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Entrepreneurship takes many forms: Many entrepreneurs aim to develop an innovative product, create a new market, or simply pursue a personal passion. Some are motivated by a desire to make a difference in their community, affect a social change, and attract like-minded people to their endeavor.
For Sasha Gribov and Eitan Ingall, Freshmen at the University of Michigan in 2007, social entrepreneurship became the focus of their extracurricular activities. The terms “Silicon Wadi” and “Startup Nation” were used at the time in the U.S. to describe the emergence, a decade earlier, of a cluster of Israel-based startups with representation on the NASDAQ exchange larger than that of all companies from the entire European continent. “We wanted to build something that would help American students understand the entrepreneurial kind of miracle that exists in Israel and find a way for them to get ahead in their careers through Israeli startups,” says Gribov, who is today the co-founder of Milu Health, helping people find the healthcare they need at affordable prices.
Like other entrepreneurs, Gribov and Ingall soon pivoted from the original idea of establishing an Israel-focused investment club to raising funds to support students who wanted to “learn hands-on about real gritty Israeli entrepreneurship,” recalls Gribov, adding, “if you think about entrepreneurship throughout the world, everybody tries to build the next Silicon Valley. Israel’s Silicon Valley happened because they had to, and they did. The entrepreneurship that’s come out of that is crazy in a way that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
And like other successful entrepreneurs, Gribov and Ingall had a long-term vision. Already in their original business plan for Tamid, a 25-page Word document, they inserted the logos of other universities, aiming for ten, possibly 20 chapters in the future. They also followed the advice of the Director of Michigan Hillel at the time: “If you create something, don’t think about the person you hand it off to, think about the person that they hand it off to, because otherwise it falls apart in one generation.”
So Gribov and Ingall spent a lot of time in their last year at Michigan finding the next Tamid leaders and ensuring the long-term flourishing of their venture. In 2010, the Tamid Group registered as a 501(c)(3) organization and sent the first group of TAMID Fellows to Israel for the inaugural summer of what became its flagship competitive internship program. The publication of Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle the year before helped popularize the phrase and the notion that “this remarkable and resilient nation” could offer lessons in entrepreneurship to help “reboot America’s economy and can-do spirit.”
When Tamid’s CEO, Yoni Heilman, joined the organization as Executive Director in 2015, it had grown to 23 chapters and 1,100 undergraduates but was still run by students in their spare time. By that time, says Heilman, “Tamid started to attract students who had no connection or affiliation with Israel, and they came because of their own self-driven career ambition. The purpose of our organization is to create meaningful, tangible engagement with Israel for the next generation of business leaders.”
Consequently, the first semester for new members is devoted to teaching the students about Israel through the prism of business. “It’s like a mini-MBA,” says Heilman, “they’ll learn strategy and finance and operations and data science with an emphasis on how Israel has been a leader in those areas,” including relevant success stories. Upperclassmen teach the semester-long course, and “that drove a lot of engagement that otherwise didn’t exist in other places,” i.e., other clubs and student organizations, says Gribov.
In addition to possible internships in Israel, Tamid students can organize a small consulting team to work remotely on a specific project with an Israeli company. Another current activity follows the organization’s original idea with the TAMID Fund, enabling students to manage a live, Israel-focused stock portfolio. Yet another component of the Tamid engagement portfolio is the 11,000-strong alumni community. It provides opportunities to mentor undergraduate members, participate in a business-focused trip to Israel, and connect with other alumni and Tamid’s Israeli partners at events.
Today, the Tamid Group has 4,000 undergraduate members in 63 chapters, mainly in the U.S. and Canada. “Even though we’re very excited about our growth,” says Heilman, “we always lead with quality. When students from a new university reach out to us, we run them through a year-long process to build a chapter. If they make it through all the hoops, we have another chapter.”
This “beta” process, as Tamid calls it, is designed to demonstrate the motivation, focus, and purpose of the new Tamid members. Heilman tells the story of a student who joined Tamid with no prior connection to Israel or interest in Judaism. After his first two weeks in Israel on the summer program, he told Heilman, “I realized these are my people.” “And I said,” recounts Heilman, “you mean the Jewish people? He said no. These people have so much chutzpah. No problem is too big; they’re going to change the world. That’s who I want to be.”
For Heilman, this was when “the coin dropped.” He realized what the essence of the Tamid experience is. “It’s not just about getting a line on the resume. It’s seeing what’s happening in Israel, seeing who Israelis are and saying, I want that inside me.”