fanger
Gold Member
Even in the hallowed annals of teenage hackerdom, this never-before-told story might top them all. In the early 1990s Avishai Abrahami found himself, as required for most Israelis when they graduate from high school, enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces. But Abrahami had been assigned to a division he wasn’t allowed to speak of, not even to his parents–a crack cybersecurity and intelligence team known as Unit 8200.
He was given an assignment that seemed right out of Mission: Impossible. Break into the computers of a country that remained in a state of hostility with Israel. The task contained several hurdles: First, figure out how to get into those computers; second, how to crack the encryption; and finally, the monumental challenge, how to access the “enormous amount” of computing power necessary to decrypt the data.
So here’s what Abrahami did once he thought he could breach the targeted computers: He broke into the computers of two other hostile countries and hijacked their processing power to suck out
the data held by the first target. A masterwork of spycraft–and a primitive precursor to cloud computing–done without leaving his chair in Tel Aviv.
“If we had to do it with a computer researcher,” says Abrahami, “it would have taken us a year. It took us a day. I’m trying to think what would have happened if someone had discovered it, what a crisis that would have created.”
But (until now) no one ever did. Which is consistent with a unit whose existence, until roughly a decade ago, had never even been publicly acknowledged or identified.
The public did, however, hear about Abrahami, who’s now 45. After leaving Unit 8200, he cofounded Wix, currently one of the world’s leading cloud-based Web-development platforms.
“Just from my generation, there are more than 100 guys from the unit that I personally knew who built startups and sold them for a lot of money,” Abrahami says. “There was a team of ten people in one room in the unit. I call it the magic room, because all of them created companies where the average market cap is a half-billion dollars.” Abrahami did his part: Wix’s market cap sits at $1 billion.
Ron Reiter, 31, another 8200 alum, whose startup was just purchased by Oracle ORCL +0.02% for a reported $50 million and who hails from a newer generation, tells a similar story: “There was one person who sold his startup for, like, $300 million to Apple AAPL -0.74%, and another whose company was sold to Cisco for $500 million–and these were both my roommates in Unit 8200.”
Much has been made of Israel’s status as “Startup Nation.” Not even the size of New Jersey, with a population smaller than New York City’s, Israel is home to more Nasdaq-listed companies than any country except the U.S. and China. On a per capita basis Israel boasts more venture capital, more startups and more scientists and tech professionals than any other country in the world.
To understand these dizzying numbers, you need to understand the mysterious Unit 8200. While no one has ever disclosed how large it is, FORBES estimates the unit has, at any given time, 5,000 people assigned to it, all mandated to deploy the latest technology, often in life-or-death situations, with surprisingly little guidance.
“There’s nobody around to tell you how to do it,” Abrahami says. “The culture inside–and it’s by design–is that your superiors just tell you to go figure it out. That gives you the huge freedom to think differently. It’s you or nobody else. And when you’re an entrepreneur, that’s the most important skill. When you do 5 or 10 or 20 of those projects, you’ve just built 3 things that could be a startup.”
Multiply those three things by thousands of tech geniuses and decades of work, and it’s clear why, as FORBES estimates, more than 1,000 companies have been founded by 8200 alumni, from Waze to Check Point to Mirabilis, the parent company of ICQ. Tech giants like to gobble up 8200 firms like hors d’oeuvres. In the last three years alone, Microsoft MSFT +1.38% bought Adallom, a data privacy firm, for a reported $320 million; Facebook FB +0.32% bought mobile analytics company Onavo for some $150 million; and PayPal grabbed CyActive, which predicts hacks, for an estimated $60 million.
So what’s in 8200′s special sauce? After speaking with more than two dozen 8200 veterans, we narrowed it down to five things that, taken together, provide a pretty good blueprint for Startup Nation–and a pretty powerful cheat sheet on how to launch a successful tech startup.
