Israel’s emer­gence as one of the world’s lead­ing high-tech pow­er­hous­es is a remark­able sto­ry, and this book sets out to explain how it unfold­ed. It traces the sector’s ori­gins to nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia, exam­in­ing the ideas that inspired the first Israeli insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion decades before the state was estab­lished. These ear­ly foun­da­tions enabled the build­ing of Israel’s first com­put­er in the ear­ly 1950s and, soon after, the appear­ance of pio­neer­ing star­tups in the 1960s, led by vision­ary indi­vid­u­als whose sto­ries are told in detail. The expan­sion of the defense sec­tor in the 1970s lat­er became a cat­a­lyst for entre­pre­neur­ship, con­tribut­ing to the cre­ation of hun­dreds of star­tups in the late 1980s and 1990s. A cen­tral theme is that Israeli high tech was pro­found­ly shaped by peo­ple beyond the country’s bor­ders. For­eign donors fund­ed uni­ver­si­ties and ear­ly com­pa­nies, knowl­edge flowed in through pio­neers who stud­ied or worked abroad, and exper­tise was pro­vid­ed by non-Israelis who helped build local capa­bil­i­ties. Many, though not all, of them were Jew­ish, under­scor­ing the transna­tion­al char­ac­ter of Israel’s tech­no­log­i­cal rise.