Snapshot; The story behind the Problems Worth Solving Program (Applications are open!!)

Nitzan Adler
Snapshot. My 2 Cents
2 min readMar 4, 2019

About 2 years ago, while I was working on fesh.fund with my friends Zaki Djemal and Hiday Goldsmith, we realized something very eye-opening. The number of extremely smart students we met during the founding of fresh.fund was astonishing. I remember the interviews we did with about 50 applicants in order to hand pick the first fresh.fund student team and all the 50 applicants were amazing. However, once we started searching for student-led startups we realized that the typical modern studentrepreneur (student entrepreneur — got it?) is deliberating between three main startup ideas:

  1. An app that solves parking problems.
  2. The uber for munchies for hungover students.
  3. Some unclear market place with no business model.
  4. Another kind of parking app
I honestly remember that we saw about 4 parking apps in 8 weeks

What a waste of talent! so many bright minds tackling silly problems. Zaki, being the top-notch entrepreneur that he is, came up with a great idea: let’s gather these bright minds and make them tackle Problems Worth Solving in some sort of Hackathon or boot camp. I loved the idea and funny enough, we brought Ayelet Cohen (then from Startup Nation Central and today the deputy director of Huji Innovate — Siftech’s closest partners) we tried to make it happen. Unfortunately, no one was engaged enough and like many other cool initiatives — it dwindled and died.

Until one day a fairy in the shape of a human called Roni Bonjack offered to apply for a joint project with Facebook— I seized the opportunity and the rest is history.

Facebook Israel CEO Adi Sofer Teeni taking a selfie in the launch event of the Siftech-Facebook partnership

Starting this week applications are open (for all Jerusalem based students) for a 10-week entrepreneurship boot camp. Guess how it’s called — that right! Problems Worth Solving. The program was designed by us at Siftech led by my dear colleague Adaya Tzur while the first cohort will focus on Cyber Bullying. I highly recommend to all Jerusalem base students to apply — it offers a unique hands-on experience and an amazing opportunity to learn what entrepreneurship is really about. For more info about this prestigious program click the link bellow.

Thanks for reading — feel free to comment and please share with any students you know in Jerusalem :-)

See you next week

Read more and apply to the PWS program

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