When the going gets tough, the community gets going

yes first of all thank you for staying this long this is highly appreciated yes uh do I get a timer sorry do I get a timer yes control give in bar some time on the clock it should be a than okay so when they're going get stuff the community gets going if you know then the theme of this year is uh together we hack right it's all about how the community responded to things that happened um in October so uh this talk is going to have three parts and each part is going to have a dedicated speaker my co-speaker are backstage and the first one is talking about the community now trigger warning this will make references to October 7th

so be prepared um that's the only photo that that we're going to have from there at least me um but this is basically how it's all started I mean I remember waking up to the alarm and then about an hour later the WhatsApp group of the building already had this going on and I was like there's no way stop spreading stuff wait until the evening and uh what actually happened is that uh it was a Saturday right so the following day on a Sunday we all woke up to this uh and we realized that we are at a war now usually um Wars is Wars are something that don't need to affect civilians the whole concept of AR army military is

that the the armies fight and the civilians go on with their lives um but something didn't go as planned on that day as you all know and uh the the first response was none there wasn't any First Response and rather quickly people started realizing that uh things need to be done otherwise it's not going to get good and then a few things that we have as as as Israelis started playing or taking place in the game the first one everybody knows the Six Degrees of Separation it all started with Kevin Bacon it was like a research and and a theory and everything which basically says that you can get from any person in the world to Kevin Bacon or any other

person for that matter in six steps well in Israel it's two and sometimes even less so that's one thing we have going for us and and the second one is that every one of us in this small country has between three and five different circles and sometimes even more I didn't list all of them of of people that they know now maybe some of the circles overlap maybe they don't overlap but maybe we've been in the military and we know people maybe we went to the Academia got our first or second or third degree so we met a few people there we have family and friends people that have been going with us like my co

speaker Ed and we know each other from 1991 which is a long time ago um some of the people we met in our career we worked with them uh they were our colleagues and some of them as you will find out later are portfolio companies of investors and that's going to be in the second part but we all have a bunch of circles of people we know and these are not very small circles this is a small country we know a lot of people so so the if you have to sum up the benefits that we started with on that day I sum it up in resourcefulness and usually it means one thing but in our

case it actually meant a few first of all well yeah resources people put in money people put in time people put in their TI the ties those people from the circles infrastructure people helped with infrastructure like uh you will see examples like internet um headcount to put people that work on something because things in order to get things done you need headcount right and people just threw that all in without even thinking and all of a sudden there was this unique situation where a lot of resources were put into this this one focused effort and that has great benefits Innovation we are very good because of the life here to come up with solutions to low resource and high constraint

situation that's our life we do that even when driving we do it in the supermarket we do it when we travel abroad we do it in the military that's just how our mind is wired because this is life here so that Al also is a very important skill and we havea we don't mind going to people that we don't know and say Hi I'm doing something and I need your help and this is very important because it enables you to go outside of those five circles that I've shown before and one last thing is we have a GTD attitude to get things done it's like it needs to be done we will do it I don't know how I don't know

what it's going to cost but we're going to do it because it matters and this uh this is a very important factor and of course in this particular situation social networks played a very big part in bringing those people together in creating those connections and building ad hoc networks that enabled us to do things right so I'll start with the two largest scale events okay a let's put politics aside they had a whole infrastructure for their operations before the war and then when the war started everything just pivoted into helping people okay okay they had this war room in BK I spent a couple of days there it was amazing it was a room with people and you could hear the

explosions in Gaza and people went got people from their houses under Fire I met a guy Lonnie if you ever see this he's over 60 he was in s matal he goes out he comes back with a bunch of people and he casually tells me yeah we ran into some uh terrorists or some firefight but it's nothing we've been through like we've been through right it's it's nothing for us that's what these people did so that's a very big operations and not only what they did in the South they also had not far from here a very big operation of getting supplies to people now that is a movement that had the infrastructure beforehand but

