technology.
Netafim was pioneering not just because it developed an innovative way to increase crop yields by up to 50 percent while using 40 percent less water, but because it was one of the first kibbutz-based industries. Until then the kibbutzim —collective communities—were agriculture-based. The idea of a kibbutz factory that exported to the world was a novelty.
But Netafim’s real advantage was having no inhibition about traveling to far-flung places in pursuit of markets that desperately needed its products—places where, in the 1960s and ’70s, entrepreneurs from the West simply did not visit. As a result, Netafim now operates in 110 countries over five continents. In Asia it has offices in Vietnam, Taiwan, New Zealand, China (two offices), India, Thailand, Japan, Philippines, Korea, and Indonesia. In South America it has a presence in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Netafim also has eleven offices in Europe and the former Soviet Union, one in Australia, and one in North America.
And because Netafim’s technology became so indispensable, a number of foreign governments that historically had been hostile to Israel began to open diplomatic channels. Netafim is active in former Soviet bloc Muslim states like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, which led to warmer relations with Israel’s government after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2004, then trade minister Ehud Olmert tagged along on a Netafim trip to South Africa in the hope of forming new strategic alliances there. The trip resulted in $30 million in contracts for Netafim, plus a memorandum of understanding between the two governments on agriculture and arid lands development.
Israeli entrepreneurs and executives, though, have themselves been known to engage in self-appointed diplomatic missions on behalf of the state. Many of Israel’s globe-trotting businesspeople are not just technology evangelists but endeavor to “sell” the entire Israeli economy. Jon Medved—the inventor of the “nickname barometer” to measure informality—is one such example.
Raised in California, Medved was trained in political activism, not engineering. His first career was as a Zionist organizer. He moved to Israel in 1981 and made a small living by going on speaking tours to preach about the future of Israel to Israelis. But a conversation he had in 1982 with an executive at Rafael, one of Israel’s largest defense contractors, burst Medved’s bubble. He was told, unceremoniously, that what he was doing was a waste of time and energy. Israel didn’t need more professional Zionists or politicians, the executive stated flatly; Israel needed businesspeople. Medved’s father had started a small company in California that built optical transmitters and receivers. So Medved began pitching his father’s product in Israel. Instead of going from kibbutz to kibbutz to sell the future of Zionism, he went from company to company to sell optical technology.
Later, he got into the investment business and founded Israel Seed Partners, a venture capital firm, in his Jerusalem garage. His fund grew to over $260 million and he invested in sixty Israeli companies, including Shopping.com, which was bought by eBay, and Compugen and Answers.com, both of which went public on the NASDAQ. In 2006, Medved left Israel Seed to launch and manage a start-up himself—Vringo, a company that pioneered video ringtones for cell phones, which has quickly penetrated the European and Turkish markets.
But his own company is less important. Regardless of what Medved is doing for his enterprises, he spends a lot of time—
In his presentations he says only half-jokingly that if Israel followed the lead of “Intel Inside”—Intel’s marketing campaign to highlight the ubiquity of its chips—with similar “Israel Inside” stickers, they would show up on almost everything people around the world touch, and he ticks off a litany of examples: from computers, to cell phones, to medical devices and miracle drugs, to Internet-based social networks, to cutting-edge sources of clean energy, to the food we eat, to the registers in the supermarkets in which we shop.
Medved then hints to the multinationals in the room that they are likely to be missing something if they have not already set up shop in Israel. He finds out in advance of each presentation which companies’ executives will be in the audience and is then certain to mention which of their competitors are already in Israel. “The reason that Israel is inside almost everything we touch is because almost every company we touch is inside Israel. Are you?” he asks, peering into the audience.
Medved has taken on a role that, in any other country, would typically belong to the local chamber of commerce, minister of trade, or foreign secretary.
But the start-ups Medved champions in his presentations are rarely companies in which he has invested. He’s always torn when he prepares for these speeches: “Do I talk up Vringo among the promising new companies coming out of
