Israel has mobilized after Hamas terrorist attacks last weekend, and tech workers and founders are now on the front lines.For bigger tech companies, Israel’s mass mobilization has proven a manageable hiccup in business as usual. For smaller ones, it can pose an existential challenge.
Folio won’t be hitting the user targets they set for October; nor will it proceed to beta testing at month’s end as planned. But speaking on Thursday after spending the previous day in a kibbutz where people were massacred by Hamas, Goldstein said she found herself questioning the importance of the problem her startup was looking to solve in the face of such tragedy.
Both Ratzon and Dibrov have stressed to customers that their service wouldn’t be affected by current events. “We don’t want anyone’s pity,” Ratzon said. “We want people’s sympathy, their empathy and understanding, but we don’t want any discounts when it comes to customer requirements, support tickets and things like that.”
“This is a group that’s been very politically involved in the last year or so,” said Ariav. “A lot of the means, the forums and technology that was used to coordinate people coming out in the hundreds of thousands every Saturday to demonstrate and talk about what was happening, has been repurposed to coordinate support at a very large scale now.
"If you would have told me seven days ago that in seven days I'd be in this situation, I wouldn't have believed it,” L.K. said. “It really rattled my world, and I'm so grateful for my peers, colleagues and executives and managers at my company that without any hesitations, or any friction, just told me, 'Sure, go do what you've got to do.’”