This post was written before I build Exceptiony for revolutionizing the software talent industry through hands-on objective testing at scale.
On June 15th, I visited Israel for a business trip for the first time in my life. I stayed until the 20th of June. In this post, I’m going to share my thoughts as a proud member of the Crossover family and a Turkish national.
The story goes a few weeks back when Andy Tryba (former CEO of Crossover, now Ionic Partners) decided to visit Israel for a meeting with Pat Gelsinger (former VMware CEO, now Intel). Just like we always do, we wanted to take the opportunity and turn Andy’s Israel visit into a high-leverage business activity. I’m going to give more information on what we did but first, let me start with my impression of the Israeli people.
- Regardless of the political noise on both sides, people in Israel actually love Turks and Turkey. I had the opportunity to observe, at its core, we are actually very similar
- Israel is startup heaven. The high-tech experience is massive
- Israeli culture is direct, which makes them great communicators. This is one of the reasons why we’re interested in Israeli senior executives
- There is a serious amount of US investment in the country, you can observe the cultural influence as a result
- Unlike many emerging markets I’ve seen, everybody I met in Israel was very friendly and able to speak English fluently
- Just like Turks, Israelis are obsessed with high-quality food. This was one of the factors that made me feel at home
- Life cost in Tel Aviv is higher than in many emerging markets
Jerusalem trip
We made it to Jerusalem with the VMware crew, it was a unique experience. Special thanks to Eli Shacked (Managing Director of VMware Israel), Tamar Finkel (Cloud Sales Manager of VMware Israel), and the crew for arranging the trip and bringing the best tour guide I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Our tour guide was super successful in delivering the story of Jerusalem in a theatrical fashion.
Payoneer fireside chat
Payoneer as our great partner on the payments side of the business was a great host in their beautiful office in Israel. Andy shared Crossover's vision with young and energetic employees of Payoneer.
Special thanks to Gal Reshef for being a great moderator and Jonny Steel for making it possible.
Crossover’s executive meetup — Israel’s role in the future of work
55 Senior executives from Israel attended our exclusive meetup in Tel Aviv, The Norman Hotel rooftop. It was a great night with our business partners, Israeli senior executives, and opinion leaders.
Andy shared the vision of Crossover and explained why Israel is one of the most important talent markets for Crossover.
I must mention our Senior Vice President of Engineering & Operations, Gilad Bornstein’s name here for being a great partner for organizing this trip.
Filming with Crossover partners
Partner stories are a core element of our marketing strategy. While our Israeli senior talent shared their Crossover experiences for the future family members to join, Andy Tryba shared Crossover’s plans for Israel. Videos are still in production, we’re going to share the material in the near future.
VMware executive exchange event with Pat Gelsinger & Andy Tryba
There were lots of senior members of the Israeli high-tech sphere. This was a unique opportunity to bring together the future of work and the future of cloud in a single event. Eli and his crew did yet another great job here. Both Pat and Andy were former Intel employees now leading pioneering global companies in the IT infrastructure and talent domains.
As a strong believer of global talent, Andy Tryba is defining the Israeli senior talent as “The Generals of the future of work”. We are welcoming senior managers of Israel to join the Crossover family.
Personally, I’m looking forward to meeting Israeli talent once again in the near future.
About the writer: Founder of Exceptionly, revolutionizing the software talent industry by leveraging his unique big dataset of over 2M hands-on tested software engineers around the world.
