Itongadol.- Meet the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs: Iddo Gino, 16, and Gil Maman, 15, worry less about their grades than about the next big startup.
A senior marketing strategist at Google visited the Internet giant\’s designer Tel Aviv offices two weeks ago, hoping to have a word with teenagers Iddo Gino and Gil Maman. He found them cleaning up trash left over from a hack-a-thon they had organized on the 26th floor of the Elektra Tower. The event had been an intensive two-day coding competition between talented young Israelis, but the remnants could have been from a high-school sleepover: empty pizza boxes, packets of instant soup and less-than-sanitary restrooms.
“He told us, ‘surely you can work at Google, and I suppose that you could also found a small startup that Google would want to buy, but we’re counting on you to come up with the next Google — that’s your mission,” said Gino the next day, in his room overlooking the Haifa bay. “So that’s my real goal — to build a huge empire, something that will change the world.”
Maman, also in Haifa, said, “By age 18, my goal is to found a company that can really help other people. I’m not interested in earning fortunes or coming up with some nonsense like [mobile video game] Candy Crush, meant only for killing time, but rather to answer some kind of real need.”
Change the future, make money
Gino, 16, is in 11th grade at Haifa\’s Reali School. Maman, 15, is in ninth grade at the nearby Alliance middle school. But their studies are only a minor part of their daily routines, which are filled with investors’ meetings, conferences, video consultations with entrepreneurs abroad and endless hours in front of the computer screen. Gino is studying for a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from the Open University (with an option to continue at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology), and Maman will start university next year. Both of them already pass out business cards, maintain Linkedin profiles and navigate the grown-up field of high-tech with ease.
“Two years ago, my dad decided I needed a suit,” says Gino. Now, I have two, for anything that might come up."
Recently, Gino and Maman decided that other youngsters with similar interests deserved a chance to display their skills, and so decided to hold the first hack-a-thon for their age group in Israel.
A hack-a-thon is a timed event, which can last anywhere between hours and a week, where entrepreneurs, programmers, developers and designers meet to build applications, computer games or anything else. Despite the name, a hack-a-thon is not a criminal hacking competition meant to crash the Pentagon’s website (“Though it can be done with three clicks,” smiles Gino), or something similar. All the code written during the event is for peaceful purposes.
Though there are many “geek Olympics” competitions in Israel, none of them are for participants under the age of 18. Gino and Maman found sponsors for the event, reserved the Google campus for the weekend, recruited mentors and judges from among Israel\’s high-tech elite, spread the word about the competition and hoped for the best.
“We wanted to show that young people in Israel aren’t only about getting drunk, fighting and stabbing each other,” says Maman.
Just before the participants were split into teams and the competition began, the organizers gathered everyone for a briefing. The guidelines were simple: Each team had two days to work on a programming project and present a working initial version of it. Another young man, who helped Maman and Gino organize the event, took the microphone to make a few more announcements. He started his remarks by declaring, “I too am a nerd."
Most of the participants arrived having already formed teams, with at least one developer, programmer and designer in each. Maman and Gino helped those who can alone connect. Demographically speaking, the Sharon and Haifa areas were well represented, and 40 percent of the participants were girls. Sophie Danilov, 17, said, “Women in high-tech have higher self-confidence than most, because they’ve already gotten past the assumptions that it’s field for men.” Danilov, who studies at a religious school in Be’er Sheva, joined a predominately female team that attempted to develop an app to facilitate supermarket shopping.