Palestinian interns dodge obstacles for tech opportunities

TEL AVIV, Israel – Enas Awwad, a 29-year-old Palestinian software engineer from the West Bank, credits interning at an Israeli startup four years ago with giving her many of the skills she needed to co-found a company in May.

Awwad is chief technology officer at NoledgeLoss Ltd., a developer of business productivity software that is germinating at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv during its early fundraising stage. She is among the breakout stars of the Palestinian Internship Program, or PIP, an effort launched nine years ago by Israeli venture capital investors and technology firms to build peace through business partnerships.

“I am the bridge,” Awwad told The Circuit. Dressed modestly in a lavender hijab head covering, she now tries to help other young Palestinians enter the clubby and competitive Israeli tech market, which spawns more startups per capita than any other country. “I understand why they do things in certain ways and can explain it to the two sides,” said Awwad, who founded NoledgeLoss with Israeli partner Tal Givati, the CEO.

Created in 2014 by New York-born Yadin Kaufmann, a co-founder of Israel’s Veritas Capital Partners, PIP has placed paid interns at the Israeli branches of global giants ranging from Intel and Cisco to Microsoft and Google. Among the Israeli businesses employing Palestinian interns are VC firms Pitango and OurCrowd, as well as Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Freightos and Redefine Meat.

Most recently, PIP’s leaders have been looking toward the Gulf, particularly for their affiliated mentorship program. Israeli companies have been setting up offices and forming joint ventures in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain since the 2020 Abraham Accords. Skills the Palestinian interns acquire through PIP make them attractive local hires because of their strong technical skills and their native Arabic. Often they can work remotely from the communities where they live.

“The regional tech ecosystem is always looking for talent, and there is great Palestinian talent,” said Tally Zingher, a PIP board member and CEO of Dawsat, a weight-loss and wellness company for which Arab women are the target audience, and which has an office in Abu Dhabi.

Still, PIP’s main goal is to help the interns play a leading role in building the Palestinian tech sector by working in jobs in the Palestinian economy. The internship program and the more advanced Palestinian Mentorship Program, which aims to develop entrepreneurial skills, were designed to address the poor job prospects for Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, who are cut off from the thriving technology climate in Israel. Participants from the Gaza Strip have participated in the mentorship program by video. More than 3,000 students graduate from Palestinian universities with technology degrees each year, but fewer than half find employment in their fields. Palestinian companies have been stymied by the political conflict with Israel, which limits international growth and investment.

That has led to a brain drain of Palestinian engineers and other tech graduates, who find themselves with a degree but no place in the West Bank to gain experience, Kaufmann said. Similarly, Israeli engineers and entrepreneurs are often lured to greener pastures in Silicon Valley. In the meantime, there are many companies in Israel that can offer fresh Palestinian graduates their first opportunities, he said. “We have developed great relationships and both partners have gained,” Kaufmann told The Circuit. “We wanted to provide them with skills, experience, and networks so they could return and help the Palestinian tech ecosystem by stimulating innovation, investment and opportunity.”

Kaufmann, who also founded Sadara Ventures to provide financing for Palestinian startups, said that PIP’s interns can create new opportunities for Israeli companies that want to expand regionally.

“In addition to benefiting from having a dedicated and talented employee, they have also benefited from having someone who can help open a window to neighboring Arab countries,” Kaufmann said.

When she started interning at Israeli startup Colabo five years ago, Awwad needed to cross through a military checkpoint from her home in the West Bank city of Tulkarm to reach the office in Herzliya, 25 miles west on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. PIP coordinated all the travel permits with the Israeli and Palestinian authorities.

Awwad’s new company, NoledgeLoss, addresses the database challenges companies face in losing information on customers and work processes when employees move to new jobs.

Another graduate of the two programs is Adnan Jaber, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, who created a mobile app when he was an intern in the West Bank’s  Rawabi TechHub in 2017 and later developed personal-fitness tracking software. Now he engages in what he calls “peace tech,” trying to connect Israeli and Palestinian leaders who are making efforts through business to resolve the conflict.

Jaber also manages a video production company creating videos in Hebrew and Arabic that focus on positive interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.

“I found a philanthropist, I hired a team,” he told The Circuit. “I am using production management skills, entrepreneurship skills and business modeling skills. PIP was the first to give me those skills,” he said.

In the mentorship program, which started in 2020, many participants are eager to receive guidance from entrepreneurs and executives who have experience in the Gulf and other Arab countries, said PIP’s executive director, Anna Gol-Dekel.

“The mentors we have who have done business in the Gulf are in high demand,” Gol-Dekel said. “They bring a lot of value… with insights of how to expand a business into the Arab world,” she said. “That is the No. 1 thing our mentees are looking for.”