danaat she's a blogger and when the war started she used her circles and her influence to build an operation almost overnight that took care of many many problems of uh lack of supplies of all kinds all over the country we had real-time rescue this is something that I will leave Eden to speak about this was a thing that helped people in real time and rescued them from their houses and then the flood started after the big things came a lot of little things um I asked for my friends from my circles to give me examples and that's what I'm sharing with you I will let you guys read I will say it in English for

those who don't speak Hebrew so we started with the technology to the rescue um there was a group of people that uh helped people who lost relatives that they were maybe killed or kidnapped or missing or whatever and they used their technical skills to get data out of their mobile phones to try to track where the the the the hostages were that was one thing that happened um more technology People Help uh other people check links a lot of people were getting links sometimes they were good sometimes they were bad so that that also helped uh a lot of um drones there were many efforts involving drones um one group brought star internet star isn't even officially

support in Israel and they brought him to one of the settlements in the South to give them internet to support peripheral cameras right we have that um and then came the things that are for people that were already rescued that had B business problems didn't get any money left their houses there was a whole array of of initiatives that helped people um there's a group that has 30 volunteers and almost 60,000 um subscrib subcribers that just helped people in whatever they needed and that is a very big thing that the community did to everything now even the military was using volunteers people helped the military with drones with data recovery with almost anything you can think of skills that people had in

their civilian life they gave to the Army um again a lot of drone stuff uh overlooking and rescuing and searching for things these these all initiatives came from people and right before I pass on uh the mic to my uh fellow speakers I want to tell you this is one of the things that made me very proud to be an Israeli when things happen I had the opportunity thanks to Eden to be a part of one of these things and it's help get over the feeling of helplessness when you see something like this happening and you feel like there's nothing you can do these are the initiatives that let you do something and feel like you're making a

change

then so I'll start off by embarrassing a person from the crowd I'm really proud my son won and part of the group of the second place so whoos like next generation and I totally agree with inar right the feeling of helplessness post October 7th was just immense right I actually slept through the morning of October 7th I was working the night before and I didn't even see the Rockets but something sped up and that's the story I'm going to talk about today which is Kim showed us what a group of Highly dedicated people could do in less time resources and everything than any project they could imagine it's a group of 30 people that build a full command and control system

on a country scale deployed at the Army bases that was just shocking but really to understand that this is the one project I never wanted to be used right in all my life I always built stuff and what gave me back is people using it but inim I didn't realize what was going on this is an email I got somewhere night of October 7th night of that Saturday from a person called Tom Tom is new york-based he was the CEO of Thompson Reuters and he sends me a message about Ami Daniel Amy Daniel is a CEO of windward a company I set on the board of that CEO is a hero supposed and I'm trying to understand like he's a Navy

guy like what would he be doing in Gaza but it was more hero than I expected and these are actual screenshots that were going on Amy just created a Google form managed to send it to all the kib and through a actually found a connection so he was whatsapping with a madim right and directing them where to go where are people stranded and save dozens hundreds of people and not just this specific person it's also a complete family

[Music]

[Music] and not just families H Kim this is this is from Sunday if I recall already where there were 400 people stranded and he was direct near and he was directing the Army specifically to the places where people were being held or people that were just there and it's like it's almost shocking that a person at that point it was a group of 10 people but that was rescuing these amount of people but then while the government obviously is working on whatever is that they were working on we got together Aton Ami Daniel's house a group of 30 people that were just running this operation and of course this was on the dining room table

because kbim have no street names so it's like at the second Cal turn left right that's basically so this is aiel photos and we were using those in order to understand where people were and to direct the Army again over WhatsApp and of course I screwed up so second day that was going on I volunteered was thinking through how we distribute as many Google forms to the people but this happened so a group I was told there was a fighting going on and I had an open channel to the IDF so I started directing the soldiers there and we couldn't find the person that was supposedly within the fight 90 Fighters there no fighting so what really happened there

