So Long Israel

It's a bittersweet moment as today marks our last day in Israel.  On the one hand we're excited: we came here to build businesses and learn about the Startup Nation in person.  Just a few days ago we pitched our ventures in what was truly the culmination of this experience.  So as we leave Israel, we know that our departure signifies the accomplishment of the task that we set out to complete.  We can all look back on the last two months and know that we got so much from this experience.  We took an idea and turned it into a business, which is no small feat.  Throughout the process, we became master of the elevator pitch, market sizing gurus and all too well acquainted with PowerPoint's features.  

But our time here in Israel means so much more than the business skills, professional development and important people we met.  Two months ago, twelve MBA's from four different universities arrived in Israel, many of us as total strangers.  We spent nearly every moment over the course of the ensuing 8 weeks together, working, playing and living.  When we board our respective airplanes today at Ben Gurion Airport we will never again be strangers because we shared together the experience of a lifetime.  From waking up to this beautiful view out our window:

to sharing our professional and personal goals on long bus drives across the country to visit a company or attend an industry conference, to the amazing Masada sunrise:

we have all grown together in ways we never though imaginable.

At the beginning of the trip, Asher Epstein explained his philosophy on expectations: "set low expectations and over-deliver."  Well, Asher, over-deliver doesn't even begin to describe it.  This has truly been the experience of a lifetime.  Every single one of has has grown professionally and personally, we've seen and done some amazing things, and if nothing else we are walking away with a deep appreciation for this beautiful country.

So long Israel.  It's been wonderful, and I'm sure it won't be the last time.

We Did It

Eight weeks ago we arrived in Haifa, Israel with the goal of building businesses out of Technion-developed technology.  We've met with business leaders, incubator directors, venture capitalists and industry experts; we've pitched our ventures every week and received tough but important feedback; and we've had access to industry advisors and mentors whose experiences in entrepreneurship have helped us navigate the intricacies of our own industries.

Last night was the culmination of this process, as we pitched our ventures to venture capitalists from top firms such as Bessemer, Sequoia and Giza.  Simply the opportunity to pitch business plans to top VC's is great, but after eight weeks of immersing ourselves in our ventures it was nothing short of impressive.  All six of our international venture teams presented eloquently, expressing the problems our businesses solve, the markets they address and the the amount of funding required to make them profitable.  We fielded tough questions from the panel of VC's, but after two months of habituation we were perfectly accustomed to the Israeli style of questioning.

Looking back on what we've accomplished, I am very impressed by our collective progress.  Eight weeks ago we were presented with technologies in fields ranging from medical diagnostics to imaging and chemical analysis.  We've taken these scientific innovations and built real business ventures out of them.  The experience of building a business is truly priceless, and not something that many people can say they have done.  From solving the problems we've encountered along the way to understanding the motivations and thought processes of venture capitalists who fund our ventures, we now posses the tools and experiences of seasoned entrepreneurs.

The Dingman-Technion Entrepreneurship
teams after our final pitches

The New Silicon Valley

Back in May I posted about why we were coming to Israel and what we would be doing.  For those of you who have followed us these past two months, you've seen some of the great things we've done, companies we've met with, and an insight to the projects we're working on.  When we return home and complete our second year of business school, one question with which we will be regularly confronted is: Why Israel?

A recent Yahoo! News article highlights the answer to this question better than I could.  Titled "Israeli innovators build new 'Silicon Valley'", our work this summer has been focused on just that.  In a country where 500 new startups form every year, our group of twelve MBA's from Maryland, Harvard, Emory and Peking University have have worked to build six companies of our own.  We're not engineers or scientists - Israel has plenty of those (indeed Israel is home to more engineers per capita than any country in the world).  Rather, we are filling an important gap in the Israeli economy, taking innovations and building well-managed business around them.

This Thursday we will put our last seven weeks of preparation to the test, pitching our businesses to representatives from some of the world's top venture capital firms.  We will seek to raise funding for our own startups as we play a role in building the "New Silicon Valley" that is the Startup Nation.

Final Stretch

After an inspiring talk from Bessemer Partner Adam Fisher, last night we presented our financial projections and sales models to venture capitalists.  This was our last preparatory presentation before making our full sales pitch to a panel of Israel's top venture capitalists next Thursday night.  In order to make a proper fundraising pitch, we've spent the past seven weeks building up to this point.  From week to week we've studied and pitched on all aspects of our venture, each pitch building on the lessons learned the week before.

Seven weeks ago we started with our technologies and thought outside the box to build commercial applications around them.  From there we developed an understanding of the potential market sizes that our businesses could address and how our business models fit into them.  After understanding our markets, we heard from guest lecturers and then made our own presentations on the intellectual property on which our business are built and how to best protect and leverage it in our ventures.  At this point, we began to drill down to specific business-level aspects of our ventures, ranging from research and development plans, our value chain location and how to address the needs of our potential customers and partners.

In the last two weeks we've focused on the final steps of commercialization: the go to market strategy, marketing activities and our sales plan.  These specific actions allowed us to finally put financial numbers and projections behind our pitches and demonstrate not only how much money we stand to gain, but also how much funding we need to raise to get there.  With one more week to synthesize everything we've done and build a fundraising pitch to real investors, we have our work cut out for us.

Biotechnology and Food Engineering

As a part of our work at the Technion we from time to time have the opportunity to visit some of the cutting edge laboratories here to meet with Technion faculty and researchers.  Today, we visited the brand new facilities of the Biotechnology and Food Engineering Faculty housed in the Carol B. Epstein Building at the Technion.  There, we met with two brilliant professors, Esther Meyron Holtz and Uri Lesmes, who gave us an overview of their research.

