A book by Dr. Gilat Kaplan
The Psychology of Israeli Entrepreneurs in New York
“The greatest ambitions often grow from the deepest wounds.”
The Book
They came to take on New York: to make it big, to turn an idea into an exit, and to do it in the big leagues.
Dr. Gilat Kaplan, a clinical psychologist who has spent many years exploring the inner world of the Israeli entrepreneur in New York, looks past the dream to the person beneath it. She sees the other fire that drives him: the voice of a critical father, relentless anxieties, or a hunger to be recognized in the one place where no one knew him back home.
In this book, Kaplan uncovers what the entrepreneur hides even from himself. Through Guy, Michal, Nati, and Yotam, Israeli entrepreneurs she interviewed and in some cases treated, she reveals what no pitch deck would ever dare to show: that the greatest ambitions often grow from the deepest wounds.
A chance, at last, to understand the person they live with.
A look at the inner forces driving the person they are betting on.
A mirror to look into before taking the leap.
Contents
Excerpt · From the Preface
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
Dr. Kaplan speaks about the inner world of entrepreneurs, especially Israeli founders in New York, drawing on her clinical work, her doctoral research, and the stories in the book.
Strong, yet vulnerable. Needs no one, yet leans on others. Unbreakable, yet the body speaks. Three paradoxes found in nearly every entrepreneur, explored through the people in the book.
How military service, especially in the technology and intelligence units, shapes the strengths Israeli founders bring to business, and the habits they may later need to rethink.
Fathers who were busy, critical, or absent even when present, and the sons who turned that pain into self-reliance, becoming, in a sense, their own parents.
The spouse who keeps the ship afloat below the waterline: identity, loneliness, and the shifting dynamics of a couple after the move to New York.
Investors, home, and guilt that never lets up: the complex reality of Israeli women founders, from the military ethos of toughness to a female chutzpah that is read as aggression.
Stress, pain, and the entrepreneur who treats feelings as an unreported bug. Why the body is not simply “acting up,” and what it means to listen to it.
About the Author
A clinical psychologist who studies the entrepreneurial personality, she divides her life between Tel Aviv and New York, the two cities this book moves between.
For 22 years, Dr. Kaplan served as a senior psychologist in the IDF Intelligence Corps, one of the breeding grounds of Israeli tech entrepreneurship. There she had the privilege of founding and heading the Corps’ mental health institute for career personnel. For a decade, she also directed a rehabilitation center for psychiatric patients.
In her private practice in Israel, she treats entrepreneurs and their families. She first met many of them during their military service and came to know them again afterward, in the therapy room and in civilian life.
Her doctoral research explored the personality of serial high-tech entrepreneurs, not from an economic or organizational angle but from a psychoanalytic one. It was based on in-depth interviews and questionnaires with 42 Israeli founders and a comparison group of 38 senior managers, analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Since then, she has written chapters in professional books and lectured at conferences in Israel and abroad.
Contact
For lectures, media inquiries, and questions about the book.