Yossi Vardi
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Yossi Vardi is one of Israel's early tech entrepreneurs. For 38 years he founded and helped build over 40 tech companies. He was co founder of Tekem (went public and now part of Ness), Alon oil company, ITL (International Laser Technologies, went public), and Granite Hacarmel (went public).In 1996 he funded Mirabilis, the first Internet-wide Instant messaging. In recent years he is actively engaged in founding and helping young internet companies. Among the companies he invested in, or helped to build are Answers.com (went public), Gteko (sold to Microsoft), Airlink (sold to Sierra), Tivella (sold to Cisco), Scopus (went public), and Tucows (went public). He was advisor to the chairmen of AOL, Amazon, and Allied-signal.
Vardi had a long civil service career serving as Director General of the ministries of Development and Energy, and as special advisor to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Finance, during Israel's peace negotiations. He served on the Advisory Board of the Bank of Israel. He served as the chairman of Israel Chemicals , Israel National Oil Company, Mifaley Tovala, Harsit and Hol Zach , and others. He served on boards of Maariv, Elite, Scitex, Bezek, Israel Refineries, Dead Sea Works, Dead Sea Bromine and others. He also chaired number of government-appointed commissions and committees, among them the Public Commission for the Regulation of the Electricity Sector, The Public Commission on Raising Venture Capital in the Stock Exchange, the Fertilizers Development Council, the Oil Explorations Concessions Council, and others. He also participated in initiating both Yozma and The Bi-national Industrial Research and Development Fund (BIRD-F).
He is a member of the World Economic Forum, of the board of Amdocs, of the advisory board of 3i, serves as an advisor on Middle-Eastern economic affairs to the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in the U.S, and on the board of governors of Weizmann Institute. He was the chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation.
Vardi received a M.Sc. and D.Sc. in Operations Research from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is co-author of Electric Energy Generation: Economics, Reliability and Rates, published by MIT Press. He received twice the Prime Minister award for life achievements in the hi tech area, Entrepreneur Of the Year and the Rominisiaru prize for Economics from Tel Aviv university, CEO!’s Entrepreneurs Hall Of Fame and numerous other awards.
He is married to Talma and the father of Arik, co-founder of ICQ, Oded and Danny.
