How One Camera Changed the Automotive World: Mois Navon on the Birth of Mobileye’s Technology

One year turned into two, two into three, and three into four. Then one day, the CEO came to us and said: “We’re out of money. We have to start selling this chip today. We can’t wait until it makes its way into production cars.” But how do you sell a technology when the product it was designed for isn’t yet ready for the mass market?

Eventually, we came up with an aftermarket device — a small box mounted on the windshield of a car. It had a camera at the front and our chip inside. The chip analyzed the road situation and sent signals to a display on the dashboard.

The system could warn a driver that a collision with the car ahead was about 2.5 seconds away. It helped drivers maintain a safe distance. If a driver got too close to another vehicle or drifted out of their lane without using the turn signal, the device would sound an alert. This wasn’t a market we were particularly interested in. Our goal was to have the technology installed directly on the car production line. But we needed money right away, so we decided: all right, we’ll sell this device, make some money, and keep developing the technology.

Unexpectedly, the product attracted interest from other companies. Insurance firms wanted to find out whether it could reduce the number of accidents and save them money on claims. Road safety organizations wanted to know whether such a system could help lower the accident rate across the country.

I will never forget the evening when the CEO told us about the results of tests conducted by independent organizations. It was a big corporate dinner. Our CEO, Zeev Degani, who later took the company public, stood up to give the traditional speech. You know how company executives usually speak at these events: “We’re doing well. Work harder. We’ll achieve even more.” It normally takes them 20 or 30 minutes to say those three things.

But that evening was different. The CEO wasn’t wearing his usual smile. He didn’t read out a standard speech. He looked at us and said: “You know what, guys? We’re saving lives.”

We were surprised. Adaptive cruise control seemed like a luxury feature for cars. What did saving lives have to do with it? It turned out that companies comparing driver behavior with and without our system had obtained some very telling results. Drivers who used the device were much less likely to be involved in accidents. And when a collision did happen, an accident that could have been fatal sometimes ended with nothing more than a damaged bumper. The system had warned the driver of the danger in advance, giving them time to hit the brakes.

That was when Mobileye changed direction. We stopped thinking of ourselves as a company that simply made a device for motorists. We realized we were working in the safety industry.

From Collision Warnings to ADAS

That was how we came to understand that there was an entire industry called ADAS — Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Our technology could have far more applications than we had initially imagined.

If a system can warn someone about an imminent collision, why not teach it to apply the brakes automatically? That is how Automatic Emergency Braking, or AEB, came about.

If it can warn a driver that the car is drifting out of its lane, why not help keep the vehicle within the lane markings? That is Lane Keeping Assist, or LKA.

These capabilities gradually developed into an industry of their own. Governments take the availability of safety systems into account when assessing vehicles. Insurance companies may offer discounts on policies for cars equipped with these features.

Mobileye managed to combine different ADAS functions on a single chip. Today, the company holds more than 75% of the global market for these systems, and its technology is installed in more than 250 million vehicles. But that was not the last turn in the company’s development.

We Were in the Startup Nation

One day, several of our engineers came to management and said: “You know, we control the brakes, the accelerator, and the steering wheel. Essentially, we control the car. Why don’t we build an autonomous vehicle?”

At many other companies, they would probably have been told: “We don’t have any customers for autonomous cars. Get back to work.” But we were in Israel — the Startup Nation. So the CEO replied: “That’s an interesting research idea. Take this Audi and see what you can do with it in the garage.”

The engineers put together a small team, took three chips, connected them on a single board, and hooked them up to eight cameras covering the car from every direction. In just one year, they had built an autonomous vehicle that relied entirely on cameras. It drove from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea in a mode that did not require the driver to keep their hands on the steering wheel.

An Autonomous Car Without Expensive Sensors

I emphasize that the car relied exclusively on cameras because other players in the market were using lidar…

The other players in the market were using lidar — large sensors that rotate, such as the ones Google, for example, mounted on the roofs of its cars. At the time, a single sensor cost more than $100,000. We, meanwhile, had managed to get a car from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea without a driver, using a platform that cost around $2,000 in total. That was a completely different economic equation. Our system had a real chance of becoming commercially viable. The problem was that we didn’t yet have customers for autonomous cars. We did, however, have customers for ADAS systems.

