Erel Margalit to New York: Want to give the West Coast a battle? Partner with Israel

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“What we told New York is this, if you want to give the West Coast a battle, you partner with Israel. If the West Coast is the U.S. technology hub, if you partner with Israel you will become the international technology hub,” said Erel Margalit, the founder and executive chairman of JVP and Margalit StartUp City in a conversation with Jennifer Griffin, National Security Correspondent for FOX News at the Mind the Tech NY 2021 Conference Tuesday.

 

“We are creating a little kibbutz in Soho, we have about 35 companies in our hub, all of which are scale-up companies. We do not call it an incubator, we call it the unicorn stable. They are all $20 million, $30 million, $35 million, trying to get by. And they are connected to Jerusalem, to Tel Aviv, to Beer Sheba, to the Galilee. Cyber, AI, fintech, foodtech, healthcare IT, and each one of the centers in Israel has a desk in New York from the moment they started, and it does something because becoming international and having a presence here is so important to the leadership in technology from places around the world.”

The Jerusalem-based entrepreneur and the former Jerusalem-based Fox News correspondent also discussed the changes the Israeli capital experienced in the past two decades, experiencing violence at the turn of the century, and cultivating technology now. “When you were covering the intifada, as a parent I was afraid to send my daughters on the buses to school,” Margalit shared. “We were afraid to go into a cafe because we did not know who would come in the door and maybe blow themselves up, so for us, innovation was not only business, it was a way for the city to survive in a creative fashion.”

Watch the full conversation in the video above