Dr. Holtz prefaced her presentation to us by disclaiming the fact that she is first and foremost a researcher and that her work is therefore intended to further academic understanding and not to produce commercially viable products. With a room full of MBA students currently engaged in technology transfer, this provided us an opportunity to listen to her research through the lens of tech transfer professionals and provide feedback on potential commercial applications for the breakthroughs coming from her laboratory.

Focusing primarily on the role of iron in the body, Dr. Holtz's work has produced considerable insights into the understanding of free radicals in the body and the resulting oxidative stress that causes the human body to age.  With continued research on this topic, it is possible that her work could result in treatments for Chrohn's Disease, osteoperosis, cancer, neurodegeneration, insulin resistance and coronary heart disease.  As MBA students, we expressed to Dr. Holtz the enormous market potential of her work and encouraged her to seek intellectual property protection around which people like us could one day build businesses.

Then we heard from Dr. Uri Lesmes whose work involves the development of new techniques to produce healthier foods on an industrial scale.  With obesity reaching pandemic proportions there is a dire need to develop health foods that are not only appealing to the consumer but also affordable and commercially viable.  Much of Dr. Lesmes' work involves investigation into emulsion digestion whereby altering the chemistry of specific foods greatly affects the lipid digestion in humans.  The goal of such research is to develop emulsified foods that taste the same but result in less caloric absorption by the body.  In other word, Dr. Lesmes, asked, "Who wouldn't want to eat an ice cream that tastes the same but has half the calories?" We immediately understood that the social value and commercial value of such a breakthrough would be enormous, not to mention delicious.

At the Biotechnology and Food Engineering Faculty

Halfway Point

We’re now officially more than one month into the Israeli experience, and what a time it has been.  We’ve met the President, slept in Bedouin tents and hobnobbed at high tech and biomedical conferences.  Given this incredible diversity of opportunities, this blog has been largely dedicated to these amazing experiences.  Amid all of this, we’ve engrossed ourselves in six different technology commercialization projects.  What started as patented technologies have evolved into very strong business models.  We still have a long ways to go, but the feedback from venture capitalists, experts in the field, and of course Asher Epstein and Ze’ev Ganor, will no doubt help us get there.

On our first full day in Israel, we met the inventors of our technologies and our Israeli teammates.  In one short week we scrambled to meet with everyone we could, from the inventor and his or her colleagues to anyone with relevant experience in the field, in order to better understand our technologies and how to apply them in the marketplace.  From there, we’ve narrowed down our list of commercial applications from five to one and honed in on real market size estimates.  From our presentation skills to our business plans, every single individual has made marked and noticeable improvements over the last month.  The venture capitalists continue to poke holes in our arguments, assumptions and models, and we take this feedback into account every week.

While we are still a long ways from launching a business, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labor.  Our first presentations demonstrated how little we knew about our technologies, the industry in which we planed to commercialize them and the details of the intellectual property that protects them.  Since then, we have all become experts on our patents, performed extensive industry analyses, and become quite accustomed to the tough line of questioning that we receive during and after our presentations.  Our presentation slides are polished and professional and where it once took five minutes to explain our technology, we now have the pitch down to 30 seconds.

From financial projections to the final business plan, there is much work yet to be done prior to our final venture capitalist pitches on July 7^th.  With the training and mentoring we are receiving, I am confident we will get there.

The Daily Grind

We've been in Israel for about a month now, and one question that we consistently receive from readers of this blog, friends and family, and Israelis alike is: what exactly are you doing in Israel? The nature of our project was broadly defined in our first blog post, and I have done my best to update on the most salient and exciting trips, meetings and events. And while our busy schedule has meant that no two days in Israel are created equal, I will attempt to express how we spend our time between travel and meeting important dignitaries.

Asher meeting with the group

After a weekend generally packed with travels, meetings and a little down time on the beach if we're lucky, Monday morning the whole team heads to the Bronica Innovation Lab at the Technion. Located on the sixth floor of the Industrial Engineering and Management Building, we work on our technology commercialization strategies while sitting around a large conference-style table. Between market size research, building presentation decks and meetings with Dingman Center Managing Director Asher Epstein, our office time keeps us quite busy.

While we're at the Technion we also take the opportunity to visit the laboratories where the cutting edge research that we are attempting to commercialize originated. Here, we have the opportunity to not only tour the facilities of the Technion but also meet with the innovators behind the technologies in order to understand the scientific and commercial sides of their work.

Touring the Technion Visitor's Center

When we need a break from the rigor of our work and meetings, the team walks outside our office to enjoy the view from the roof of the Bloomfield Building. From our vantage point atop a hill, we can see all of downtown Haifa, the Old City and even a little bit of the beach. Enough to recharge our batteries and get back to work, anyways.

A Realization

A Guest Post from Shawn Latimer:

I woke up this morning to instant coffee, offset by a beautiful view of the Mediterranean off of our shared porch, and began to contemplate the task in front of us.  The first of 8 classes was last night, and the rigor and detail we need to put into our final deliverables is daunting.  These are real applications, with real opportunity to create real businesses.

And we will be part of the team that makes it happen.

Some of the technologies have potential to save lives, providing better tools across the medical industry.  But the only way to get them into the hands of the people that can use them is to produce an actual product, and then get it in front of people.  This is the best kind of synergy between inventor and business.  Sure, we would all love to make a blockbuster product that makes heaps of money.  The real value though, is in getting these techniques to market so they can save lives.

We have 8 weeks to scope out an entire business model, from initial ideas for how to use the patent all the way through to the budget and final business plan.  It’s an ambitious goal, but with the help of our Israeli classmates, and this view, I think we can make it work.