is that Kamas actually there was a fight there earlier Kamas took a phone and basically misdirected us and thankfully that was not an ambush right but that could have been an ambush and this is the second day and this taught me that we actually need a bad actor's detection layer which I'll speak about so when we were building the app the the series of the structure Bad actors actually became a really important part of what we were doing and we integrate into social frame databases of sorts so we can ask people when we know who they are in order to make sure this is not the Hamas but I I could have killed people too

so that was happening so suddenly people hear about what was going on and we started getting more and more requests and it wasn't just about about rescuing people from kibu it was also about ashalon people that were that had a missile hit their home and needed uh in order to be uh res yeah rescued or removed we had to scale this thing so Neil the president of Wix just assigned some of their best Engineers so designer product and and to this day these are some of the best people I know know uh Fiverr as well Monday as well I'll show you some stuff and this is this team initially just took vacation days until we understood this is

actually a critical project that we needed to build and it will take time though within a week we had this so from a Google form that was just totally random and a spreadsheet of who we approached be it theek be it the army so from that kind of infrastructure this is a location based service uh it actually has uh session management so we can actually even track and continue the discussion of the communications with the people that were stranded and this was up within a week um which was pretty good but this actually monday.com has been for anyone that is involved they have built amazing command control there have been I think at at the outset there

were about 100 to 50 such command and control systems and a team there came helped us and we built something that could actually hold 50 people at the command Control Center and this is probably mid through week two that we could already handle more than 50 people at the same time including the Bad actors so we can validate that and then become a router in order to Route things to AEK or the army or whatever so we started scaling that up this is act you start thinking about this as a product right this is week two and we're thinking how we're scaling this in how we teach people and the amount of volunteers have been immense

like the number of people that wanted and like top quality people that just wanted to be on the phone in order to help people which is like amazing and you're seeing here I think it was the first lesson or the first uh crash course course of how we operate the system programming programming wild missiles programming wild missiles um we still to this day have no idea who that is but there only one and then sh became real so you can see on the right this is uh obviously blacked out but this is someone from the malal saying uh hey first Rockets identified coming in from the north uh you need to start collecting the information of security

people in the northb now think of it we're a bunch of civilians right and someone from the government telling us uh we don't have those lists uh but we need to we might need to distribute your Kim system to these people so can you collect the list of the security Personnel in North fine we did that and the Army came and that kind of changed uh so up until that point think there have been bunch of Kim doing amazing work and we're at the process of just building the system that we don't want to be used and the Army hears that and says we want to install it in all uh kakim up north because if things hit the

fan we need your system so they start they came in and there have been many soldiers there and we developed then another layer which is a GIS system this is week three uh this GIS system can aggregate all incoming requests throughout the country wherever they come from and display them in a way that allows us to pass certain calls to the Army other calls to and we at that point we integrated with other entities that we could direct the traffic or direct the incoming calls after we validated them and were able to collect all the relevant information so this GIS system was then installed in uh a bunch of army locations this was Army specific and

because that happened uh we had to block our floor Fiverr were hosting this at this point Mika the co Fiverr is the general manager for this project right so we all have jobs but at that point we're just running through the this preparing for the North Front at which point my girlfriend that was doing the marketing for this and I'll show you in a second says why is the north the problem uh isn't Jaffa or the areas in y shamon aren't they a problem as well and that was really I have to say that was the first point in time that I felt threatened personally uh in just building the system literally I remember I couldn't fall asleep that night

because suddenly I realize I'm a customer of whatever it is that we're developing it's no longer just escapism of building something in order to feel empowered it's we're actually threatened as well at that point in time so that floor because of the army integration was shut off and uh we were working there and and because that was happening you can see this is becoming like software engineering like building a product so we have a road map we have specific uh channels that we work with we have a to-do list and this became so we had another Monday board in order to manage the project and we started integrating with other Monday boards in order to pass calls because we started

getting calls that were not related to rescue so we became so we install we had an llm just understanding what it is that people want and just integrated to other uh systems or other centers and we're just pushing requests up to them so this became like a BDC aggregation tool of a location base I'm at this location and I need this food or I need this delivery so it became kind of that through this and we started publishing it to make sure that people when they need it especially if it happens up north they can get the app they know where it is but at the end game we actually had a agreement with the media channel is that if there are

