TO MILK A UNICORN

Start-ups and Magic in the Holy Land

Roni Einav & Zvi Morik

Eric Torrance and Ruth Lourie are two lovely American recent graduates in their early twenties who met during their last year in college and quickly became a couple. The following summer, they plan to vacation together to Israel, the start-up unicorn valley and cradle of the world’s major religions. They look forward to an exciting journey.

Eric, the third son of a New York Wall Street businessman and a stage performer, both of the Protestant faith, studied applied mathematics and computer science at Columbia University. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he planned to earn his master’s degree and hoped to join the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley.

Ruth is the elder daughter of a Jewish family from Los Altos, California, whose father was an Israeli navy officer and is currently a dentist, and her mother a Jewish American high school Spanish teacher, originally from Santiago, Chile. Ruth studied anthropology and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is keenly interested in exploring ancient occult knowledge in Israel.

In Tel Aviv the couple enjoys meeting with Ruth’s father’s old friend, a leading start-up founder and investor with proven success who is ready to guide them and help Eric find his way into Israel’s high-tech ecosystem.

While touring the country, they manage to explore other exciting magic worlds in Israel and meet a host of intriguing characters, including a powerful Kabbalah mystic in holy Safed, a terrifying Arab woman who tells their fortune, an expert of the secret Druze religion, peaceful Ahmadi Muslims in Haifa, and Good Samaritans on Mount Gerizim. The couple even experiences a startling Christian miracle at St. Peter’s Church in Jaffa, learns about the Neolithic sites of sun worshippers in the Golan, and is initiated into the original Israeli self-defense Krav Maga discipline.

During this spiritual quest, Ruth and Eric encounter a series of hair-raising experiences and daring adventures—which they barely survive. Upon transitioning from vacation to business activity, Eric is hired to build the Samaritans’ website while visiting Mount Gerizim and finds himself grounded there by the chief of the CIA in Israel who is controlling him, and in a strange relationship with a Ukrainian widow. Ruth, who is left on her own, unexpectedly finds a new boyfriend, Uri Canaan, a high-tech entrepreneur whose company has been developing and promoting a life-saving seismic alert system for multiple sectors. They meet on the evening of October 6, 2023, looking to join the Nova music party near the Gaza Strip. Suddenly, in a shocking turn, battalions of Hamas terrorists invade Israel in a bloody surge of violence and murder against innocent civilians. Fortunately, Uri manages to use his past skills as a trained fighter, and they survive.

Three months later, Ruth resumes her affair with Uri when he is released from reserve duty as a commando fighter. After a heated romantic weekend at a Japanese B&B in the Galilee, Ruth eventually joins her boyfriend’s start-up company at his partners‘ request. They trust that with her fluent Spanish and Japanese, as well as her intelligence and youthful charm, she will be able to communicate with their current and future customers and help them license the company’s software products in Chile, Mexico, Japan, and North America, particularly in California where she came from.

Lora, the company’s account manager who trains Ruth is a dominant and energetic manager of the Christian Arab community, and they soon become close friends. Together they travel to their target markets in Chile and Mexico, in addition to California and, finally, Ruth travels on her own to Japan.

At home, Ruth and Uri reunite and the book reaches its enigmatic and touching end.

Roni Einav is one of the first pioneers who initiated the myth of Israel’s high-tech industry, aka “Start-up Nation,” in the 1980s. Born to a modest blue-collar family in northern Tel Aviv, where he grew up and was educated, he learned that he could only count on his own skills and knowledge. Einav graduated with a degree in engineering and operations research from the Technion in Haifa, a highly acclaimed technical institute, and worked as a system analyst for Israel’s cutting-edge security infrastructure.

After he followed his father’s advice to run his own business, Einav broke all Israeli records when he sold the 4th Dimension Software in 1999 for $675 million, a unicorn in modern terms, to BMC Software in Houston, Texas.

Despite his impressive success, Einav didn’t slow down or retire. Instead, he kept busy and remained actively involved in various technology start-ups, founding more than thirty high-tech companies, including Jacada, Mend (formerly White Source), Cyboard, Guidde, and Eurekify. His dramatic life story was depicted in Nordau to Nasdaq, which was translated and published in several languages.

Roni Einav is married to Matia, an architect and town planner who also graduated from the Technion. They have raised four sons, all of them active in the start-up or academic scenes, and hope that their gifted grandchildren will also follow in their footsteps.

Zvi Morik is a seasoned international publisher and editor with a solid academic background from Tel Aviv University in mathematical economics, stochastic processes, operations research, and game theory.

His company, Dekel Publishing House (est. 1975), was initially an academic publisher that then branched out into various popular fields, such as martial arts and leisure activities. Its flagship product, the Israeli self-defense Krav Maga series, was successfully published and translated into English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and most European languages.

Having noticed the key role that start-ups play in Israel’s economy and their benefits to society, he was delighted by the opportunity to write this book with Roni Einav, his charismatic youth movement instructor. Morik believes that this book will help interested readers to better understand the hidden magical facets of Israel, as well as the spirit of its dynamic and often enigmatic modern start-up scene.

Zvi Morik was born at an UNRRA DP camp in Odenwald, Germany, and immigrated with his parents to Israel as a baby. He is married to Pnina Ophir, a renowned Israeli copywriter. Their son, a Middle East expert, works as the export manager at Dekel Publishing House.