Serial high-tech entrepreneurs and managers in Israel: Background and personality

Gilat Kaplan Only recently (mid-2006) a large high-tech company in Israel was purchased by a very well-known investor. Warren Buffett bought ‘Ishkar’, an Israeli high-tech company, for four billion dollars. This large acquisition is merely one representative of the worldwide interest in the Israeli high-tech industry, which is considered to be second only to Silicon Valley (De Fontenay and Carmel, 2004). This phenomenon enhances curiosity and interest in the locomotives of that industry - high-tech entrepreneurs and managers. In this chapter the spotlight focuses on highly successful serial high-tech entrepreneurs and a comparison sample of high-ranking managers (executives) who were interviewed about their background and personality. The interviews were conducted and analyzed within the framework of psychoanalytic theory. The purpose of this chapter is to reveal the factors and motivations that influenced high-tech entrepreneurs and managers to choose the career they have chosen. Psychoanalytic theory regards itself as the art of human relationships at every level and phase (Hatav, 2003). Freud regarded it as a form of treatment but also as a new branch of science (Mitchell and Black, 1995). Psychoanalysis is a theory that uses its tools and concepts to deepen the understanding of other fields such as social sciences, art, literature and even politics (Hatav, 2003). The basic assumptions of psychoanalysis are that early childhood experiences with the parents create the basic structure of the psyche and a person’s developing unique personality (Freud, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1920, 1923a, 1924). The basic structure contains anxieties and defenses against….