Then Tesla came to us and said: “What is this? We want it!” Audi, Nissan, Volkswagen, and almost every major car manufacturer you can think of followed. Almost all of them — except Toyota. And Toyota was the company that had originally given us the money to test Amnon’s idea. But later, the company said: “You’ve proved that it can be done. We’re Japanese, we work for Japanese companies. Goodbye.” And it went to NEC, the Japanese equivalent of Intel.

Toyota asked NEC to develop a powerful image-processing chip. Of course, you can’t blame a company for working with its own partners. But you know what? I will never forget the day we were told that Toyota had driven out of the showroom in a car equipped with an NEC chip — and that the chip had burned out as soon as the car was switched on. Why did that happen?

How the Mobileye Chip Works

The basic architecture of a computer is known as the von Neumann architecture. Put simply, it consists of memory, a control unit, and a mathematical unit that performs calculations. For example, when you watch a movie on your phone, the file is stored in memory, the program controls playback, and the processor performs the operations needed to display the images on the screen.

NEC had obviously developed a general-purpose chip based on this principle. Ours was different: it was designed to perform only the operations needed to analyze the road environment. Let me explain using the example of a tracker — one of the components I was responsible for developing. Its job is to track cars from frame to frame. Imagine, for instance, that we need to follow a Ferrari driving down the road.

A person sees a car as an image, but to a chip it is just a set of numbers. Each pixel has its own value. We use black-and-white images because they are easier to process than color ones. Each pixel is assigned eight bits, giving us 256 possible values, from black to white, with all the shades of gray in between.

So the image is converted into a set of numbers, and a visual task becomes a mathematical one. To track a car, we need to compare two consecutive frames and determine how much its position has changed. The chip does this by comparing the values of corresponding pixels, subtracting one from the other, and adding up the differences. If the result is close to zero, the image has barely changed. If the difference is large, the car may have moved or disappeared from view altogether.

On a regular computer, this would require constantly accessing memory, retrieving pixels, performing calculations, and moving on to the next ones. Doing this for thousands of pixels at a rate of 30 frames per second would put an enormous load on the processor. So we developed specialized hardware. Instead of a general-purpose processor, we built a system that receives rows of pixels from two images simultaneously and processes them using separate subtraction units and an adder. While one operation is being performed, the next set of data is already entering the system.

This is called pipeline processing. It allows the chip to work quickly and efficiently without wasting resources. Thanks to this, it can fit inside a small device mounted on a car’s windshield. It can operate even in the heat of the desert, in summer, without a fan, and without overheating.

In 2008, we received an award for the best electronic design in the automotive industry. And that was probably one of the reasons Intel later became interested in us.

Why Intel Decided to Buy Mobileye

In 2014, Intel announced a partnership with BMW and Mobileye. We said that together we would bring a commercially available autonomous car to market. For Mobileye, this was our first major contract in the autonomous driving sector.

But inside Intel, the situation initially looked a little different. They looked at the partners and didn’t quite understand why they needed Mobileye. BMW made cars — that was clear. But Mobileye made chips. Intel made chips, too. What’s more, almost every component on the car’s electronic control board was made by Intel. There was only one chip on it that wasn’t theirs.

Can you guess what Intel wanted? To get rid of us. Its representatives came to Mobileye every day, asking how our interfaces worked and how we had developed various solutions. They were trying to understand our technology so they could reproduce it themselves. But a few months later, something unexpected happened. Intel’s CEO came to Israel, gathered Mobileye employees at the Jerusalem Theatre, and said from the stage: “We’ve been watching you for months. And we’ve decided it’s better to buy you than beat you.”

And that was how the deal happened. Intel acquired Mobileye for $15.3 billion.

The deal mattered for more than just our company. So much money flowed into Israel that it even had an impact on the exchange rate. But what mattered even more was the way the country began to be perceived afterward. Announcing the deal on international television, Intel’s CEO said: “You know, Intel is as much an Israeli company as it is an American one.”

Strictly speaking, that wasn’t entirely true: Intel is an American company with major operations in Israel. What mattered was that the head of one of the world’s largest chipmakers publicly emphasized the Israeli contribution to this story.

Mobileye, incidentally, had not presented itself as an Israeli company either. We were registered in the Netherlands, while our research and development center was in Jerusalem. At the time, many companies tried not to emphasize their connection with Israel. But after the Intel deal, the situation changed. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be associated with Israel. What I call a paradigm shift had taken place. People began to see Israel not only as a small country facing a complicated political and security situation, but as an innovation superpower — a place from which the world gets science, technology, medical developments, and industrial solutions.

