Get To Business.

This post was originally published at Found|Read, I’m reposting it for our readers.

Continuing from where I left in my previous post: Founding in a War Zone, I and my cofounder Eran Galperin had both just been sent to the Israel-Lebanon border with our Army Reserve units. It was July 2006 and our units were unexpectedly deployed as part of an Israeli military action during the 2006 War with Hezbollah. The timing couldn’t have been worse for us. We had just taken up some web-development projects that were supposed to provide us with some financial support. Uncertain if we’d even make it back to our homes in Tel Aviv, we’d called our clients and told them their projects were “on hold,” indefinitely. They weren’t happy. We did make it back, after 25 days of fighting, and immediately took up the challenge of completing our projects on a much tighter schedule.

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This post was originally published at Found|Read, I’m reposting it for our readers.

Recent developments in Gaza and ongoing violence elsewhere in the Middle East remind me of the instability of my company’s home country: Israel. It is hard enough to run a start-up, and there are plenty of things that make entrepreneurship a high-risk proposition. But there is nothing like the ultimate security risk, life vs. death, to galvanize a team, to re-invigorate priorities, and ultimately, to inspire performance. I live in Tel Aviv, about three hours from Syria and southern Lebanon. Here the Army is a constant–if sometimes inconvenient–teacher of this important life and business lesson. Eran Galperin and myself have gotten this tutorial more than once while cofounding Octabox.

The Army has a huge role in educating Israelis, and played a huge role in making me a better entrepreneur. For starters, living in a war zone matures you a lot. It also breeds a nature for risk-taking. But the Army creates some big obstacles for start-up founders, too.
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A Few days ago I wrote an article about my past experience with Offshore Outsourcing for Found|Read .
I am re-posting it here for our readers.

As a project manager, I frequently have had to deal with outsourcing work, and offshore outsourcing, specifically. From my past experience, I can only say that while sometimes the costs are very low and, therefore, somewhat seductive, in the long term you generally end up paying more than you expected to.

In early 2005, a friend contacted me and requested that I design a website for his company. He also asked me to take on management of the project, and find the appropriate coder(s) to do the work. The specifications were really simple: build a dynamic website with a few, simple, administration capabilities and a Content Management System.

“That’s not rocket science,” I told him. “It should be completed within few days,” and I hung up. (Would that it were so!)

At the time I had no available coder to work on the project, and while I could have rented a local freelancer to ease my own pain of overseeing the project as manager, I decided to outsource this simple task to an offshore freelancer.
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