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The New Artist-Entrepreneurs Of High Tech
Idan Cohen, left, who helped found the media start-up company Boxee. The Boxee technology (a screen shot is below) allows users to view the contents of their PC on their television. Joshua Mitnick by Joshua mitnick Inside, Idan Cohen sits on a couch, gum stick-sized Apple remote control in hand, and glides through menus of large colorful icons on a large Toshiba flat-screen. He moves from movies in the hard drive, to on-demand content providers like CNN and Netflix, to Internet radio station providers, to a digital photo album. “It’s going to be the Firefox of the living room,” he said, referring to the upstart Web browser that has shoved its way into a market dominated by Microsoft. The vision of Boxee — a 13-person operation with headquarters 
Sounds like a cool idea? The demo is even cooler. If high tech is the center of Israel’s economic boom, and start-ups at the core of the high-tech boom, then it can be said that high-tech “geek” entrepreneurs like Cohen, 30, are the main drivers of Israel’s economy. Even if their companies are not pulling in billions of dollars a year in revenue, their brain power is what Israeli leaders like to brag about. They consider it the country’s only natural resource, the magnet for billions of dollars a year in foreign investment capital — and the reason for Tel Aviv’s reputation as Silicon Wadi, Israel’s version of Silicon Alley outside of San Francisco. Both high-tech experts and entrepreneurs like Cohen say Tel Aviv has become the center of Israel’s community of young geek go-getters who like to tinker and create new companies to support their inventions. Tel Aviv, they say, has the creative ferment that drives young techies. With $4 million in seed money from two U.S. venture capital funds, Boxee was able to graduate from an attic and a café to a proper office, and Cohen said it was a no-brainer to stay in the center of the city rather than move to an industrial park. (Venture capital raised by Israeli high-tech companies has fallen in the global economic downturn to $265 million in the first quarter of this year, down 30 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008.) “It was very important that our office would be inside the city. There’s something very fertile in this city,” he said. “There is something very strong in the link between a young company with few people that is trying to do something new, and the fact that it’s in an office that when you go outside into the street, you live there. “You feel much more alive [in the city],” Cohen continued. “Those high-tech parks in the suburbs are places where people go to work. There’s something important about your work being part of your life. In entrepreneurship, work mixes with life and even takes precedence.” Yossi Vardi, an Israeli high-tech guru who first became famous when his two sons sold their instant messaging start-up Mirabilis to America Online for hundreds of millions of dollars, said the affinity between techies and Tel Aviv’s vibrant urban centers is no coincidence. The same sort of thing can be found in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City’s Silicon Alley and Shanghai’s high-tech community, he argued. “This whole hotbed of high-tech is not a technological phenomenon — it’s a cultural phenomenon,” he said. “Tel Aviv and high-tech are a product of the culture of aspiration and free-spiritedness, of striving to be better. There’s less fear of taking risks or pushing the envelope.” Indeed, with only a century of history, Tel Aviv could still qualify as a start-up city in Israel — and in the rest of the region. But despite its youth, it has raced ahead of more established cities. Back when it was a newly established neighborhood outside of Jaffa, Tel Aviv could rely on Jaffa’s position as a commercial center for Palestinians. But Jewish businesses started moving into Tel Aviv following the Arab riots of the 1920s. Nationalist tension also forced demand for Tel Aviv to establish its own port just up the beach from the old Jaffa port. Tel Aviv also benefited from its location in the center of the country, with a close proximity to Jerusalem. Because many of the politicians in Jerusalem hailed from Tel Aviv or its suburbs, attention was given to economic development of the city and its growing metropolitan area. Today, the area’s economy is becoming more centralized within Tel Aviv itself. Companies such as Israel Railways, that maintained headquarters outside of the city, are relocating them to Tel Aviv. “There is a process of a concentration of all of the economic power in Tel Aviv. The control of Tel Aviv is absolute,” said Baruch Kipnis, a geographer at Haifa University who suggested that Tel Aviv’s domination is unhealthy for the economy. “They used to say Israel was a state with a huge head and a shrunken body. Today, it’s a huge head without a body.” Kipnis was referring to the fact that about 80 percent of Israel’s high-tech firms are located in the Tel Aviv greater metropolitan area. They make up the largest concentration of tech firms anywhere in the world outside of Silicon Valley, fueled in part by Tel Aviv University and The Technion in Haifa, which have become factories of high-tech talent. “It’s lifestyle, it’s art, it’s design, it’s fashion — it’s the whole experience economy and experience society,” said Vardi. “Young guys are very creative and looking for more engaging experiences in professional life and in their cultural life.” The techies are also drawn to each other and to an exchange of ideas. In recent years the entrepreneurial community in Tel Aviv has spawned several events where tech geeks get together to tinker with robots, model planes and discuss trends. Vardi’s Kinneret conference was one of the more well-known events (though it’s closed to the media). Another popular forum is the Garage Geeks, an occasional inventors’ conference held in a warehouse in the industrial zone of Tel Aviv’s neighbor city of Holon. The forum was spawned by a couple of inventors chopping up the front seat of a car, adding a screen, and computerizing the dashboard to create a virtual car. Rafael Mizrahi, a Boxee programmer, said he’s working on a guitar-playing robot controlled with the hardware from the video game Guitar Hero. Not surprisingly, the nonprofit informal conferences have drawn visits from foreign technology executives. “It’s true that the content is high tech, but the idea is to do something that is artistic that might later be commercial,” he said. Vardi noted that design and art are increasingly being married to high-tech products, especially those aimed at the end user. The Internet is no longer a software program, he believes, but rather a design program. Boxee founder Cohen concurred. “When we started the company, it was important to have a product I could connect with. I can’t work on any old thing. By itself, the challenge is not enough. I need to have passion for the product,” said Cohen, who studied art before diving full time into work. “I couldn’t go to work in a start up that would work on a piece of software that helps organize some organization. What excites me is that we’re going to influence people’s lives.
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