What It Takes to Build a Technology Company

A few years ago, a group of investors from China came to Israel. They represented Sinochem Corporation, a company connected with the construction of the Shanghai Towers. Along with their CEO and around twenty senior executives, they spent two weeks in Israel studying the experience of local companies. They wanted to understand the secret behind Israeli innovation and how to build successful technology businesses. They visited many companies and eventually came to see me. They had a very specific question: how did we build Mobileye? How did we manage to do it?

I told them that our CEO had been asked that question many times. At one corporate dinner, he had even summed up what it takes to build a company like ours. First, you need an innovative idea — something other people believe is impossible. For example, detecting three-dimensional objects in three-dimensional space using a single camera.

Second, you need to be able to withstand financial blows. The story of how we ran out of money and had to find a way to sell our chip immediately is just one of many such episodes. We came close to bankruptcy more than once. If we hadn’t found a way out back then, you would never have heard of Mobileye. We took out loans, brought in investors, cut teams, and did everything we could to keep the company afloat.

Third, you need patience. You cannot expect an exit in two, five, or even ten years. Mobileye went public on the New York Stock Exchange 14 years after it was founded. It took another three years for Intel to acquire the company. That made 17 years without an exit.

And finally, you have to be able to change direction — to pivot. We started with adaptive cruise control, moved on to ADAS systems, and eventually turned to autonomous vehicles. If we had stubbornly stuck to our original idea, Mobileye’s story might have turned out very differently.

Our CEO liked to quote Thomas Jefferson: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more of it I have.” As a rabbi, I allowed myself to rephrase that thought a little. I believe that the harder a person works, the more God helps them. I believe there is a Creator, and that He wants us to repair the world. If we try to do His will, He helps us in that work.

The guide accompanying the Chinese investors heard this and immediately came over to me: “Forget God! They’re 100 percent atheists!” I looked at the guests and said: “So, I hear you’re atheists.” They smiled and nodded.

Then I left them with a question that, in my view, has no simple answer: the question of the Jewish people. Two thousand years ago, Jews lived in this land. Then the Romans came, drove us out, and scattered us across the world. Wherever we went, we were not exactly welcomed — and often people tried to destroy us. They still do.

But we survived. More than that, we returned to our land, rebuilt the country, and became so successful that people now come here from all over the world to understand how this was possible. Mark Twain wrote back in the nineteenth century: “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” The history of the Jewish people does not fit the usual patterns of historical development. So I asked the Chinese investors: how would you explain it? Some call it luck. I call it God’s help.

Technology Must Serve People

I tell this story not only to explain how Mobileye came into being. I want people to understand what Israel really is. For me, this is connected with an idea my supervisor at NASA spoke about many years ago: tikkun olam — repairing the world. We believe that science and technology can make it a better place. And that is what we try to do. But I always emphasize that technology must be considered within ethical boundaries. It can bring enormous benefits, but it can also cause great harm. Just because we are capable of creating something does not mean we should.

That is why I teach ethics and artificial intelligence to engineers at Bangor University and Bar-Ilan University. I also speak to students and professionals in different countries. I have lectured at many universities in the United States, from Cornell, Harvard, and UCLA to universities in Texas, as well as in London, Hong Kong, and South America.

I share Israel’s experience with anyone willing to listen. And I want people to see not only the technological products themselves, but also what lies behind their creation: ideas, perseverance, responsibility, and an understanding of purpose.

Mois Navon: From Surfing in California to Mobileye’s Success

I wasn’t born in Israel. I grew up in Los Angeles, in a secular Jewish family. I wasn’t religious, and I had a wonderful childhood. In the 1980s, I went surfing and skateboarding — in short, I lived a typical California life.

But when I was seven or eight, I started thinking seriously about death for the first time. I learned that people die and asked myself: what is the point of our existence if one day we simply disappear? For a boy growing up in Los Angeles, the answer came easily enough: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But then I thought: if death means disappearing so completely that you don’t even remember ever having existed, what is the point of all that eating, drinking, and merrymaking?

My parents weren’t religious and weren’t particularly interested in philosophy. So I went back to surfing. I surfed throughout my youth and was part of the surf team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I studied computer engineering.

In my sophomore year, I got an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). For an engineering student, that was quite an achievement. I remember my first day: I arrived early, met my supervisor, and he explained the engineering work and showed me around the campus. Then we went to the cafeteria. He said: “Order whatever you like.”

