The busy start of Sabbath

After a short night, we managed to get up early again for another day full of visits. The streets were noticeably quieter, as we’ve expected: Friday is actually a free day in Israel for Sabbath starts in the afternoon, but Royal HaskoningDHV was nice enough to receive us anyways and told us about construction work in Israel from the perspective of a Dutch company.

Israel is working on subway system with 22 stations and asked Royal HaskoningDHV to do the engineering work for 10 of them. We learned how complex such a project is, as a lot of infrastructure has to be adjusted without hindering the traffic too much. Surprisingly, technical challenges were not the most troublesome. Many stakeholders and cultural differences play a big role in communication. Meetings are often in Hebrew, permits take a long time and everybody has their own agenda. The expected completion date of 2021 seems to be impossible. Maarten en Maurice of Royal Haskoning told about their way of handling these things. Despite of all the setbacks and challenges they still thought of the project as one of the most challenging and interesting engineering projects in the world right now.

After visiting the construction site, were we talked with the site manager, they treated us on a lunch at one of their favorite places and we had to say goodbye. Because the next meeting was about to start. We visited a startup called WalkME, which has managed to raise 20 million Euros in 3 rounds. One of the first committee members of YES!Delft students had heard of our visit to Tel Aviv and invited us to visit the startup he is currently working for. We would like to explain Walkme in a couple of sentences, but that is more difficult then you’d think. That is a problem Nir and his team are facing on a daily basis, so after a tour, he asked us to help him with that. We splitted up in teams and though of a tagline and an elevator pitch that would explain Walkme to potential customers.

As usual, after a quick shower at the apartment, we went for diner. We though about having a quiet night, for we were all tired, but that did not work out the way we planned: Tel Avivs night life ruined our conservative plans and we spent the night visiting various clubs and having a great time.