The combat navigator who helped relaunch Pango, and founded a life-saving startup at 60

About the podcast “Popcorn”

Popcorn, one of Israel’s leading and longest-running podcasts, seeks to track the changes in the new world of work, and through in-depth conversations with executives, entrepreneurs, scientists, psychologists and artists, offers ways to adapt to it and to the opportunities it brings. The insights that emerge from it provide practical tools for managers and employees alike. Lior Frenkel is an entrepreneur, a consultant to organizations adapting to the new world of work, and the author of the bestseller “The Little Book for the New Manager.” Each month, we will bring here a written version of one episode, carefully selected from among the Popcorn episodes published in recent months.

What is the new world of work? In the 21st century, and especially over the past decade, the world of work has taken on new forms we had not known before, from the hybrid model, through the growing use of technology, to globalization. In a reality where traditional norms are being abandoned, employers place significant emphasis on creativity, while employees seek a dynamic career, one that does not settle in one place. All of these are also changing the way organizations operate and the principles on which the economy rests. Now all that remains is to try to understand the new rules of the game and start playing.

He was a combat navigator in Squadron 201, “The One,” received the Chief of Staff’s Commendation during the War of Attrition, fought in the Yom Kippur War and served as commander of the air force’s computer unit. In business, he was also among the founders of Pango and served as chairman and CEO of various high-tech companies. Despite his impressive résumé, Dr. Yoram Romem, 75, did not rest on his laurels. At age 60, he founded HealthWatch, a startup that developed a vest that monitors the heart and warns of danger.

“At my age, you’re already settled, not hungry for food and not needing to prove yourself. Your concern is not just making money, but giving meaning to the world.”

HealthWatch was born out of a personal event that happened to Romem while he was CEO of the computer company ESI, during a trip to Germany. “I slept in a hotel, after two days in which I hadn’t slept because of a series of dramatic discussions at the company. In the middle of the night I woke up, but half my body didn’t wake up with me. I didn’t understand what was happening, so I turned over and tried to go back to sleep. That was a bad decision.”

Romem, it later turned out, had suffered a stroke, which changed his life. “After an event like that, the scans show there is a problem with the hardware. But you can’t see the software, and I wanted to understand whether my thinking was still okay. So I went to do a doctorate in philosophy of science. I said that if I succeeded, my condition was good.”

The second step was to found the startup he heads today. “After I recovered, I started thinking: how can it be that a healthy person suddenly has such an event out of nowhere? That thought took him to a familiar setting, a fighter jet. In a plane there is a light called master caution, which, when it comes on, signals that there is a serious problem and you need to find out what it is.

“Back there in Germany, I was missing such a light, and I decided I wanted to create a master caution for the body. I had another requirement, when the pilot and navigator in the plane see the light, they do not need to do anything special to receive the warning. I wanted the same thing, that a person would not need to do anything different in life in order to get the alert. Combining those requirements was difficult to implement.”

The solution Romem eventually found was a vest with sensors embedded in its textile threads, a nano layer that monitors heartbeats, like an ECG, and alerts a cellphone if necessary. To get to market quickly, the first product was intended to detect heart attacks. “In 30% of heart attacks the person feels nothing, and our vest helps identify them.”

Business with the Chinese

The third decision Romem made was to write a book. “Black Swans” is a fictional story based on real events involving entrepreneurs over 60. “Once everyone was used to seeing white swans, until one day a black swan was found in Australia. This surprising event became, over time, a metaphor for an event that shatters all expectations, cannot be predicted, and after which nothing is as it was before.”

What black swans did your company face?

“First of all, it was the first garment in the world to receive FDA approval as a medical device. In addition, we were the first to offer an ECG solution that did not require going to a medical center. The third thing is that, unlike other companies that went to the US and Europe, we decided that our breakthrough would come through China.”

Why China? That is so difficult.

“In China 15 years ago, every nine seconds someone died of a heart attack. It was an acute problem. Also, anyone who did not feel well had to go to a hospital, there was no private doctor or clinic to turn to, and the hospitals were so crowded that sometimes people had to wait until evening to see a doctor. Venture capital funds in China understood this and defined the goal, to move from hospital-centered medicine to home-centered medicine, and we came with a solution that fit that concept. Besides, the book ‘Start-Up Nation’ captivated them and they admired us.

“But it really was difficult. We found a partner, a large Chinese company in the HealthCare field, that invested tens of millions of dollars in our startup. But then it turned out that it wanted to compete with us. The truth is, that was a surprise we should have expected. But the real black swan came with coronavirus. We were then completely invested in China, and suddenly the country was shut down all at once, like slamming on the brakes.”

Let’s talk about what it means to be an entrepreneur at 60 plus. Do you encounter ageism?

“When I was your age, if they had offered me a 60-year-old candidate for a job, I probably would not have hired him. But people that age can conquer half the world. Both the CEO and my partner were my age, and only afterward did the young people start arriving.”