I smelled the hamburgers and ordered a cheeseburger. My supervisor grimaced. I thought the food must be terrible and suggested getting something else. He grimaced again. So I told him I wasn’t very good at reading facial expressions: “Unless you tell me directly that the cheeseburgers here are bad, I’m going to order what I like.” That was probably the last cheeseburger of my life.

It turned out that my supervisor was a religious Jew. In Judaism, there is a strict prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. During the next two years of my internship, we spent half the day talking about engineering and the other half discussing Jewish philosophy.

He explained to me that there is a Creator, that human beings have souls and a purpose. We are not here simply to live for our own pleasure. We are meant to work on ourselves and try to make the world a better place. In Hebrew, this is called tikkun olam — repairing the world. Gradually, these ideas began to resonate with me, and I realized that I wanted to do something more meaningful. Although, at the time, I was the recruitment chair of a fraternity at UCLA. If you’ve seen American movies about college fraternities, you know what that means: parties, parties, and more parties. The recruitment chair organizes them at the beginning of the academic year and then hands things over to someone else.

One day, at a big party, I was holding a slice of pepperoni pizza when I suddenly remembered what my NASA supervisor had told me about the prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. So I simply picked the pieces of pepperoni off the pizza. Of course, anyone familiar with Jewish law knows that this changes nothing: the dish doesn’t suddenly become kosher. Still, it was one of the moments when I began to think seriously about my Jewish roots.

While I spent 16 years working on chips for Mobileye, I also spent six of those years studying at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva. It was about ten minutes from the company’s office. I went there twice a week and eventually became an Orthodox rabbi. So I am both an engineer and a rabbi.

How I Moved to Israel

While studying at UCLA, I met a woman who had also grown up in a secular Jewish family. We began exploring Judaism together, got married, and one day decided that if we wanted to follow this path, we should live in the homeland of the Jewish people. We needed to move to Israel.

I started sending my résumé to American engineering companies with branches in Israel. Predictably, I received quite a few rejections. No one wanted to hire someone who was 10,000 kilometers away. My wife said: “You know what? Let’s just go. People do that.” But I objected, saying I didn’t know anyone who had done that and wasn’t about to move somewhere unknown without a job.

Around that time, I was working for an engineering company in Los Angeles. There were several Israeli engineers there who had come to the United States on sabbatical: they were spending a year working in America, gaining experience, and earning money. We became friends.

One day, one of them came into my office and put a fax from IBM Israel on my desk. The company was planning to come to Los Angeles to interview candidates for nine or ten engineering positions. I asked why he was showing me the fax, since I hadn’t told anyone I was planning to move to Israel. He replied: “I thought you might be interested.”

Of course, I sent my résumé to the company and received an invitation to interview with the CEO of IBM Israel, Yosef Raviv. He was one of the people who had essentially laid the foundations of Israel’s technology industry. Back in the 1970s, he had brought IBM to the Technion campus in Haifa, long before the word “startup” became commonplace.

We met at the Beverly Hills Hilton. He said my résumé looked pretty good, but I would need to pass a technical interview. He couldn’t conduct it himself, but the head of the chip design group would be at San Francisco airport the following week. Could I meet him there? I figured a ticket to San Francisco would cost less than a trip to Israel, so I agreed.

The manager’s name was Arun Arun. He was a well-known figure in the technology world: he had once become the first CEO of Apple Israel, headed the Israel Innovation Authority, and was now leading IBM’s chip design group. We met in the airport’s VIP lounge. It seemed as though everything would be straightforward. But Arun was also head of the Computer Science Department at the Technion, so his idea of a technical interview was to ask me questions from his students’ exams.

People around us were watching television, listening to music, and relaxing, while I was trying to answer questions I wasn’t even properly prepared for. I failed the interview. Arun thanked me, I gathered my things, and I left.

When I reached the exit of the VIP lounge, I suddenly thought: “My God, you’ve just lost your chance to move to Israel. You can’t let that happen.” I turned around and went back to Arun. He was sitting on a sofa. I said: “Listen, you know things that I don’t know. But you don’t know what I know. I’ve been working in this industry for almost ten years and have developed all sorts of interesting projects. Among other things, I worked on the ‘Star Wars’ system.”

I wasn’t talking about the movie. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, US President Ronald Reagan feared that the Soviet Union might launch intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States. That led to the Strategic Defense Initiative, which became known as “Star Wars.” The idea was to develop missiles capable of destroying Soviet missiles in space.

