There is a huge spiritual dimension of building the land
of Israel, building companies, building the future.
And I dare say that creating technologies that will solve
pollution, that will help with the energy crisis, that will
feed the planet, that will solve healthcare, that will make
children learn better. All of this is God's work.
We've got to create. We have to be partners with
Hashem. We are we are partners in terms
of building this wonderful, beautiful planet.
And to not do so is to, I think to turn your back on our
tradition. Do you have this sort of nasty
disease, ALS? But I'm not letting it define me
and actually opening up all kinds of new projects which I'm
working on. And literally I flat lined at
the hospital and was resuscitated and brought back
after 8 minutes. So I think anyone would ask
themselves after an event like that, OK, you've been brought
back. What?
What does that mean? Sholam Alaikum and welcome to
Start Tank. Start Tank is a podcast for the
challenges and opportunities of being a mentor in the workforce.
This week, we're joined by John Medved.
John is the founder of Our Crowd.
He's also one of the founding fathers of the Israeli startup
nation scene. So, John, thank you for joining
us and welcome. It's great to be here, Yakov.
Thanks for having me SO. Let's start with a little bit of
sort of personal background. What was your childhood like?
Entrepreneurship, investment building, companies saying that
talk to you from a young age. What was the world that you
inhabited in growing growing up? Well, I was born in San Diego
and raised in Los Angeles out on the West Coast of California
where there was a lot of sun. But at least in the years that I
grew up in the 50s and 60s, not a lot of the.
And I literally grew up on the beach, both in Pacific Beach,
San Diego and Pacific Palisades and spent a lot of time on
boogie boards. And I was deeply into the 60s
and changing the world, but grew up in a pretty warm Jewish
family where we were considered fanatics for our neighborhood,
which had a lot of Jews but not a lot of Jewish observance.
We had a Passover Seder, pesos Seder, I would call it today.
Back then, Passover, which usually had 60 or 70 or 80
people potluck and we were a warm Jewish family.
But I was expelled from Hebrew school.
I hated that. I didn't hate the fact that I
was expelled. I thought maybe I'll be off the
hook, but it just forced us to drive farther to shore.
We lived about 20 miles from the and our Conservative synagogue,
which we didn't drive to except for the holidays.
But what what really got me into entrepreneurship was both my
family's interest and love of politics and history, as well as
the fact that my father, 11 Shalom Dabi Medved, was a PhD in
physics who was a serial entrepreneur.
And he built a very early startup as a chief scientist,
which was bought by Xerox and then built a fiber optic
communications company. And believe it or not, that's
how I started in entrepreneurship was with an old
Jewish tradition called nepotism.
Got it. And so you started out very far
from Israel. You started out very far, you
know, geographically, virtually far from what we would call, you
know, Orthodox Torah Mitsos observance that you which you
have a part of your life today. So you can take us briefly
through that journey from, you know, the John of the childhood
out in the West Coast to the John and your shall I am today.
Well, first of all, I went to Berkeley because it was a
political place and a really interesting place.
And I got there sort of in the highlight of the 60s and early
70s. And I showed up and I remembered
that I needed to. I promised my parents, since I
wasn't going to come back for the High Holidays, that I would
find a place to go to synagogue. And some of my friends said,
yeah, we'll go to Hillel, where there was a very Reformed
service. And another friend said, no, no,
let's go to this place called Habad where they they drink.
And I said, that sounds good, let's go there.
And it was the first experience I really ever had with Orthodox
Yiddish kite and was very warm and accepting.
And moreover, what really got me going was on the campus, there
was a lot of Jewish activity with a group called the Radical
Jewish Union. And in particular when I went
off to to to Israel after my freshman year, because that was
the only place my parents would pay for a plane ticket,
Everybody I knew was going abroad somewhere.
And I said, hey, how about Mexico or Spain or Morocco?
And they looked at me like I was crazy.
And they said the only place we'll pay for is Israel.
So I said, OK, Israel it is. And I went there and I came back
about a week before the war broke out in 1970's, the Yom
Kippur War. And that blew my mind because
what I had loved in Israel was the upbeat, wonderful feeling of
making history. It deeply affected me on that
trip. But then I saw that it was
struggling for survival and I felt like I was needed.
And on the Berkeley campus there was like a war breaking out.
It was about 50 years early where anti Zionists, anti
Semites were fighting for the literally under the headline of
death to the Jewish state. And that really got me going.
