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Students met with Neta Meidav for a talk on social entrepreneurship: From idea to realization. Vault is a platform through which work ethics problems can be solved and, in doing so, a pleasant and professional work environment for everyone is created. During the meeting, Neta presented herself and her company, and spoke about the thought process she underwent from when she first formulated the idea up to the time through to when it took form and she established the company.

Students met with Raviv Melamed to hear a lecture about entrepreneurship: From idea to initiative – All the way to founding a start-up. Raviv is the CEO and Founder of Vayyar Imaging Ltd., a company that has developed a radio frequency integrated sensor that “sees” through objects and builds a three-dimensional picture of the environment without using any cameras. When it was first established, Vayyar focused on the medical field and aimed its first radio frequency sensors toward use as an imaging device that would serve as an accessible, relatively inexpensive and non-ionizing alternative for conventional mammogram devices designed for early detection of breast cancer. Today, the company’s focus has moved to include additional fields such as smart homes, cars, retail, security, medicine, consumerism and more.

In this first meeting of the year—a face-to-face meeting (after a long period of only seeing each other on screens)—veteran students met the new students who joined the program this year. During the meeting, students were presented with challenging thinking activities in the form of an escape room. They had to work together as a team and received tools to help them develop creative and innovative thinking.

During the meeting, Shaul shared with the students the story of his journey after graduating and up until today, the link between founding a business and the Lapidim program, a few things that he learned along the way, and some things he would have been happy to have known at the beginning of his journey. Shaul is a graduate of the Lapidim program who completed his studies in 2013. In the eight years since, he founded three startup companies in Israel and the U.S. Today Shaul is the CTO of Digital Asset, which he established in New York in 2014. The company employs about 170 people spread over five continents and to date has raised approximately 300 million dollars.

The students met with Prof. Yoav Shoham, Faculty graduate and professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. His research focuses on artificial intelligence in the field of multi-agent systems and game theory. During the meeting, Prof. Shoham spoke to the students about academia, industry and life itself. He told the students about his academic path and his research, and also described his entrepreneurship and the companies he established that deal with online businesses. The most well-known of these is Trading Dynamics, involved in online tenders. Prof. Shoham is the CEO and co-founder (with Prof. Amnon Shashua and Ori Goshen) of AI21 Labs, which deals with AI applications.

Students met online with David Sokolic, managing partner at OurCrowd Pandemic Innovation Fund. The meeting focused on crowdfunding as a method for funding initiatives.OurCrowd, one of the worlds’ leading crowdfunding platform for investing in startups, is managed by serial entrepreneur, Jon Medved. Since 2014, OurCrowd has invested over 220 million dollars in 93 portfolio companies.