But how did the Chinese view that?

“With the Chinese there was a bit of a problem. In their culture, the grandfather no longer goes to work, and his role in life, together with the grandmother, is to look after the grandchildren so that the parents can work. And suddenly people that age came and started giving presentations and so on. I was the chairman, and on my business card it said Chairman, which in China is like emperor.

“In every Chinese company there is only one person making decisions, and if he makes a mistake even the company’s lawyers would not dare point it out. And suddenly the Chairman comes and gives presentations to people younger than him. That was strange to them and made things harder for us.”

Israeli entrepreneurs in startups do not have this issue of, ‘Give me respect.’

“That connects for me to the comparison with entrepreneurs. People in their 60s and older may not understand the need to add yet another feature to a cellphone like younger people do, but they want to do something meaningful. For example, my partner Amos Shatner and I created another company that aims to help with the problem of falls in old age. According to studies, when people 65 and older fall, they may break their hip, and about 30% of them die as a result within a year. So we developed a belt that you wear, and if you fall, something opens from it like an airbag, which prevents the fracture.”

“I was amazed by the patent”

As mentioned, Romem was among the founders of the parking payment app Pango. In the 1990s, the idea was conceived by an entrepreneur named Shlomo Zaitman, who was then in London and, in pouring rain, had to look for a parking meter to pay at. Cellphones already existed, and he wondered why you could not simply pay from the phone in the car. But Zaitman struggled to turn the idea into profit.

“He failed to raise enough money and the company shut down,” Romem says. “But he registered a patent that was approved in Europe and the US. Zaitman was an air force pilot, and one day I met him at a forum of air force businesspeople. He told me about the patent and I was amazed. That was the beginning of the relaunch, and I came in as a partner.”

You talk a lot about the value of ‘quality determines.’ Tell us a bit about that.

“I served as commander of the air force computer unit. When they appointed me, at age 38, I first took a month off to think about the important thing I wanted to change in the unit, and I came to the conclusion that it lacked a guiding value that would create differentiation between it and a similar unit in the air force. I chose the value of quality and excellence.

“Then I gathered the unit members and wrote on the board, ‘Quality determines.’ There is no doubt that quite a few people thought it was just a slogan. But the commander’s challenge is to give it substance, and that was visible immediately: we held a quality competition with prizes, performance measurement, and there was even quality in the appearance of the base, down to the bathrooms.”

Everyone wants to work in a place where things are made as perfectly as possible, but entrepreneurs constantly have to compromise and decide where to lower quality and release a product even when there are bugs, so it will not be ready in 13 years. How do you deal with that?

“Already in the army I told my people, when we go into civilian life it will be harder, there will be problems and profitability will have to be maintained. In the air force we were able to sanctify quality. Later, as CEO of large companies, I learned that you can uphold that value, but usually not as the first value.

“The dilemma comes, for example, when you need to decide when to release a product because it is never perfect. It is a managerial decision of how much to push and how much to say, ‘We will wait. It is not good enough,’ and here the value of quality is strong, but it is not the only one. If quality were the only value, it would probably hurt profitability.”

“One of the pains from my first startup, Moovu, is that we wanted the app to come out perfect so badly that in the meantime we burned most of the money. By the time it came out, there was no money left to market it.”

If today they gave you the chance to head a computer unit in the army again, what would you take there from what you learned in civilian life?

“The added value of a commander in a development unit should be to innovate and initiate. We have two hands, one rests on the operational pulse of requirements and the other on technology and how it is developing in the world. The challenge is to combine the two.”

Some say the solution for a company is to split it into two units, one that takes care of maintaining what exists and one that looks ahead. How did you solve that at Pango?

“My solution was to have people who would help me think about the future. Sometimes market constraints require you to be perfect. I am no longer there, but at Pango they looked around and there was someone who pushed not to do only parking solutions.”

I think that in companies dealing with AI, the value of ‘quality determines’ has been completely set aside. They just want to put something on the market with all the bugs, and say, we will learn at your expense.

“My doctorate was in ‘expert systems,’ the previous generation of AI. These were systems that wanted the computer to do the work like a human expert in the field, and for that the technology was a rules-based system: they would interview the experts and then input rules into the system in human language. We built systems like that for banks, cell companies, procurement in the air force and more.

“The rules could also be changed by people who were not software professionals, and the tool became a bypass for those same departments. My final conclusion was that in their current form these systems could not advance, because what was missing was adaptation. The rules were correct for the moment you entered them, but they no longer fit later. And that is the leap of AI today.”

Each month, we will bring here a written version of one episode of the podcast “Popcorn.” Lior Frenkel is an entrepreneur, a consultant to organizations adapting to the new world of work, and the author of the bestseller “The Little Book for the New Manager.”

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