Yossi Vardi Speaking in New York

Asaf Buchner | May 09, 2006, 03:36 PM

Yesterday night I went to hear Yossi Vardi speak at an Israeli Business Forum event. For those unfamiliar with the name, Mr. Vardi acquired a reputation of an Internet expert (in Israel and beyond) after in 1998 he led the $400 million sale of Mirabilis (“ICQ”) to AOL. His experiences obviously extend far beyond that. It was interesting to get his perspective on the state of the Internet and how Israel’s culture fits in.

Yossi spoke about the four phases in the Internet’s evolution, from being a university network, to expanding to public use, through a “nuclear winter” to the current revival. Obviously there was a lot going on during that “winter” only that the financial markets were closed. To his approach, the Internet’s structure (scattered and de-centralized) is a perfect fit with the Israeli culture, explaining the abundance of Israeli success stories (ICQ, Checkpoint, or even Cyota and LivePerson, to name a few).

Vardi paralleled the behavior of the Nasdaq in the late 1990s/early 2000s to that of the Dow Jones in the late 1920s/early 1930s. For those fond of predictions, Vardi thinks we are currently 40% on the way to the peak. Jupiter makes forecasts, for instance, about the US online population [Subscribers]. However, we do not forecast the performance of the financial markets, so I won’t comment.