So ultimately I became a Zionist activist on the campus, built
Jewish organizations, worked for the Jewish Agency, would you
believe, as a itinerant field worker, and then made Aliyah
1980 and came to Israel for the first time to live after many
times visiting that. But I got here to Israel.
I wasn't observant. I was quite committed Jewishly,
and I found my way into entrepreneurship, into the whole
another story. So at what point did you, I
guess would you consider yourself of becoming, you know,
some retirement? So say what?
What was that moment? Well, what happened is when I
got to Israel as an older Hadash, I joined my father with
his fiber optic communication company called Merit and I built
a chapter in Israel or you know, subsidiary and he had no
investment money. And this was the 1980s where
there was not not a single dollar of investment dollars in
Israel. So what I ended up doing is
raising money from a company called ECI Telecom.
And as soon as I raised the money, I just got married to my
wonderful wife, Jane, the mother of my four children and the
grandmother of our 16 grandchildren.
And the the company that invested in our company said,
look, you got to go back to the States.
I said what? I just made all yeah.
And they said, no, you got to go back, help your dad.
He needs your ability to help build the business.
And then he'll come back here in the year and everything will be
fine. Well, we went to the States.
It wasn't a year, it was six years.
We ended up having three of our four children there, but there
my family had become active in a balchuva shul on the beach
called the essentially the Pacific Jewish Center, which was
right on the boardwalk in Venice.
That was an incredible place. With my brother was the
president, Michael Medved, and our rabbi was Rabbi Daniel
Lappin, and we ended up falling in with the community.
And that's what really changed level of observance.
So by the time I got back to Israel in 1991, after having
made a successful exit with the fiber optics company, too, by
selling it to a big oil company called Amoco, which is today
British Petroleum, we came back to Israel with three kids.
We were religious and we haven't looked back.
Wow, So it's it's really wild to hear how your journey
professionally, religiously, nationally, all sort of
intertwined and weaving and backs and forth.
It's very interesting to hear that.
So you know, many people are familiar with the book Startup
Nation or it started as a book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
And so it's become sort of a a brand that Israel is a leader in
technology and innovation. So you played a role in that
books particularly was broadly in the, you know, the early
stages of Israeli tech. At what point did you realize
that Israeli tech was punched well above its weight and that
that should be part of our sort of global story?
Well, again in the 80s when I started the fiber optic company,
I fell in love with these tech guys.
And the way I did was I actually accompanied my father 1982 on a
visit to meet with some research guys over at Raphael.
The guys who did I make the Iron Dome, as well as so much else,
makes us safe, among other things.
And I sat with them. I didn't really understand any
of what they were talking about because I'd studied history, not
engineering or physics. But at the end of the
conversation, where I had driven my father up to north of Haifa
from Jerusalem, they turned to me.
And they said, well, young Medved, what are you doing?
And I said, well, I'm, you know, teaching Zionism.
I'm working with summer students who come here helping out with
the Zionist movement. And they looked at me and said,
wait, Atta Scott, you're a like a just a, a bureaucrat.
And I said, no, no, no, I'm very committed and said, look, you
don't get it. Your father is an entrepreneur.
He's a pioneer in fiber optics. That's the real Zionism today.
If you want to do something for the country, go build a
subsidiary and build the factory and get involved with this
technology. And literally on the way home in
the car, I asked my father, really, what is it that you're
doing? And at the end of that very,
very fateful week visit, he decided to give me 100 bucks a
month to keep an eye on these guys, maybe see what I could do.
And I fell in love with technology and the rest is
history. And that's really when I began
to realize that Israel had this incredible potential being
expressed, but no one really knew it.
And what I could do with my English and sort of connections
is help to tell that story more effectively.
I think I heard somewhere, and you can correct me if I'm wrong,
that you know, you at one point had like assembled a PowerPoint
that you were giving in different places and that
PowerPoint was sort of the kernel that ended up being
Dancing or his book Starvation. Is that true?
Look, I I know Nan and Saul a long time, they are brilliant,
but they've done for Israel is incredible.
Yes, I gave that PowerPoint presentation to a group that Dan
brought to Israel from Harvard. Saul was think my analyst did
Israel seed when we were still in the basement phrase together
with Michael Eisenberg and Neil Cohen.
So I I love those guys. They they really did.
And then huge, huge thing for Israel in terms of crystallizing
what was obvious to people like me and others and putting it
into a book and launching really the brand of Startup Nation.
