The Most Unconventional Israeli Startup Studio: sFBI

As some of you may know, this week I began interning with the marketing and business development team at sFBI, a venture builder just outside of Tel Aviv, Israel.

sFBI stands for “Small Factory, Big Ideas” and it’s incredibly unique – I’ve never encountered anything like it. In short, it’s a startup studio that creates businesses around human-centered innovation (“B2H: Business to Human”). Think: An accelerator, but the startups are built internally. sFBI provides each company (5 currently) with seed funding and plenty of effort to get it off the ground. Once each company becomes self-sustainable, sFBI theoretically transitions into a consulting role, but none of the companies have matured to that point yet.

sFBI operates in a villa – a house, in a small village called Rishpon just north of Tel Aviv. There’s a living room, kitchen, and backyard. Mango trees are not uncommon and more horses walk by than cars. Yesterday we saw a peacock outside. By no means is it a conventional office. On day one, I walked in wearing a button-down and pants. I didn’t realize the dress code is flip-flops, t-shirts, and shorts (“so we don’t suffer from the intense Israeli heat”). But that doesn’t mean we aren’t serious. The sFBI team is smart, and we work hard to accomplish our goals.

I work on a variety of different projects. Currently I’m doing affiliate marketing research and web design for Pulse Play – a smartwatch that helps tennis and raquet-sport players keep score. I’m also doing market research for Gistit – an assisting chat-bot that distills down the web’s overwhelming amount of data to provide students with quality summaries of the many academic articles they’re assigned. Think: an automated TA that’s actually useful.

The real value of sFBI lies in it’s team, and communal, collaborative atmosphere. Just behind my desk in the “office” sits sFBI’s marketing head Natalie Edwards. At first I tried to avoid interrupting her – but then I learned better.

Real questions and real answers are at the heart of this company. In fact, one of the very first tasks us interns were assigned was to paint our ego rock. Allow me to explain. Just outside the front door of our villa is the ego box. Before beginning work at sFBI, each team member decorates a rock (their “ego rock”) and literally leaves their ego at the door.

In the words of our CEO, Enon Landenberg:

“There’s a big problem…where people come into the office in the morning and the first thing they do is leave their brain at the door and when they go home at night they take their brain and continue using it. But their egos go with them and sometimes it’s precisely their ego that stops them from doing meaningful work.

I’m trying to do the opposite here. I want everybody to leave their egos at the door and bring their brain in. It’s up to you whether you want to bring your ego home at night – my wife won’t let me – but that’s a personal decision. So we’re all going to write our names and paint our ego and put it in the box. I didn’t get any normal colors because egos aren’t normal. So it will be there and we’ll always remember where it is.”

We embrace brutal honesty and open communication. With hard work, mistakes are inevitable, but failure isn’t. Because with each mistake, we grow and learn. It’s quite refreshing, and I hope to bring this model back to my endeavors in the states.

I’m incredibly grateful to have this experience. Huge thank you to TAMID Group and sFBI for making it happen.

Hope you enjoyed. This summer I’m exploring Tel Aviv’s startup ecosystem. Subscribe below to get my next post this Thursday straight to your inbox.