What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

- Jared Stein, Excel Ventures 2017

I joined the Birthright Excel Ventures Program this past summer eager to find out. I have repeated the phrase hundreds of time by now — in person, at a bar, on the beach, or via email — describing the mission of Excel Ventures. An intensive 10-week technological venture creation program meant for aspiring entrepreneurs from both Israel and America. But what does it really mean to be an entrepreneur? What am I aspiring to? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an entrepreneur as “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.” My goal in this blog is to share how joining the greater Birthright Excel community as a part of the Excel Ventures Program has helped me rewrite Merriam-Webster’s definition. This is a top 10 list of the experiences and lessons I have learned that helped me understand what it truly means to be an entrepreneur.

1. The Personal Talk, or PT: On our first day in the program, Adam Lazovski and Uri Gafni, co-founders of Excel Ventures and our program managers, shared with us our communal obligation to get to know each other. And they meant really get to know each other — our passions, what we were looking for in a co-founder, why we quit our jobs to move across the world for something unknown — just to start the conversation. They dedicated valuable program time during the first three weeks of the summer for us to fit in at least one “personal talk”, AKA “PT” with somebody in our cohort. 45 minutes in between programming? PT. Commuting time on the bus? PT. Eating lunch? PT. But what was the goal of us sharing such intimate details about ourselves with people we had just met? Weren’t we here to become entrepreneurs? When trying to implement a solution, entrepreneurs are first taught to thoroughly understand and fall in love (or disgust) with the problem. Building this type of relationship with a problem requires us to know it inside and out, and this is exactly what we were being challenged to do on day one of Excel Ventures. To understand each other beneath the surface. To share what made us excited and what did not. To pinpoint our motivations and which character traits we value most. Excel Ventures taught us from day one that the first step we have as entrepreneurs is a responsibility to dive much deeper than we ever thought we would — into a problem, an experience, and ourselves.

2. Slack: Slack became our cohort’s go-to place for all things communication. A digital water cooler of conversation and collaboration. Curious if someone was free for a PT later? Slack-it. Wanted to ask if anyone in our Excel Ventures cohort was an expert on blockchain? Slack-it. We even coordinated team workouts through our #healthynfit channel. Each team’s Slack became a living montage of collaboration, where ideas could be openly shared. Slack taught me how entrepreneurs leverage technology to find alternative ways to communicate, whether from our offices in the heart of Tel Aviv or on a bus returning from a weekend away exploring Jerusalem.

3. Daily Scrum: With three weeks remaining until our final pitch presentation, our cohort met every morning for a daily scrum. Each of the six teams shared their three primary goals for the day, and were met with quiet cheers or deafening silence depending on the progress and ambition of each team. But in as little as a day (and often many times throughout) goals shifted — and teams leapfrogged to a new level or pivoted onto something new and tossed old goals aside. This public exclamation of what we wanted to accomplish forced us to place all of our cards on the table. What had we accomplished? Where were we struggling? How could we help each other? Teams were excited to hear what everyone else was working on, creating a sense of shared deliverables — no matter if one team’s goal to find a piece of hardware had nothing in common with another team’s goal of interviewing 100 college seniors. But sharing our goals created a feeling of responsibility as entrepreneurs, not only to our own venture, but to all six teams in the cohort.

4. Bus rides: On Excel Ventures, we spend a lot of time together. And many of the most meaningful experiences we have are during our 30 minute commute from our home, the B’nei Dan Hostel to our co-working space, Mindspace Ahad Ha’am, and back again. This is a time for us to bounce ideas off each other (while trying not to bump into each other), to get outside of our cozy hostel and chic shared workspace, and update each other on the work we were doing. Every abrupt twist or turn of the bus created an atmosphere ripe for ideation — for us to provide feedback to one another, share a thought, and throw ideas against the wall and to see what sticks.

5. B’nei Dan Hostel: Our home for the summer became a ripe environment to share ideas — from breakfast and dinner table conversations daily to late night conversations on the tables in the grass between buildings. The complex became a hotbed of ideation — where Excel Business Fellows would constantly ask Ventures participants about our progress, and a time for Ventures to gain a completely new perspective from other members of our Excel community. The space also became home to numerous speakers — like Dr. Zohar Raviv, International Vice President of Education for Birthright Israel, and Yehuda Glick, Member of Knesset — to seminars with representatives from underrepresented communities in Israel and a testimony from a Holocaust survivor — which set an atmosphere of conversation. This willingness to engage in open thought and discussion is a key ingredient in the recipe of what makes an entrepreneur.

6. Hackathon: With two weeks remaining in our summer, Excel Ventures joined forces with the Birthright Excel Business Fellows for an all-night hackathon. Each Venture team had the opportunity to pitch to the Fellows our startups, what we were looking for assistance with, and what was in it for each intern that joined for the night. My team recruited 6 interns, a mix of Americans and Israelis, 2 of which stayed until after 4:30am. The interns (if they can even be called that) consisted of student group presidents and non-profit co-founders, army commanders and small-business owners. The hackathon gave our team the opportunity to listen to others. This infusion of outside talent helped our team focus our marketing and messaging, build financial models, research competitors, and learn how to motivate others who had little connection to our venture other than wanting the experience to work with us, collaborate together, and contribute.

