When you're moving as a family, the only common denominator you have is the family, so you stick together and you make sure that everybody goes through the experience in the smoothest way possible.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Quite a ride, it brought me through 5 different locations (Switzerland, France, Spain, Andora, Bulgaria and now Israel), 9 or 10 different positions and all with this desire, this intent to actually revolutionize to some extent a quite old and legacy industry and move it into something closer to the twenty first century.
We've always wanted to be kept on our feet, to put ourselves in challenging situations, facing new unknowns over time probably in order to avoid complacency and comfort of just having a very, well-organed life.
The more the company was offering new locations, the more we felt it was just not the right thing to do. And the right thing to do was to stay here, to live in Israel, to become Israelis, to develop our kids here in this country.
The biggest challenge has been to advocate for this smoke-free world as part of Philip Morris, to come in as a representative of the largest, you could say, death enabler from some perspective of avoidable death, by selling cigarettes and being listened to and considered by anti-tobacco activists, by political stakeholders, by community leaders has been very challenging and quite painful and quite tough at times.
One of the biggest personal changes was also to manage our parents from a remote perspective, parents who are getting older and don't have their grandkids around them.
I had a stint at startup and eventually things weren't exactly the way I was expecting them to be. I found it to be way more complex than I guess I naively thought and actually quite cynical. Overall I understood what it takes to be an entrepreneur and to be part of a startup and to manage it and it turned out that it was not really my thing, so it was a great experience but it didn't really hit my DNA in the way I thought it would.
What I'm doing at Catalyst Investments is actually offering selling or setting up a platform in the form of a venture capital fund for corporates that want to create a portfolio of startups in Israeli innovation.
ON TOPIC: All things Israel, start-up scene, ecosystem, Israeli culture
You have now more than 90 unicorns out of Israel, which is the highest number for a single country in the world, number of startups per capita and investments.
I think it's the country that invests the highest percentage of GDP into education, over nine percent of Israel’s GDP is going to education.
Israel had always been a bit of a dream destination, something that I was, we were very keen in experiencing.
[Israel] is still a pilot project as a country, it's a 75 year old country made of a melting pot of people that have immigrated from over 80 countries so it's still all in development.
The Israeli Innovation Authority is really fuelling and funding not only with money, but also with support and with networking capabilities the entrepreneurs and their ventures.
There's more 380 VCs present in Israel providing funding.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD is so intimately linked to most of the things that have happened to me. It's not only about giving back to be connected and to participate and to be active about it.
I don't see INSEAD as just a place where we learn things, or we developed a great network and friendships. It's really a foundation step in what has happened to me and my family over the past twenty years.