While the internship program tries to stay nonpolitical, politics are unavoidable in a region fraught with tensions and conflicts, noted Cecile Blilious, head of impact and sustainability at Pitango, one of Israel’s oldest and largest VCs.

“Things are always tense — we can’t overlook that,” Blilious told The Circuit. “We have to consider that people are really afraid on both sides, especially with all the violence going on now, it is terrifying,” said Blilious.

“But once you overcome that,” she continued, “there is obviously business to be done, and in the end we are in high-tech innovation, entrepreneurship and ideas impact, which means something for us as people.”

Still, with the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at a standstill for nearly a decade and violent incidents breaking out daily in the West Bank, normalization is a very loaded word in the Palestinian lexicon. Both Jaber and Awwad said people have told them they shouldn’t be associated with the Israeli-backed internship program.

“There are always people who will criticize you and people who will support you,” Awwad said. “I choose to stay with those people who offer support.” 

Israeli tech startup Wilco closes experience gap for aspiring software engineers

A rookie software engineer sits at his desk and faces a problem he’s never encountered before, at least not in his college coding class. The wrong fix could cost his company millions, but luckily the stakes here are much lower. This engineer is honing his skills at a fantasy company on an online platform that works much like a flight simulator for aspiring pilots. 

When the Israeli startup Wilco launched its simulator platform last month, On Freund, the company’s CEO, and his founding partners were taking a page out of the playbook used by pilots, architects and race car drivers by creating a simulation experience for software engineers to gain new skills and master existing ones regardless of someone’s career opportunities or background. Engineers using Wilco complete various “quests” that allow them to practice troubleshooting problems that commonly arise in real-world situations, but in an engaging way that’s akin to a video game. 

“I quickly realized that there is a difference between the theory which they have learned in school and the actual hands-on practice that takes years to come by,” Freund told The Circuit. 

The idea for Wilco (the name comes from the Roger Wilco character in the “Space Quest” movie franchise, not the alt-rock group) came to Freund about a decade ago. After he graduated from Tel Aviv University, he was managing a team of engineers at Handy, an online platform that connects users with cleaning and handyperson services, and Freund was looking for ways to let his team practice and learn new skills, outside of coding, that were not taught in university. 

Freund thought about hosting an evening school where he could expose software engineers to real-world problems within a few months, rather than the decades it might take on the job. He kicked around the idea for a few years, and in 2020 he reached out to a few chief technology officers, who supported his goal. 

One of Freund’s former colleagues, however, told him to think bigger. 

“I mentioned my idea to a colleague of mine and he told me I was stupid. He said that I was going to have six, maybe 10 developers per class, which wasn’t making a dent in the universe,” Freund said. “He wanted to work with me and figure out a scalable way to solve this problem.” 

A year later, in 2021, Freund, Alon Carmel, Wilco’s chief products officer, and Shem Magnezi, the startup’s chief technology officer, came together to launch Wilco with $7 million in seed money; the platform is accessible to any software engineer regardless of their background or location. 

All three founders understood that gaining new engineering experiences on the job was a tough and slow process. They wanted to close the gap of experience for people who may be working at companies that don’t have access to the same resources or a strong set of mentors that inspire and push their employees. 

“What we try to do is give engineers an environment where they can gain experience at their own pace, in a safe way, and solely based on their merit,” Freund said. 

The ‘quests’ offered by Wilco

Wilco is unlike other coding practice websites that allow participants to practice only one set of skills. Freund stresses that coding is just one of the many skills an engineer needs to be a good software developer. 

Wilco allows engineers to join a fantasy company that has all the complex systems that a real company would. Freund ticked off some of them: logging data, monitoring, analytics, load balancing a network’s infrastructure, a real data set, as well as the unexpected issues that typically arise from humans working on all of these components. 

Engineers then join a “quest” that includes a problem that the engineer must fix. The quests, Freund said, grew out of experiences Wilco’s partners faced in their own careers as developers. He gave the example of a company needing to know the extent of damage for a particular software problem, how the engineer would fix it and how the problem should be communicated to a stakeholder. 

“The focus is not on how to fix a problem, because anyone can learn that in college or a boot camp or even an online course,” Freund said. “The focus is how do you even know that something’s wrong in production? What do you do once you’ve found out? Do you go for a quick-and-dirty fix or something more meaningful?” 

What Freund finds most rewarding about Wilco is hearing developers talk about the value they get out of the platform. Engineers can communicate with each other over Discord, the voice and instant messaging platform, where they often ask each other how to solve certain quests and exchange tips and advice. 

Freund wants Wilco to become the standard place for developers to practice, in the way that flight simulators are for pilots.

“Software engineers shouldn’t be expected to wait for an emergency or something extremely important to happen that they must solve without previous experience,” Freund said. “We want to be a place where developers can practice regardless of their background or skill level to unlock their full potential.”