— Harry @ 10:01 am
Yossi Vardi is the most public face of Israel’s internet industry.
Vardi has been a player in the Israeli hi-tech sector for years but solidified his status as the godfather of Israel’s internet scene when he sold ICQ for over 400 million dollars.
He is a doer, a connector and by many accounts incredibly generous with his money, so he is also a dream fulfiller - giving seed money to a myriad of young Israelis with big ideas.
He’s put his money behind successful startups such as Answers.com, Speedbit and FoxyTunes, which was recently acquired by Yahoo.
Vardi doesn’t lack his own ideas, that’s for sure.
Case in point:
The revelation by Google founder, Sergey Brin, that Vardi helped inspired Google.
“Yossi invented for us the magic formula,” he said with a smile.
“He told us to devote two thirds of the [internet] page to original results, and a third to advertisements, and that is what we did.”
As quoted by Ha’aretz in an event at GarageGeeks, a venture capital funded space for techies to get their geek on.
Well isn’t that the cherry on top of the malabi:
On top of all of Israel’s contributions to hi-tech, we’ve also invented Google.
Kind of.
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