Start-up Nation

Gross, a test-flight engineer at IAI, began in the design department. When he came up with a new idea for the landing gear, he was told by his supervisors to not bother them with innovations but to simply copy the American F-16. “I was working in a large company with twenty-three thousand employees, where you can’t be creative,” he recalled.¹⁰

Shortly before the Lavi’s cancellation, Gross decided to leave not only IAI but the whole aeronautics field. “In aerospace, you can’t be an entrepreneur,” he explained. “The government owns the industry, and the projects are huge. But I learned a lot of technical things there that helped me immensely later on.”

This former flight engineer went on to found seventeen start-ups and develop over three hundred patents. So, in a sense, Yossi Gross should thank France. Charles de Gaulle hardly intended to help jump-start the Israeli technology scene. Yet by convincing Israelis that they could not rely on foreign weapons systems, de Gaulle’s decision made a pivotal contribution to Israel’s economy. The major increase in military R&D that followed France’s boycott of Israel gave a generation of Israeli engineers remarkable experience. But it would not have catalyzed Israel’s start-up hothouse if it had not been combined with something else: a profound interdisciplinary approach and a willingness to try anything, no matter how destabilizing to societal norms.

CHAPTER 12

From Nose Cones to Geysers

If most air forces are designed like a Formula One race car, the Israeli Air Force is a beat-up jeep with a lot of tools in it. . . . Here, you’re going off-road from day one.

The race car is just not going to work in our environment.

—YUVAL DOTAN

DOUG WOOD IS A NEW AND UNLIKELY RECRUIT to Israel. With his calm and reflective demeanor, he stands out among his more brash Israeli colleagues. He was hired from Hollywood to do something that’s never before been tried in Jerusalem: Wood is the director of the first feature-length animated movie to be produced by Animation Lab, the start-up founded by Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit.

Wood worked as vice president of feature animation development and production at Turner, Warner Brothers, and Universal. When Margalit asked him to relocate to Jerusalem to create an animated feature, Wood said he would first have to see if Jerusalem had a real creative community. After spending some time in Jerusalem at Bezalel—Israel’s leading academy of art and design—he was convinced. “I met with the faculty there. I met with some TV writers and [author] Meir Shalev, and some other big storytellers,” he told us. “They were as good if not better than the people you would meet at the world’s top arts schools.”

But he also identified something different about Israel. “There’s a multitask mentality here. We’ve consulted with a lot of the Israeli technical people and they come up with innovative ways to improve our pipeline and do things more directly. And then there was this time I was working on a creative project with an art graduate from Bezalel. He looked the part—long hair, an earring, in shorts and flip-flops. Suddenly a technological problem erupted. I was ready to call the techies in to fix it. But the Bezalel student dropped his graphic work and began solving the problem like he was a trained engineer. I asked him where he learned to do this. It turns out he was also a fighter pilot in the air force. This art student? A fighter pilot? It’s like all these worlds come colliding here—or collaborating—depending how you look at it.”¹

It’s not surprising that multitasking, like many other advantages Israeli technologists seem to have, is fostered by the IDF. Fighter pilot Yuval Dotan told us that there is a distinct bias against specialization in the Israeli military. “If most air forces are designed like a Formula One race car, the Israeli Air Force is a beat-up jeep with a lot of tools in it. On a closed track, the Formula One’s going to win,” Dotan said. But, he noted, in the IAF, “you’re going off-road from day one. . . . The race car is just not going to work in our environment.”²