But how could you test whether such a system would work? You could launch two missiles into space and see whether one intercepted the other. But that would be extremely expensive and risky. A way had to be found to test the system before an actual launch.

I was assigned to develop the IRSP — the Infrared Scene Projector. Essentially, it was a video projector designed to simulate a “movie” of missiles in flight. A camera mounted on the nose of an American missile would capture this scene, allowing engineers to test how the system tracked its target.

It sounds simple, but this wasn’t ordinary video. The missiles used heat-seeking guidance, so the images had to be created in the infrared spectrum. That required a huge system involving laser beams and a special screen on which the required scene was formed using thermal spots.

I told Arun what I had been working on. He thanked me again, I gathered my things, and I left. About a week later, Yosef Raviv called and said: “We want to offer you a job.”

I went home and told my wife: “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we’ve got a job. The bad news is that they’re offering us half the salary we were earning in Los Angeles.” She replied: “That’s fine.”

I couldn’t understand how that could possibly be fine. We weren’t living in luxury in Los Angeles. How could we move to Israel and get by on half our previous income? But my wife said: “Other people manage somehow. We’ll manage, too.”

Cutting our budget in half turned out to be difficult. If you Google money-saving tips, the first recommendation is usually to stop buying takeaway coffee. But we had long since passed that stage. I had owned my own car in Los Angeles since I was 16. It’s practically impossible to live there without one. In Israel, I could no longer afford a car, so I hitchhiked to work.

Remember how we said Israel was a small country? Well, on my first day at work, I was given a lift by none other than Yosef Raviv, the CEO of IBM Israel, in his “Rolls-Royce.” Although, to be fair, there were no Rolls-Royces in Israel in 1992. It was a Volvo. But at the time, it felt about as luxurious as a Rolls-Royce in Los Angeles. So it was a pretty good start.

My First Years in Israeli Technology Companies

Haifa is a wonderful city. It was at IBM Israel that I learned how to design chips, and professionally, the job was extremely valuable to me. Socially, however, things were much harder. At the time, there were very few people in Haifa who lived a religious lifestyle, and there wasn’t much of an English-speaking community either. I had no relatives there and no familiar social circle. I was, essentially, lonely.

About a year later, I told my wife: “I can’t do this anymore. Either I’m going back to Los Angeles or we’re moving somewhere else.” Around that time, a friend of mine had a startup in Jerusalem. We thought: great, Jerusalem has English speakers, a religious community, and friends. Before I left IBM, my colleagues threw me a small farewell party. They asked where I was going and what the company I was leaving IBM for actually did.

I told them about the startup. They looked at me and said: “You’re leaving IBM Israel for that? That’s a stupid idea!” And they were right. The startup closed about three months later, and I was out of work again. But at least this time I was unemployed in Jerusalem.

I started looking for another position and, about two weeks later, found a job at a different startup in Herzliya Pituach, one of the research and development hubs north of Tel Aviv.

The company was called OptiBase. It was developing MPEG systems — technology that compresses and decompresses the video we now watch on our phones. Without MPEG, we would have to carry around something the size of a refrigerator just to store movies.

This was 1993–1994, the beginning of the MPEG era. We were working on some of the first systems of this kind. I was assigned to develop the first in-flight video-on-demand system for aircraft.

If you’ve watched movies during a flight, you may have used a system similar to the one I worked on. In 1994, things were very different: if a passenger wanted to watch a movie, they had to wait for a flight attendant to insert a cassette and then watch whatever had been chosen for them, at a set time. If turbulence started, the screening could be interrupted altogether.

We were building the first video-on-demand systems. It was a great job, but commuting every day from Jerusalem to Herzliya Pituach was a real ordeal. My life consisted of travelling, eating, sleeping, working, and travelling again. After about a year, I decided I couldn’t keep doing it. Around that time, a friend offered me a job at NDS — News Digital Systems. It was located near Jerusalem and belonged to Rupert Murdoch’s media corporation, News Corporation, which included Fox News, B-Sky-B, and other businesses.

The company was developing pay television. We were designing a special encryption chip that encoded video before it was broadcast. If your television had one of these chips, it could decode the signal, allowing you to watch pay-TV channels.

I worked at NDS from 1995 to 2000. Before leaving OptiBase, one of my friends asked whether I had exercised my stock options. For anyone unfamiliar with the term: when you join a private technology company, you may be given the right to buy its shares in the future at a predetermined price. Those are stock options. If the company goes public, they can become very valuable. If it doesn’t, they may end up being worth nothing.

