If You Can Make It There: Three Paradoxes of the Israeli Entrepreneur
Strong, and vulnerable. Needs no one, and leans. Invulnerable, and the body speaks. Three paradoxes that appear in almost every entrepreneur, told through the people in the book.
A book by Dr. Gilat Kaplan
If You Can Make It There
The Psychology of Israeli Entrepreneurs in New York
“The greatest ambition grows, more often than not, out of the deepest wound.”
The Book
The personality beneath the dream
They came to conquer New York—to make it big and turn an idea into an exit, on the biggest playing field of all.
But Dr. Gilat Kaplan, a clinical psychologist who has spent many years studying the inner world of the Israeli entrepreneur in New York, sees the personality beneath the dream. She sees the other fire that burns in the Israeli entrepreneur—whether a critical father figure, demanding anxieties, or a hunger for recognition precisely in a place where no one knows you from home.
In this book, Kaplan decodes what the entrepreneur hides even from himself. Through Guy, Michal, Nati, and Yotam—Israeli entrepreneurs she interviewed, some of whom she treated—the book reveals what no investor pitch deck would dare to show: that the greatest ambition grows, more often than not, out of the deepest wound.
For families
A chance to finally understand the person who lives beside them.
For partners and investors
A look at the psychological forces driving the person they are betting on.
For future founders
A mirror to look into before the big leap.
Contents
Inside the book
- Preface
- Who Is the Israeli Entrepreneur?
- 1Dreaming in Hebrew, Succeeding in English
- 2Where Do Israeli Entrepreneurs Come From?
- 3The Absent Father
- 4The Woman Beside Him — Like Israeli Mud Coffee in the Middle of Manhattan
- 5Skipping the Early Class — Creativity as the Entrepreneur’s Superpower
- 6Recovering from Failure — Nahum Gets Up
- 7The Need to Be the Best — and the Price It Exacts
- 8A Lesson in Independence
- 9Attitudes Toward Money
- 10A Woman Entrepreneur in the Big Apple
- 11“This Body Is Just Noise”
- 12Does the Entrepreneur Actually Like Managing?
- 13David — There Is No Algorithm
- 14What Israeli Entrepreneurs Carry with Them
- Sources and Further Reading
- Glossary of Terms and Israeli Context
Excerpt · From the Preface
It started with an espresso
It started with an espresso. Or, more precisely, with a conversation in a Tel Aviv café with one of them—one of those veterans of an elite military unit you can spot from a mile away: unusually quiet, a little too sharp, a little tired. Someone who once ran operations and systems and now runs employees and investors.
He stirred his coffee in a slow circle, then looked at me with glazed eyes.
“You don’t understand, Gilat. Being an entrepreneur is like falling into a bottomless pit while everyone applauds. The applause doesn’t help you while you’re falling.”
He was wrong about one thing. I did understand.
For twenty-two years, I worked as a clinical psychologist in Israel’s military intelligence community, within the IDF’s Intelligence Corps. I came to know these people up close—the people who built the backbone of the country’s security system, sometimes at an age when their peers were still wondering what to study in college. I knew them under pressure and at moments of breakthrough, in struggle and in success. I was there for both the achievements and the cracks. Behind closed doors, somewhere between silence and cynicism, I heard about the exhaustion, the relentless drive to do more, and the gap between the confident exterior and what remained inside.
Lectures
The psychology of entrepreneurs
Dr. Kaplan lectures on the inner world of entrepreneurs, with a particular focus on Israeli founders in New York—drawing on her clinical work, her doctoral research, and the stories in the book.
Before New York, There Was the Unit
How military service—and the technology and intelligence units in particular—shapes the capacities Israeli founders bring to business, and the habits that may later require revision.
The Absent Father and the Entrepreneurial Drive
Fathers who were busy, critical, or absent while present, and the sons who turned the pain into control and became, in a sense, their own parents.
The Woman Beside Him: Couples, Relocation, and the Entrepreneur
The spouse who holds the ship below the waterline: identity, loneliness, and couple dynamics in the wake of a move to New York.
A Woman Entrepreneur in the Big Apple
Investors, home, and chronic guilt: the layered dynamics Israeli women founders face, from a military ethos of toughness to chutzpah read as aggression.
“This Body Is Just Noise”: When the Mind Is Silent, the Body Speaks
Stress, pain, and the entrepreneur who treats emotions as an unreported bug. Why the body is not “acting up,” and what it means to listen.
About the Author
Dr. Gilat Kaplan
Clinical psychologist and researcher of the entrepreneurial personality, dividing her life between Tel Aviv and New York—the two cities between which this book moves.
Career
For 22 years, Dr. Kaplan served as a senior psychologist in the IDF’s Intelligence Corps—one of the incubators from which Israeli technological entrepreneurship grew. There she had the privilege of founding and heading the Corps’ mental-health institute for career personnel. She also directed, for a decade, a treatment center for the rehabilitation of psychiatric patients.
Clinical experience
In her private practice in Israel, she treats entrepreneurs and their families. She first came to know many of them during their military service, and met them again after it—in the therapy room and in civilian life.
Research
Her doctoral dissertation examined the personality of serial high-tech entrepreneurs, based on in-depth interviews and questionnaires with 42 Israeli founders and a comparison group of 38 senior managers, analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively—from a psychoanalytic rather than an economic or organizational perspective. She has since written chapters in professional books and lectured at conferences in Israel and around the world.
Contact
Get in touch
For lectures, media, and inquiries about the book.