Israel's Garage Geeks Gather to Hear Google's Brin

Posted by: Jennifer L. Schenker on May 16

“The ’60s gave us the Beatles, the ’70s gave us the Doors, the ’80s gave us Madonna, the ’90s gave us Microsoft Windows, and this decade gave us Google. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sergey Brin,” announced Israeli tech sector guru Yossi Vardi. A cheer went up as the Google co-founder, who made a late night stop at a dilapidated warehouse in the seedy Tel Aviv suburb of Holon on May 15, made his way through a large crowd of Israeli tech entrepreneurs who call themselves “The Garage Geeks.”

Brin, who shared the stage with a guitar-playing headless robot built by the geeks for fun, fielded a barrage of questions such as “Do you still write code?” and “Will you become Bill Gates when you grow up?”

The Holon warehouse is funded by two Israeli venture capital firms, Giza Venture Capital and Carmel Ventures, to give some of Israel’s best tech entrepreneurs a place to build non-commercial projects that might otherwise never come to life. Vardi, who has partnered in founding more than 50 Israeli high-tech companies, including ICQ, which was sold to AOL for over $400 million, brought Brin there for a purpose: to convince him that there is so much creativity and entrepreneurship in Israel that Google (GOOG) needs to to do even more business there.

Earlier in the day at the "Facing Tomorrow" conference in Jerusalem, organized by Israeli President Shimon Peres to celebrate the country's 60th anniversary, Brin shared the stage with other tech titans, including Yahoo president Susan Decker and former Yahoo chief executive Terry Semmel, as well as media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Google and Yahoo are both strengthening local teams in Israel. They have opened offices in the same building, so Decker and Brin joked about poaching each others employees. Yahoo also recently purchased an Israeli company that Vardi invested in, called FoxyTunes, for an undisclosed sum.

FoxyTunes is the third Israeli tech company started by entrepreneur Vitaly Sirota, who immigrated there in the 1990s from the Ukraine. Sirota and his brother Alex, FoxyTunes' chief technology officer, were among a sizeable group in the crowd at the Holon warehouse who have already made their fortunes in tech. By some estimates there were at least 30 millionaires in the crowd. All of them continue to hang out at the dusty, grim-looking warehouse, which is filled with soldering irons, computers, and various engine parts, to tinker and dream up new projects.

When Vardi was asked by an Israeli news reporter why he thinks Israel is so strong in tech he didn’t skip a beat. "It is because of the Jewish mothers," he quipped. "From the age of five they are asking their children, 'Is it so much to ask for you to win at least one Nobel prize?'"

Vardi himself is evidence of how Israel's influence in the tech sector goes far beyond the country's borders. ICQ was the world's first Internet-wide instant messaging service and is today used by more than 29 million people. Brin surprised the crowd by recounting that it was Vardi, a frequent visitor to Silicon Valley, who advised him on how to set up Google's extremely lucrative advertising-based revenue model. If Vardi and the garage geeks have their way, the next Google could come out of Holon.