I am back in Israel in search of the country’s secret, not-so-secret weapon: world-class software engineers. For 10 years, I have invested in almost 80 startups, including twenty in Israel, like NextSilicon, SentinelOne, and Sunbit.
Over the past two decades, in my career as a founder and CEO, I have opened subsidiaries for my American companies and have probably employed 2,000 people in the United Kingdom, India, Germany, France, Romania, and Australia. But until now, I've never hired anyone directly in Israel. Not until now have I ever opened my own company in Israel itself. I am officially signing the papers this week.
Our Israel team is already three strong, and I’m on a mission to hire in Zion. My startup is called Modelcode.AI, and we are opening for business so we can hire into our subsidiary, aptly named Modelcode Chai.
Why now? What has changed? After all these years of building and investing in startups, why am I hiring in Israel now?
Let me tell you clearly: it’s not because I am a Zionist. Of course, I am a proud Zionist. But there are a thousand ways to support Israel. I’m hiring in Israel because I am a capitalist and because Israel meets this moment in hi-tech perfectly.
Hiring in Zion
Now is the moment of Artificial Intelligence. Now, more than ever is the moment that software – through a generational explosion in AI – fully eats the planet. Every single industry, from timber to Tinseltown, from farming to pharmaceuticals, will be made and remade unrecognizably in the next thirty years. All of this will happen because AI-enabled software will radically shift cost structure, enable products that were heretofore perfectly impossible, and connect dots of information that have been kept in silos since the fall of the Second Temple.
Israel is the perfect place for an essential development center in this AI revolutionary moment. It is the perfect place for Modelcode, which is building AI for AI, the DNA source code for software that transforms every field on earth. Israeli engineers and Machine Learning gurus and Artificial Intelligencers are fresh off the battlefield, experienced in inventing and assembling novel applications, and rightly confident in their abilities to solve impossible problems. This is not the AI of theory and whiteboards. This is the AI of nailing real-world solutions, of shipping products, of saying when you see an intractable obstacle, "Ein Baya." No one does this better than Americans – and Israelis.
So I am back. I’ve been here multiple times since October 7, managing investments and, importantly, for my oldest son’s Bar Mitzvah during the heinous Iranian bombardment last April. But this time I am back to hire in Zion.