Dov Moran, The Israeli Who Sold The DiskOnKey For $1.6B, Shares His Thoughts On Success, Startups And Working Until The Very En
Guest post by Paul Sánchez Keighley
You know those child geniuses who, instead of
brandishing toy-soldiers and erecting Lego fortresses spend their childhood
carefully taking electric devices apart, reassembling them and even further
befuddling their parents by improving them? Well, Dov Moran
wasn’t one of them.
Dov Moran is the founder of M-Systems,
the company that created the USB Flash Drive (DiskOnKey) and went on to sell it
for $1.6 billion to SanDisk; he created modu,
which made modular cellular devices a reality and sold it to Google
for $4.9 million; and, most recently, Comigo, to develop an
Android-based TV platform and Smartype, which developed a
smart keyboard.
Dov Moran is a fountain of creative output who,
according to his workmates, doesn’t sleep (“This is incorrect” he states “I do
sleep sometimes…”) and who devotedly heeds his family’s advice (Answering the
question of whether he is involved in charitable donations, he says: “My
wife gave me a very good lesson: if you talk about your charity work, it isn’t
charity anymore. It’s PR.”)
Still, during an interview with NoCamels, this
tireless tech giant good-humoredly shared with us his clumsy beginnings. He
indeed remembered himself, “at the age of ten or so, buying electronic
components and digital watch parts” from a supplier published on the last page
of MAD magazine. “But,” he blushingly adds, “I cannot state that I overly
succeeded doing something with those parts…”
The inner inventor waiting to pounce
As his childhood memories prove, the inventive spirit
of the entrepreneur lay inside little Dov Moran and all it lacked was a means
of revealing itself. And so it did, for a twist of fate awaited this child who
filled in his home address in the blank squares of MAD magazine’s purchase
forms.
“I was sent when I was 16 to an annual course in
computers held in Tel-Aviv University.” He reminds us that “these were the
days” in which “to write a program you needed to mark cards dedicated to that
with a pen.” After three months of strenuous efforts to see eye-to-eye with
this primitive system, Moran wrote his first program.
But this self-described “futile creation” was but the
first toddles of a programmer learning the ropes. Moran cruised through his
computer courses until obtaining a Bachelor of Science at the Technion,
Israel’s Institute of Technology. It was during these days that Moran decided
“[he was] going to open a company” and “the feeling strengthened when [he
later] served in the Navy.”
“My dreams were to create company that would succeed
in generating revenues of $1 million. I didn’t think about a
billion!” he says M-Systems, his first company. But Moran, an unsatisfied
personality by nature, didn’t have enough: “When we passed that, the desire
came for a company that with annual sales of $10 million. We then strived for a
company with annual sales of $100 million and then the $1 billion just
happened…”
In 1995, M-Systems created the world’s first flash
drive (DiskOnChip) and, in 1999, the first USB flash drive (DiskOnKey). This
invention, which revolutionized the world of technology and clicked all
computer devices together, heaved the company’s value over the billion dollar
mark and was sold in 2006 to SanDisk for $1.6 billion. “It
just happened,” says Moran.
 |
| Dov Moran, the man, who never sleeps |
When the going gets tough, the tough gets going
When Moran began his career, two concepts we can all
come across nowadays by perusing any business publication were not yet at home
in the Israeli lexicon: he claims the word “high-tech” wasn’t really common and
no one knew the meaning of “raising money”. “Raising money?” he mimics the
engineers of old “You can raise flowers, but money?”
First published at nocamels.com
First published at nocamels.com