There's something that I've thought about a lot and I think
you'd be a great person to to weigh in on this.
You know, we're here in Strathalmar, we're counting
towards, you know, Chef Vote and Mamad Harseenai.
And, you know, it seems pretty clear to me that a Kurdish bar
who didn't, you know, choose the Jewish people at Harseenai in
order to be the home for Nvidia's next R&D center.
You know, it's, it's great. It's important for our economy
and for our development and our world standing.
But you know, from from that angle, it's the means unto other
ends and not a inherently spiritual valuable process.
It's it's, it's, it's wonderful, but not like the core of what
we're all about as a nation. Am I thinking about this wrong?
Would you say it differently? Is there more spiritual and
religious value in our in our framework, in the way you see
it, Israeli startup scene and and our role as a nation among
among the world? Absolutely.
Look, I believe very strongly as a religious person between the
connection of the Rishalai Mushala Mata and the Rishalai
Mushala. You can't separate them in
Kamakh, in Torah, OK? And the fact is that we need to
have a robust economy so that people can live good lives and
have time for Torah. And and yet we look, there's
nothing in our tradition that loves or embraces poverty and
the notion that Israel should be a nation of poor people
essentially subsisting on the halukah that died hundreds of
years ago. We are not going to survive on
the devote. We always ask for it in all of
our prayers. You know, Parnas, Parnasa, not,
you know, not sadaqa. We learn in fact, that the
greatest form of Sedaka from the Rambam.
Rambam is the fact that you teach somebody a skill so they
can get a job. And therefore there is a huge
spiritual dimension of building the Land of Israel, building
companies, building the future. And I dare say that creating
technologies that will solve pollution, that will help with
the energy crisis that will feed the planet, that will solve
healthcare, that will make children learn better.
All of this is God's work and it's clearly got a spiritual
element. My father wrote a book called
The Hidden Light about the Torah in science, and his premise, and
I believe in it fully, is there is no contradiction between the
having a Torah outlook and a scientific outlook.
OK. I'm a believer in what's going
on at Mahon Lab, which is such a Kedusha sham where you have the
cutting edge of science and technology together with very,
very solid Torah learning and Torah principles.
And the notion that you have to separate these two is wrong,
completely wrong. In fact, it's not just a modern
phenomena. If you look at the A vote, they
were all entrepreneurs. Abraham was coved but sown.
Abraham amassed wealth. He was an evangelist.
He spread the good news about Hashem.
OK. His son Yitzhak was an
incredible hydrologist. He built wells.
He was the water Mccarrote expert of his time.
Yaakov Avinu was a biotechnologist.
Look what he did with his son and creating proper breeding.
And his son Yosef was Lamashvir was the public private
partnership, a great leader, economic and political.
There is no reason to believe that these two things have to be
separated. They are in our DNA.
If Israel was not the startup nation, if Israel was not the
light unto the nations with this incredible becerra of NVIDIA.
NVIDIA is not a small thing. NVIDIA is the most valuable
company in the world, and the most valuable company at the
heart of the most important revolution of AI chooses to
build its most important Research Center in Israel.
That's something that not just Israel and Jews worldwide should
be proud of, but every religious person should be proud of this
because this is fulfillment of prophecy.
That's really fascinating. And I, I, I, I, I'm really blown
away by the response. And, you know, you actually
lumped in a few different religious values that I want to
maybe just point out in that answer and then maybe put them
together in a sense, You know, you said in Kama, in Torah that
each, you know, individual in the nation needs sustenance and
shouldn't be poor. That's sort of 1 aspect #2 you
mentioned that Yushuva RX, the fact that we are commanded to
build up this country and the Star Nation is one of the, the,
the primary vehicles that we've been doing to, to build up this
country and make it as strong and powerful.
And then the third thing is that, you know, some of the
technologies may, not all of them are helping to solve some
of the world's problems to Kunolam, creating solutions to
various story issues around the globe by use of technology.
But maybe, you know, putting them together, listening to you
describe, you know, so eloquently these three things,
the fact that, you know, and this is what startup Nation is
all about. Such a small besieged country
with no natural resources is able to become a world leader
through this thing. Is that also part of our sort of
historical destiny to be so such a great nation, despite, you
know, physical specs that are so underwhelming?
And the startup Nation is also sort of putting these things
together and creating a a somewhat of a world power, a
small power well beyond what we should.
Is that also sort of part of the historical arc, the way you see
it? Of course it is.