attacks they will include our information within the broadcasting which again the think of it is insane that a group of people that three weeks before that had no intention of building this but this is all about Israel as the ability to get to basically anyone and everyone which is what we felt including the commander of Puda Olf and and everyone else everyone wanted to listen at that of course it's uh this is so my 12-year-old actually sent we had to create incentives for people to work harder so sugar is always a good thing and this is one of the stand-ups I have no idea what Roi is laughing about but he's one of the best Engineers I've

worked with in my life uh from from Wix but this is just part of the team that at that point was working we were doing our daily uh we're doing our daily but it takes a village right so what happened after that is we kind of realize that that is an infrastructure that we build when bring a company an Israeli company do last mild delivery and I think inbar actually met them uh what farama they said hey how about we install this in all cars related to so it became a command and control system of everyone that was driving around so they can have a button a rescue button where they were helping out people but they were threatened as

well so what you're seeing on the left side is a document I actually wrote for the integration so that any system any of the other systems any of the command and control can integrate uh with us but then other things started happening so people heard about the bad actors's detection like and then they said well we have a problem in the WhatsApp groups ofek and other like all Logistics and so we started decoupling some that some of the system that we built and operationalizing it in allowing people to scan for Iranian bots on WhatsApp groups right which you wouldn't expect and after another request another request we kind of realized that the real thing that we needed to supply as a

takeaway and it really relates to what Inbal said is we were able to get to almost anyone uh be it the mosad be it theal be it at resources uh Cloud providers zapier that was our data layer the CEO just gave us free stuff and so we we started thinking of like how can we expose that to other projects in order to speed those up and not just have our resources hidden uh with us being able to get to the people with that have authorization for vests right crazy stuff and so uh we actually took the infrastructure that we built and provided it to everyone else and just navigating the network getting access to people because the real currency we had

at the point is trust people trusted us because we were building something that was useful and it still is the one thing I never want to be used right but it did get our agency back right all that team it was at the height it was 50 people and we all felt that we're doing something that matters and what it is that that group will never forget working on that together and even months after uh we're still meeting we're still discussing and we're still operationalizing the system to for other customers and hopefully not not for anything soon but I'll leave you with what one of my kids wrote randomly because I I was just not there I was

working on the project all the time and just coming back and seeing him writing this 12y old at the time it just meant for me that there is a future and that what we're building and our agency is important and that's it for me thank you Edan thank you Eden thank you so much and congratulations again to ofk for doing so well in the CTF and now it's the final part part three of our closing keynote love thank you after which I'd love to have the besid Aviv crew on stage for a little moment but first let's hear from Idan tendler Idan are you good are you ready while he's getting he's not yet ready so I'll tell

you a little bit that Idan tendler he is the founder of bridge crew which was acquired by pal Alto networks and in his role now in pal Alto networks hean come stand next to me here hean spends a lot of his time on initiatives that are helping bring more people into the technology ecosystem including people from a really religious Jewish Orthodox background such an important Mission thank you for being with us today Idan thank you K we appreciate it thank you let's smile to the camera quick oh sorry okay yes um so actually this is like the last one right Karen closing okay so actually I'm I'm going to talk more about the future like

what is the most important role of the Israeli Tech from now on but before before I do that I need to talk a bit about my history so you will understand how come I you know from being a cyber security entrepreneur found myself dealing with that so it's like almost three years ago you remember these times covid right so I'm in SFO San Francisco me and Dona are going back home after seven years that we lived we used to live in San Francisco Palo Alto networks uh is acquiring my start up and we're coming back to Israel with three kids actually till these days we have no idea where is the third one um but trust

me uh she came with us um and we were coming back and I find myself in paloalto networks like a big corporate you know that the biggest cyber security company of the world the biggest cyber security R&D Center in Israel and you know you it's a new company for me and I'm like um trying to get to know everybody right so I'm like in a big meeting room I remember that uh and I'm asking them like yeah you tell me uh where where did you come from and this guy told me yeah I'm from uh A200 time yeah that's cool I'm from time as well and you uh I'm from time and you I'm from time as