Inside Israel's Secret Startup Machine
Richard Gutjahr was the dual German Israeli who filmed both the Nice attack and also the Munich attack,Richard Gutjahr’s wife is Einat Wilf – Politician - Zionist - ex Israeli Defense Intelligence Officer.
He was given an assignment that seemed right out of Mission: Impossible. Break into the computers of a country that remained in a state of hostility with Israel. The task contained several hurdles: First, figure out how to get into those computers; second, how to crack the encryption; and finally, the monumental challenge, how to access the “enormous amount” of computing power necessary to decrypt the data.
So here’s what Abrahami did once he thought he could breach the targeted computers: He broke into the computers of two other hostile countries and hijacked their processing power to suck out
the data held by the first target. A masterwork of spycraft–and a primitive precursor to cloud computing–done without leaving his chair in Tel Aviv.
“If we had to do it with a computer researcher,” says Abrahami, “it would have taken us a year. It took us a day. I’m trying to think what would have happened if someone had discovered it, what a crisis that would have created.”
But (until now) no one ever did. Which is consistent with a unit whose existence, until roughly a decade ago, had never even been publicly acknowledged or identified.
The public did, however, hear about Abrahami, who’s now 45. After leaving Unit 8200, he cofounded Wix, currently one of the world’s leading cloud-based Web-development platforms.
“Just from my generation, there are more than 100 guys from the unit that I personally knew who built startups and sold them for a lot of money,” Abrahami says. “There was a team of ten people in one room in the unit. I call it the magic room, because all of them created companies where the average market cap is a half-billion dollars.” Abrahami did his part: Wix’s market cap sits at $1 billion.
Ron Reiter, 31, another 8200 alum, whose startup was just purchased by Oracle ORCL +0.02% for a reported $50 million and who hails from a newer generation, tells a similar story: “There was one person who sold his startup for, like, $300 million to Apple AAPL -0.74%, and another whose company was sold to Cisco for $500 million–and these were both my roommates in Unit 8200.”
Much has been made of Israel’s status as “Startup Nation.” Not even the size of New Jersey, with a population smaller than New York City’s, Israel is home to more Nasdaq-listed companies than any country except the U.S. and China. On a per capita basis Israel boasts more venture capital, more startups and more scientists and tech professionals than any other country in the world.
To understand these dizzying numbers, you need to understand the mysterious Unit 8200. While no one has ever disclosed how large it is, FORBES estimates the unit has, at any given time, 5,000 people assigned to it, all mandated to deploy the latest technology, often in life-or-death situations, with surprisingly little guidance.
“There’s nobody around to tell you how to do it,” Abrahami says. “The culture inside–and it’s by design–is that your superiors just tell you to go figure it out. That gives you the huge freedom to think differently. It’s you or nobody else. And when you’re an entrepreneur, that’s the most important skill. When you do 5 or 10 or 20 of those projects, you’ve just built 3 things that could be a startup.”
Multiply those three things by thousands of tech geniuses and decades of work, and it’s clear why, as FORBES estimates, more than 1,000 companies have been founded by 8200 alumni, from Waze to Check Point to Mirabilis, the parent company of ICQ. Tech giants like to gobble up 8200 firms like hors d’oeuvres. In the last three years alone, Microsoft MSFT +1.38% bought Adallom, a data privacy firm, for a reported $320 million; Facebook FB +0.32% bought mobile analytics company Onavo for some $150 million; and PayPal grabbed CyActive, which predicts hacks, for an estimated $60 million.
So what’s in 8200′s special sauce? After speaking with more than two dozen 8200 veterans, we narrowed it down to five things that, taken together, provide a pretty good blueprint for Startup Nation–and a pretty powerful cheat sheet on how to launch a successful tech startup.
Inside Israel's Secret Startup Machine
Richard Gutjahr was the dual German Israeli who filmed both the Nice attack and also the Munich attack,Richard Gutjahr’s wife is Einat Wilf – Politician - Zionist - ex Israeli Defense Intelligence Officer.