I mean, look, why do you believe that about 40% of the Nobel
Prizes in the sciences are in Jewish hands?
Is that an accident? Do you know what that means?
We are 2/10 of a percent of the world population 0.2 and yet we
have 40% of the Nobel prizes in the sciences.
A ridiculous percentage of billionaires, so much in the
entrepreneurship or big companies were built by Jews
that are changing the world for the better.
So much in charity, in the building of hospitals, in the
building of schools and universities.
This is because that's what Jews do and we don't do enough.
Both talking about Israel, but about Jewish greatness about
that Jews have to create. We learned that the world was
not perfect in six days. We have what to do are the the
the Malachi is still to be done. We have work to do.
We did. We have to learn.
We have to study our sources, but we've got to create.
We have to be partners with Hashem.
We are, we are partners in terms of building this wonderful,
beautiful planet and I dare say planets beyond that.
That's what we have to do. And to not do so is to, I think
to turn your back on our tradition.
Our tradition is about creation and about innovation.
Our whole lives have been about innovating, but not rootless
innovation where we are informed by our past, we're enriched by
being part of this long chain. And that when you're building a
company here in Israel or elsewhere, as a Jew is a proud
Jew, you're conducting up all these hundreds and thousands of
years going backwards, but now you're connecting to the future.
And so when you ask me, you know, what am I?
What am I most proud of? I'm proud that I'm part of this
chain. I'm proud that I have a family,
that I'm so proud of my children and grandchildren, my wife.
And I'm proud of the people who I've been able to enable with
funding or teach how to build companies and how to create
innovative technologies. Wow.
So I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, some people might
be a little harder to convince that the, there's a Direct Line
between Harcena and the startup Nation, you know, would be that
if you think about the world of innovation, you could divide
technology broadly into, you know, 3 buckets.
There are technologies that are clearly making people's lives
better, you know, mobilize. Just one example, you know,
there were 1000 people dying by car crashes per month and now
there are 300 because of a technology like mobilize that's
bucket, you know, one bucket Two, though, is, you know, the
technology that allows this zoom to be slightly faster, slightly
sharper, I don't know, maybe sort of, you know, values
neutral technologies that are, you know, not clearly of great
value. And then there's also the third
bucket, which is technologies that are actually doing real
harm or, you know, causing people to waste time, get
addicted to certain things, you know, think about, you know,
sports gambling apps just as a as a as a one example.
So, you know, people don't view the technology world necessarily
as something that we should embrace or just view as our core
religious identity because a technology bag is so mixed with
between some technology which are so amazing and so wonderful,
but also some which are neutral and some which are destructive.
So what would you respond to someone who's taking that as
you're describing? Look, I think it's technology is
like anything, you have to deal with it in moderation and
carefully. I love wine.
I like single mouth Scotch, but if you do too much, it's really
bad. You know, I think that exercise
is really important and but if you are completely obsessed,
that's too much. OK.
I think that there are so many things that are good about
technology and when I think about how people are using
technology to be able to get access to Svarim and it's text,
how people are getting Shirim online, how people are cluing
into a Shiva overseas, OK, there is so much that you can use, but
obviously you can abuse this stuff and you have to avoid the
abuse. We have a big responsibility to
combine our ethics and our morality with technology so we
don't abuse it. But to say no technology, Let's
go back and live the way we lived in Poland or the Ukraine
or in Morocco 200 years ago. No, thank you.
That's not going to work and it's not smart and it's not
Jewish. Yeah, people also tend to over
romanticize what life was actually like back then.
It's a lot worse than they wanted, they want to admit.
I want to transition to me one last section to this
conversation, which is that, you know, you have recently, you
know, transitioned out of the CEO role of our crowd, which you
occupied for many, many years due to health challenges which
you've sort of been open about. And so has that transition been
hard for you to go from sort of a full, full speed ad CEO to
someone who's sort of take a little more of a backseat
overseeing more strategic things in the company, but not
day-to-day day operations? Look, I've I've been productive
for most of my life and I've still got a lot of life left.
Do you have this sort of nasty disease?
ALS. But I'm not letting it to find
me. And while I can't work 141618
hours a day like I used to, I'm still putting in a good eight to
10 hours a day and actually opening up all kinds of new
projects which I'm working. I'm still helping companies.
I'm still very much a member of the board and our crowd and
wishing it well and helping. But there is so much to do, not
just for specific companies, but for Israel and for the
technology scene here, successful in bringing billions
of dollars into this economy and being involved in the funding of
hundreds of hundreds of companies and providing
literally thousands and thousands of jobs.