7. Israeli ecosystem: Excel Ventures epitomizes what the greater Israeli entrepreneurial community is about — people helping each other and taking that extra time to educate, connect, and collaborate. We learned this first-hand during one particular meeting with one of our mentors, Michael Perez, Head of Consumer Business at LivePerson. Our team traveled to his office on a Monday afternoon for a deep dive as we floundered from idea to idea, trying to pinpoint the unique problem we wanted to solve. We spent the night drawing out the entire food supply chain until we came across the inspiration for our venture, Hava, which aims to bring farm fresh and healthy food directly to communities to simplify the supply chain, lower costs for the consumer, and support local farmers. As our team built out a business model, researched competitors, and interviewed farmers and consumers, our team’s other mentor, Litan Yahav, regularly sat with our team to challenge our assumptions and push us to think outside the box. To learn how to answer questions a consumer or investor would demand from us. This support network taught me that entrepreneurs are never alone and the role we have in the ecosystem we play in to push one another.

8. Birthright Israel Excel: Noa Meir, Executive Director at Birthright Israel Excel, made it a priority and found the time to meet with every participant on our program. She taught us that to truly lead requires investing our most important asset: our time. Her passionate and genuine leadership of this community reminded me that entrepreneurs are not products or services, they are people. And the secret sauce which drives any entrepreneur is the passion they exhibit and the time they invest to make it all happen.

9. Adam Lazovski and Uri Gafni: When interviewing for Excel Ventures, I asked Adam and Uri what were their motivating factors for investing so much of themselves into this program. Uri shared his desire “to empower Jewish leaders, form meaningful connections, and foster collaboration.” Adam put it bluntly — that he recruited the best people he could as “to make us proud.” But I have never asked Adam who he is referring to as “us.” Adam and Uri have taught me that the “us” expands to a much wider net than just the program managers and staff. It extends to the rest of our Ventures cohort, to Excel as a whole, to alumni, and so much more. As entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to an audience much wider than we can ever imagine who we are specifically solving a problem for. The responsibility to make whoever the “us” is in our lives proud is a key ingredient that shapes an entrepreneur.

10. Each other: Every single day of this program has been a roller coaster. There were moments where I wanted to shout with excitement, tears of joy welling in my eyes — like when we made our first sale of fresh groceries to a stranger named Ronen. There were moments of intense pain, like being told a week into team formation that a co-founder of mine felt that I wasn’t listening to him. In one day, I learned how entrepreneurs can travel from an overwhelming feeling of success — validation that we were addressing a problem people would pay us to solve — to feeling like I wasn’t cut out to be a part of my team and this program. Yet, throughout each slap in the face or euphoric high, I maintained an incredible obligation to demand more from others and myself. To dig deeper through PT’s, to leverage slack to communicate a random thought in the middle of the day, to publicly announce my goals, to view bus rides as an opportunity to collaborate, to engage deeper with the incredibly smart people sharing B’nei Dan Hostel with me, and to learn how much other members of Excel can teach me — even if they are not a part of my team. I learned about the power of mentors and late night deep dive sessions and the Israeli support network, how much the Excel leadership cares about our experience and shows it by making an effort to give everyone an opportunity to be heard, to our program managers who feel a deep sense of purpose in recruiting and supporting a community of fellows they barely know, and a team of co-founders and cohort who continually demand more from one another.

Excel Ventures has redefined how I describe an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is not only a person “who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise,” but someone who is on a never ending quest for more. Before our final day on the program, our pitch presentations, Adam and Uri spoke about the process and journey we had undergone for the last 10 weeks. I came to Israel looking to push beyond my limits like I had never gone before — but I could never have imagined what Ventures actually had in store for me. This moment of reflection was a beautiful reminder that this summer was not about preparing for pitch day. It was about every moment and second we had beforehand. To improve ourselves. To learn and reflect on what we are really good at and where we really need to improve — both professionally and personally. The Ventures program provides the training, template, and launchpad to learn what it really means to be an entrepreneur, which is a word that cannot be described in a single sentence. An entrepreneur is acting with a mindset — a commitment to dive deeper into a problem, an experience, each other and ourselves — and an obligation to never be satisfied, to improve, and to always demand more.

Jared Stein is a member of the Birthright Excel Ventures 2017 Cohort. He grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of the University of Maryland. His venture this summer, Hava, connected farmers with communities to improve the accessibility and affordability of farm-to-table food. Prior to the Excel Ventures Program, Jared spent two years working at the Bank of New York Mellon in New York City. He loves barbecuing with his family and friends, walking his dog Baxter, and hosting Shabbat dinners.