Yossi Vardi’s billion dollar suggestion

June 2, 2008 - 10:01 AM by

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.Yossi Vardi

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.

Tags: • Category: General, Technology 

Comments

3 Comments on Yossi Vardi’s billion dollar suggestion

  1. karin on Mon, Jun 2nd 2008 10:23 AM

    2. Harry,

    I love the lecture he gave about the problem with “local warming” at the TED event. You should post the video….

    He’s also featured in 21c’s recent President’s Conference video. I’ve never met Vardi but he seems charming, on top of being a wise and savvy businessman.

    Karin

  2. Tony Snedden on Mon, Jun 2nd 2008 11:32 AM

    3. I understand this individual has done alot for Israel, but many of you are forgetting the founder of the Israeli Internet Security company called Check Point Software Inc. You want to talk godfather of Internet Security then you must discuss “Gil Schwed” the founder of Check Point Software! This is the global leader of all Internet Security companies and solutions and it was his invention of “Statefull Inspection”. Now every, i.e., has left the “Packet Filtering” method and formulated their own “Statefull Inspection”, however they lag behind the creator.

  3. Harry on Mon, Jun 2nd 2008 12:35 PM

    4. I actually worked for one of his startups back in 1999. My first “real” job after the army. It did not succeed. It was not my fault.

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