well and you I'm from and you know it's a I raised my like what how come everybody's like uh and I remember someone told me noan you know it's we have more people you know you need you need to talk to him and and I'm asking him where are you from and he's he's from Mam and like what and you know it's a now I understand it's it's a big cyber security company actually we grew so fast mainly uh thanks to Acquisitions right and when you acquire small startup so you know people are kind of the same but then I understood that what I just saw in that meeting room is not something unique to us it's something

that is unique unfortunately to the entire tech industry in Israel on one hand we are like the most coolest growth engine of the economy everybody wants to be in the tech by the way do you know how many people in in Israel actually work in the Israeli Tech how many no but in numbers how many people how many Israelis actually walk in the tech how much I'm like a stand up here what less than a million quarter million so the number no first of all nobody knows but it's something like 400,000 people that's it 400,000 people this is the number think about how much noise do we do do how much noise do we create but it's not

that we just create noise the tech is the biggest growth engine of the Israeli economy and it will be and it should be but how come only 11% 11% of the Israeli population that actually work work in the tech and then you know I started to talk to friends from other companies and I understand that you know on one hand yeah yeah we are amazing and you know you see the numbers but then when you drill down into the numbers you see that one quarter of the Israeli population live in the North and in the South 25% of the Israeli population right they live in the North or the South but when you look at the number of employees in the tech

industry that actually live in the North or the South it's 12% this is like an unacceptable Gap and then I asked myself how come like how come and I understood that you don't need to start you don't need to analyze the data now you need to look at the universities right let's see the universities who is actually taking like computer science and engineering this is like an example of a number and probably you will get the message if you look of at all the students that live in Rana by the way same Asia and Ron same as mod by the way same as something like 35% in universities and colleges they take computer science but if you look to

atot at k k it's 18% so you know we shouldn't be surprised right that you don't see these guys are people from the North and the South in the tech and you know we can go actually back to high school this is something I really really like and I just saw it uh this is like statistics of the students that actually got bot in the entire state of Israel now it's not like it's not just that they took bagrut they had buut in Tech uh in other words in uh math English physics or computer science now look at the Gap the number of students that actually got this b bch or in English stem in Tel

Aviv versus the South now this is relatively like I don't know two years ago so we shouldn't be surprised in 10 years from now that we see students that we see or I would say employees in the tech many more that are from Tel Aviv and not the South now Israel is a tiny country I used to live in San Francisco relative to Israel relatively sorry to United States Israel is like a County right or like a small County these gaps in our small country do not make sense Israel is too small to justify them and we have to fix them and this is where I understood that you know there is a pain and there is is

a need and maybe I could help with that and this was the time to build another startup but this time it wasn't around cyber security it was a social startup and we named it place place because of the place and placement and play we founded it two years ago and this is like a nonprofit that actually combined all the Israeli Tech together to bring people from under represented groups in other words people from the periphery a population Ultra Orthodox Ethiopians Drews into the tech we do three things and I will you know do it really quickly because you will get it first is like One-Stop shop if you're a tech company I'm looking for the next biggest best

front-end engineer play is like One-Stop shop you could find all the talents that could fit your specific role from under represented groups okay second we're doing screening so you know we don't care who are you who you know where are you coming from if you learned in a college that nobody heard of we don't care we don't care about your past we don't care about your CV like throw it away we don't care all we care is about the potential we want to understand what is the potential of this Talent could this Talent relatively Young probably Junior right could this Talent be the best talent in the Israeli Tech in 5 to 10 years and we're doing it

with test that I will explain in a second and the third thing we're doing internship program you know you're junior that's okay everybody started you know as Juniors uh you know here's a tech company here's a team actually here's a team lead you will start a new position in the tech for one year this is internship we will pay you actually play sale we will subsidize 50% of your salary just get the experience and this is eventually what play sale is doing um I mentioned the test uh and you know you will definitely appreciate that because it's not something we in play Elber actually it's something that the entire Community CTO and VPR ands and

