This morning was an early one as we woke up just before seven in order to leave for TEVA Pharmaceuticals. TEVA is located in Petah Tikva, Israel which is about a 25 minutes from our hotel.

At TEVA, we heard from Yehuda who was born in the United States but moved to Israel when he was 18 because of Zionism. We learned much about TEVA and it became especially apparent how different TEVA is from other companies in Israel because so many are high tech start ups.

We have been learning about how there are no “giants” in Israel. Because TEVA emphasizes long term planning it has been able to grow its company globally and obtain more than 40,000 employees. This idea of long term planning is foreign to many Israeli companies and is the cause for the large amount of short exits.
We then drove on to the Google Israel R&D center to hear from Hadas Igras. One of the most important developments for Google that has come out of Israel is Google Autocomplete which we all use every time we search the internet. Israel R&D has also developed a system for live results which can be used for weather, stocks, sports updates, etc. Google also developed Google Trends which analyzes what is most heavily searched or trending on Google Search.

Google has a 20% rule which means that Google employees get 20% of their time per week to pursue any project they feel passionate about. One of these 20% projects spurred the Google Cultural Institute which archives many cultural documents and information about them. We also heard from Yossi who is the director of the R&D center who answered questions for us.

After being mesmerized by Google, we went to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange where we were very surprised by the calm and quiet of the headquarters for all of Israel’s stock exchange.
Before our last visit we stopped at Max Brenner’s to drown ourselves in chocolate and get a little sugar spike to make it through the last company tour. We really didn’t need much energy though, because the Wibbitz company of twelve employees was very energetic and extremely interesting. Their technology to convert text into video is incredible and I believe it will be utilized in countless ways in the future.

Later this evening we will be venturing to Herzliya for yet another stuffing dinner and we will be joined by fifteen or so IDC students.

Chandler,
Class of 2016
Minneapolis