The Road To Nazareth: Empowering The Arabs Of Start-Up Nation

posted on: Apr 5, 2015

It’s the final leg of my marathon series of meetings in Israel – I am here with a delegation of Hispanic entrepreneurs – and my tour bus is climbing the slow but steady hill up to Nazareth. In the old city this afternoon, just hours before the sabbath, we will be meeting with a few Israeli Arab entrepreneurs. It’s a fitting venue for the conclusion of our journey. It’s the place where one big story began, and another is about to begin.

Nazareth is a mostly Arab town in the north of Israel, and home to a number of new accelerators – including our host this afternoon, the Narareth Business Innovation Center (NBIC) – who share the mission of serving Arab entrepreneurs who have been left out of the central narrative of the Israeli tech miracle. Among the entrepreneurs we meet this afternoon, one in particular stood out for me: Dr. Firas Swidan, whose company (Gene-Way) is about to launch an MVP (minimum viable product). Three reasons why.

First, there’s the story of the founder. Born in Nazareth on the 24th of December (I kid you not), Firas has led a life of culture-crossing adventures, and is now poised to do it at scale. As a tenth-grader, he was recruited to study at a Jerusalem-based magnet school that served both Arabs and Jews. From there he went on to study mathematics at Technion — the so-called MIT of Israel – under a special scholarship for talented students; he graduated summa cum laude. And from there, studies in brain research at The Hebrew University, studies in bioinformatics in Munich, back to Technion in Israel for a Ph.D. in computer science, then post-doctoral research and work in industry in the US (including a stint at Intel INTC +0.03%) and New Zealand. But he kept returning to Nazareth — where he and his company today are based — and each time with a new view of what the city might become.

Source: www.forbes.com