Over the past few weeks, the Smith team has benefited from a number of impromptu on-campus meetings and events at the Technion. I've covered some of these in previous posts - such as the bi-weekly e-club meetings, the business ethics seminar, and the Shai Agassi speech. Additionally, in two other instances we've been able to meet with a pair of established Israeli entrepreneurs and discuss with them, both their current and future ventures. These two meetings were very interesting and I think it's definitely worth relating a little about each meeting and describe each entrepreneur.
Photo by Stephen Kushner
A few weeks back we had a chance to meet with Gil Perlberg. Formerly a VP for Business Development at Traceguard, an Israeli military and defense technology firm, Gil is currently the CEO & Founder of a new start-up, Ceronyx. This firm, Ceronyx, develops ceramic nanocomposites that address the increasing demand for advanced ceramic products in high growth fields, such as ceramic armor, cutting tools and medical applications, including ceramic implants for the hip and knee joints. Ceronyx's development is based on a proprietary technology platform developed by Prof. Wayne Kaplan, from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. This is still very early stage - which made all that more interesting.
Last Thursday, we met with Dr. Ze'ev Ganor. Currently an adjunct professor (and one of our judges in class) at the Technion, Ze'ev has been a successful entrepreneur for many years. Over the course of an hour, Ze'ev walked us through his many past ventures, covering both his successes and failures. After his stint in the Israeli military and college at the Technion, Ze'ev began his career at Computer Consoles Inc. (CCI) a US-based voice processing and computer software firm. Through a connection at CCI, he was a principal investor with a start-up that developed a new medical technology, Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA). This technology - a precursor to the MRI - was sold to Elscint for $70 million after 4 years. After this success, Ze'ev had the entrepreneurial bug. Other significant investments and start-ups Ze'ev has been involved with have included ChipX, Nanomotion, and Fiberzone.