team leads we built it together and the test event eventually throw away the CV throw away the resume and for each Talent we create like a huge really cool profile professional if you learn to write code if you you know you say you're AI experts we will test that but we will also test the potential you know how much motivated U are you um today I mean two years ago it was a dream these are the companies today that work with play actually this morning two additional companies joined this and this is exciting and we have like lots of success and um you know dozens of new Juniors that came to Tech but then October 7th

came and in October 7th like everybody here like in ba like Eden we ask ourselves what should we do what should we do now when October 7th came and for me there was like aha moment and this was the moment you know have you met alone in the past Alon is the mayor of zot Alon davidi and I came like all the tech leaders you know we came to yamama and we came to a lot and we wanted to help and to volunteer and Alon told me one sentence that I will remember for the entire of my life it all it saw that I'm coming from the tech because I was with my my uniform the

black T-shirt and Alon told mean that's that's great that you're coming now to help but nobody cares you need to come post war you need to be here after the war ends you need to build the tech industry in the RO in the negative you need to create jobs if the tech industry won't be the root in the day after nobody will be in the root and I understood that we have a mission we the tech industry we play sale have a mission the road is not that far away you know I did this road so many times in the last I don't know eight months it's only 1 hour and 10 minutes sometimes more sometimes less this is

not periphery guys if you will tell someone from Silicon Valley that one hour from Santa Clara 1 hour from San Francisco it's a periphery they will laugh at you 1 hour is not a periphery it's in our minds and we need to change that we initiated the tech the Israeli Tech negtive fund this is the first fund of the Israeli Tech and we have a clear goal we have a clear goal we are going to create 400 new jobs in Western netive of the Israeli Tech you know we the tech industry we have plenty of jobs but we have only one job job that nobody else can do and this is to create jobs and

this is what we're focusing on these days and it's really new but we already have success we already have success stories Fus she's from Rahat we decided I didn't mention that that we're not going only after zot we're going after the entire Western from ashon to toim to to the Kim to R Fus is now working in armies if you heard about that amazing company Fus learned in sapir college and like other people from the periphery that learn in colleges usually unfortunately their dream is to be interviewed in companies we're you know I will be very honest we're kind of snobs right when you see somebody that learned from that learn in college or is

from rat usually you want even invite them to interview it doesn't make sense we had the same thing with Noam as you probably saw no is from kir we already expanded it to the North no learned computer science in telai M High her dream was to be interviewed in the tech industry we tested these guys with our screening methods we saw they are amazing amazing Norm is now working in autonomous pivot in computer science role for them it's the first opportunity to prove themselves and to get experience the last example I want to show is this incredible guy Kai is from ntiva Kai is a survival of the massacre of October 7th and we love him because he's so

brave to talk about that he learned computer science in m ashalon he's from nativa Asar and he's also talking about his um anxiety uh attacks since October 7th and due to them it was extremely hard for him to pass interviews in the T we tested high and now high is walking in Risky fi now this morning I just mentioned it but additional two guys from the neev joined the Israeli Tech without initiative eventually this is the new role of the tech industry guys this is our role together as as Community we have to create an equal opportunity to everybody it doesn't make sense that if you an Arab if you're Ultra Orthodox if you're from the north

if your parents never walked in the tech or never actually went to University it doesn't make sense that you won't get the opportunity I got and we can and we have to do that this is our responsibility we have to reconnect Israel in my teams today in your teams today there are people from all the sides of the society of Israel you know if you read the newspapers we are divided if you go into the tech teams you see that we are not divided we are working together maybe we are not we don't agree right on political issues but people from the left people from the right people religious and non-religious Ultra Orthodox Arabs Jews oim everybody

are working together it's possible and I think the tech is the only place in Israel that actually can enable that our responsibility eventually is to rebuild Israel so please join us we need more companies we need more volunteers this is a QR code we have all the details uh there and thank you uh this uh amazing day uh for the opportunity to talk to you thank you