AP/NATI HARNIK

Stockbrokers at the Tel Aviv stock exchange.

Wegetwa rscl

JENNIFER FRIEDLIN

SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

The number of Israeli
companies traded on
Wall Street may soon
reach 100.

I

t's a Thursday afternoon and Yuval Davi-
dor and his 10 employees are cleaning their
office after another week of 12-hour days
developing software for the shipping in-.
dustry.
The founder and CFO of Schema Advanced
Optimization gets the garbage while his mar-
keting director mops the floor and the head
technician puts the Calvin and Hobbes car-
toon books back on the shelves. When the
three-room office is clean, Mr. Davidor cuts up
a watermelon, and the team sits down in their
kitchen/workstation located on Kibbutz Glil-
Yam to reassess the week's progress toward
becoming Israel's next big-name high-tech ven-
ture.
Ten minutes down the road, in Herzliya's
industrial park, thousands of pensioned em-
ployees at major-leaguers like Scitex, Digital
and Cellcom work in sterile high-rise build-
ings while company directors meet to discuss
quarterly results in closed-door boardrooms.

No Calvin and Hobbes books, no Thursday af-
ternoon clean-up sessions, no company-wide
reassessment over watermelon.
Surely, despite their youthful spirit, the en-
trepreneurs at Schema also have Wall Street
in their eyes. But before such newborn high-
tech companies can reach the coveted 1130 (ini-
tial public offering of stock), they must first
reach adulthood. And with only a one-in-ten
chance of success, fledgling high-tech entre-
preneurs must pull out all the stops to reach
the status of their elder corporate brothers.
Since its inception, external forces have
pushed Israel to the technological forefront,
as perennial military threats generated home-
grown developments, improvements and in-
ventions of everything from a foot-soldier's
radio to an air-to-air missile.
As a result, many of Israel's high-tech god-
fathers, such as Uzia Galil of Elron Electron-
ic Industries, Hanan Achsaf of Motorola, and
former Air Force commander Benny Peled,

were technologically baptized in the army be-
fore setting out to find civilian applications for
military hardware.
These, along with a new generation of Is-
raeli computer buffs and armadas of highly
skilled, postcommunism immigrants, ulti-
mately turned Israel's high-tech industry into
an international wunderkind.
Yuval Davidor was working as a math pro-
fessor concentrating on evolutionary compu-
tation at the Weizmann Institute. In 1993, he
came up with the idea that certain algorithms
could be used to create a software program
that would allow shipping companies to de-
termine the most efficient way of loading car-
go.
The tenured academic left his cushy job at
the prestigious institute, and together with
one of his students established Schema in his
Tel Aviv apartment.
At first, Mr. Davidor, who was earning a
salary by moonlighting as a consultant, had
to rely on people's kindness. His accountant
did not charge him for a year; when it came
time to move to a proper office, Kibbutz Glil-
Yam offered him space with a flexible rent con-
tract; and his growing number of young
employees accepted the fact that he could only
pay them 50-60 percent of their agreed
salaries.
Success came slowly. In 1995, after sever-
al breakthroughs, Mr. Davidor, 35, and his
growing team of programmers caught the at-