Yazamut 360° co-founder and general manager Dana Gavish, left, and Gadi Bahat, an entrepreneur who heads Yazamut’s academic programs. (photos from bgu.ac.il)
Representatives from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s entrepreneurship centre, Yazamut 360°, will be coming to Vancouver in April.
Yazamut – which means entrepreneurship in Hebrew – aims to provide the BGU community with the skills and mentality to excel in any career. It also promotes innovation.
Since its establishment in 2018, Yazamut 360° has seen more than 240 startups and ventures created, had more than 2,000 program participants, fostered an entrepreneurial community of 11,000+ members, and had more than $45 million invested in its companies.
“It was clear to us from the very beginning that, if we’re starting a new entrepreneurship centre at BGU, it needs to be special. We decided to touch very different audiences because entrepreneurship for us is a set of skills, and that set of skills needs to be mastered by everyone,” Dana Gavish, Yazamut’s co-founder and general manager, told the Independent.
“With these different audiences in mind, we went on to develop nine different programs that would match these different audiences and would be the correct ones for entrepreneurship. But the one thing that they all have in common is the idea that you need a learning-by-doing experience.”
Those who enrol in Yazamut are taught such skills as putting together a team, examining problems and solving them, coming up with ideas, conveying messages, presenting in front of a crowd and, on occasion, rejecting a first idea and pursuing another. Yazamut trains participants to move out of their comfort zones towards greater resilience and mental toughness.
“It’s a difficult journey but, when you graduate, you are self-empowered and better educated when you go out to the outer world,” said Gavish, who emphasized that students from across the university are coming to the centre because they see value in what it offers.
“Our graduates really aim high and reach high. We know that they’re hunted today by HR [human resources] specialists from different companies and VCs [venture capitalists]. They’re more daring, and they are employed in wonderful places.”
Among its entrepreneurial offerings, Yazamut features a leaders program that not only teaches entrepreneurship and other skills but forces students to take a fresh look at how they run things, how they manage other people, and how they manage their relationship with failure, said Gadi Bahat, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with extensive experience in Israel’s tech sector, who heads Yazamut’s academic programs.
“If you want to be a good entrepreneur, it’s not enough that you know how to build a startup. It’s not enough that you know how to measure the right pricing or how to get penetration into the right market,” he said. “You also need to be a different type of person, and that goes into your ability to talk with people. It goes to your ability to present yourself in the right way. It goes to your ability to survive this roller-coaster period. Because, as an entrepreneur, you get a lot of ‘no.’ You get a lot of problems.”
According to Bahat, participants in the program do not come solely from science, engineering and technology backgrounds. Almost half are from other fields, such as medicine and the social sciences. In total, 18 different BGU departments are represented in Yazamut, and half of the participants are women. The startups created, therefore, have sprung from many fields, including medical technology, agriculture and software development.
On April 12, Gavish and some of the entrepreneurs in Yazamut’s leaders program will be in Vancouver for Spark to Startup: Resilience Ignites Leaders. The event will feature the “RBC Lion’s Den,” which will see BGU student entrepreneurs pitching their ventures to a panel of judges and the audience, with a focus on the Negev.
“They will be presenting a potential solution, products and potential markets,” Gavish explained.“It will be a taste for the audience of how we teach entrepreneurship at BGU. The kind of experience these guys get is literally priceless. No other university teaches like it.”
The winning team will receive a monetary prize.
The keynote speaker for the Spark to Startup event will be Saul Singer, an advisor to various companies and nonprofits, who, with Dan Senor, wrote Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle and The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Troubled World. Michael Fugman, with PearTree Canada, will be honoured for his entrepreneurship and leadership, both in work and community. Martin Thibodeau, regional president of RBC British Columbia, and his wife Caroline Desrosiers, a community leader and advocate, are the event’s honorary co-chairs.
For more information, visit bengurion.ca/events/vancouver-events/spark-to-start-up.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.