When you leave a company, you usually have to decide what to do with those rights: exercise the options or give them up. I told my friend I didn’t have the money to exercise them and that the risk was too high. He looked at me and said: “Are you crazy? We’re engineers! Engineers don’t get rich on their salaries alone. The whole point is the stock options. You can’t just leave them on the table.”

I agreed that it was good advice, but by that point I could no longer stand the commute between Jerusalem and Herzliya. I didn’t have the money to exercise the options either. So I put the idea aside and went to work at NDS.

The Dot-Com Crash and the Most Difficult Period of My Career

In 2000, the internet was becoming incredibly popular. Everyone realized that it was the next major technological revolution. The so-called dot-com boom had begun.

If you look at the NASDAQ chart, it had grown fairly steadily until the 1990s. Then, toward the end of the decade, the stock market shot up. Investors were willing to put money into almost any business connected with the internet. You could sell toothbrushes, but if you called your company Toothbrushes.com, it seemed as though you were already a millionaire. The same thing was happening in Israel. Almost every small office was turning into yet another internet startup.

I thought: this is my chance. I should take my friend’s advice, join a startup, and get stock options. I left NDS and joined a company called OnePath. It was working on fiber-to-the-home technology — bringing fiber-optic connections directly into people’s homes. Today, that is commonplace, but in 2000 we were trying to roll out some of the first systems of this kind in the world. I was assigned to develop a network chip.

The company offered me a salary and stock options. Management explained that it had enough funding for one year and then planned to go public, raise more money, and continue its work. But the following year turned out to be the year of the dot-com crash.

Whereas investors had previously been willing to pay enormous sums for technology companies, they now began asking questions: why should two guys in a garage who have built a website be valued at a thousand times their earnings? It made no sense. Investors started selling their shares. Everyone was selling. In less than a year, the market had been cut in half.

It makes an interesting case study for courses in economics, finance, or investment. Experiencing it firsthand, however, is not interesting at all. When the market falls, companies close, the economy slows down, and people lose their jobs. That is exactly what happened to me. OnePath shut down, and I was out of work again. This time, things were much worse. It was the absolute low point of my career. I was unemployed, my engineer friends were unemployed, small technology companies had gone bankrupt, and large ones were laying people off. Everyone around me was trying to figure out what to do next.

That was when I needed an idea from Jewish philosophy. It comes from the Talmud, a collection of Jewish laws, stories, and reflections on how to live. The story is associated with Rabbi Akiva, one of the great teachers of the Jewish tradition. His life was not easy, but he had a philosophical principle that helped him get through difficult times. It goes like this: Gam zu l’tova — “This, too, is for the good.”

It doesn’t mean that everything around you is good. It doesn’t mean you should pretend that problems don’t exist. It means something else: I am only a small part of an enormous picture that I cannot see in its entirety. I don’t understand everything, but I believe there is a meaning to it. So I’m not going to stop. I have to pick up the pieces and keep moving.

You need to learn this through small things. For example, you’re walking along the beach and stub your toe — tell yourself Gam zu l’tova and carry on with your day. If you practice, you’ll be able to respond in the same way when you find a $200 parking ticket tucked under your windshield wiper.

And then the moment will come when you lose your job, all your friends are unemployed, and you have five children, a wife, and a mortgage to support. At that point, you simply sit down and start sending out résumés. That is exactly what I did.

How I Joined Mobileye

Eventually, after many weeks, I received an offer from a large technology company in Tel Aviv. But I turned it down because I still wanted to work at a startup and get stock options. I hadn’t forgotten my friend’s advice. Then I was offered a job at a startup in Modi’in. But the company was working on internet technologies, and I was already ready to leave the internet behind.

I kept looking. Then one day, a friend said: “You once worked with a guy at NDS. He’s now at a startup in the Ramot area, not far from Jerusalem. The company does something related to cars,” he told me.

People will always need cars, I thought. That sounded much better than another internet project. And that is how I joined a small automotive startup that would eventually become Mobileye — the very company Intel acquired for $15.3 billion.

Now, when I tell this story, it seems to me that the principle of Gam zu l’tova really does work. You can lose your job, find yourself in a difficult situation, and fail to get the result you wanted. But that doesn’t mean the road has come to an end. Sometimes you simply have to keep moving, even if you don’t yet know exactly where that road will take you.