But there's a lot to do. We have huge challenges in terms
of our image abroad, in terms of people's ignorance about Israel
or the Jewish people. We have to deal with this and we
have to make sure that we strengthen our infrastructure
and in particular our social solidarity.
We have to be united to face these challenges.
We have to learn to stop arguing all the time and to love each
other and to see the beauty in Ami Israel in all of its
aspects, because it is beautiful and we are Hashem's people and
we have a great, great future. Wow, that's, that's really
beautiful and you're wishing you continued good health and then
you should feel good and have strength to continue the
important work that you're doing, you know, having this
awful diagnosis of ALS. What how is that?
How is your sort of faith helped you?
Have you learned anything new about faith that you didn't
before that you'd want to impart on to your children, your
grandchildren, based off of this new perspective on life that you
now have? Look, I was very sick when I
went to the hospital about 8 months ago.
I flat lined at the hospital and was resuscitated and brought
back after 8 minutes. Thank God my boys were there and
they literally encouraged the doctors to keep trying and they
succeeded in bringing me back. So I think anyone would ask
themself after an event like that, OK, you've been brought
back. What?
What does that mean? And for me, for me, it means
that I'm not done. There's still what that I have
to accomplish. And I'm very, very determined to
do so. I still have a lot of work to
do. We all do.
And the one thing my father blessed memory, his favorite
joke, someone who asked, what would you like them to say at
your hospital? You say that's an easy question.
They should get up and yell, hey, he's moving, OK.
The idea is that you should always live and as long as
you're moving, as long as you're breathing, you have to be
productive. My father worked literally until
the week before he died at age 83.
He fought a nasty disease, non Hodgkin's lymphoma, for 14 years
and survived. And a couple of weeks before he
died, we celebrated his second bar mitzvah at age 83, because
we believe that Melt David at age 70 had a life.
At age 83, you get celebrate a second bar mitzvah.
And my father read from the Torah most magnificently.
We had a big party about the week before he died.
He died on Shushanpuram and at that party he was talking about
his new startup. He had built many startups and
he was already planning the biggest one.
That's how I want to go. I want to continue to work, be
productive to help people to meet the challenges which we
have and they are significant, and go out doing what I love,
surrounded by my beautiful family and friends and continue
to be part of this marvelous people and nation that's
beautiful and you know. This conversation has been
filled with so many great, you know, perspectives and advice
for people who are sort of starting out in their careers.
And I know you said you have a lot of work still to do, so
we're going to let you, you know, go do that in a few
minutes. But me, if I could ask, you
know, one more question, which is someone who's sort of
starting out their career nowadays, what other sort of
core piece of advice that we haven't touched on yet, would
you want them to sort of have at the front of their mind as
they're embarking on their journey?
Whether it's, you know, anywhere where especially people who are
in Israel starting their careers, don't be stuck.
In a specific role, embrace reinvention.
Realize that you have to continually re educate yourself
and change. That's the only constant is
change. Stay true to your principles,
stay true to the Torah, stay true to your role and the Jewish
people, but learn to absorb the fact the world changes
constantly. And so today, if you're not
embracing AI, if you're not learning about quantum, if
you're not thinking about defense technology or energy or
clean tech or food deck or all these things which are and
what's going on in the health area, which are changing the
world, then you're, you're keeping your eyes closed.
There is so much opportunity. Don't be depressed, don't be
discouraged, move forward and you can do it.
John. It's been a fascinating.
Conversation. I usually end up with a very
quick rapid fire round. 3 short questions, three hopefully short
answers. We're in the summer, we have
nice long shops, afternoons. What do you like to do at that
time? I like to read books.
Amazing. And Speaking of books.
Do you have a favorite book on the partial that you go back to
you to look for inspiration, guidance, or just thing
interesting? I like Rabbi Sacks.
Amazing. And finally, if you.
Were forced by gunpoint to leave the startup world, find some new
profession, new job, anything in the world that maybe something
you do to doing as a kid or something you got a little bit
of itch to try out. What would that be?
I want to be involved. In telling Israel's story, I
want to help Israel improve its message and its image.
OK, amazing. John, thank you for.
Doing this, we really appreciate it and wishing you continued
good health. And I'd slack one off the
wonderful thing you're doing and I'm sure the listeners are going
to really love this conversation.
I mean, it was a pleasure.