike enclosure and opened the doors to reveal three complicated-looking boxes, each about the size and shape of a refrigerator. It was the CRS-1, in all its glory.

Most people do not know what a router is, and so might have trouble relating to Chambers’s excitement. A router is something like the old modems we used to use to connect our computers to the Internet. If the Internet is like a mighty river of information that all of our computers connect into, then routers are at all the junctions of the tributaries that feed in, and are the main bottleneck that determines the capacity of the Internet as a whole.

Only a few companies can build the highest-end routers, and Cisco—like Microsoft for operating systems, Intel for chips, and Google for Internet searches—dominates this market. Upon its unveiling, the CRS-1, which took four years and $500 million to develop, earned a place in the current volume of Guinness World Records as the fastest router in the world. “We liked this entry, because the numbers are so huge,” said David Hawksett, science and technology editor at Guinness World Records. “I just installed a wireless network at home and was quite pleased with 54 megabits per second of throughput, but 92 terabits is just incredible.”²