Milpitas, CA – High-Tech CEO Blends Business And Jewish Religion Devotion

Milpitas, CA – Silicon Valley, CA – Yaacov Cohen knows the high-flying, high-tech, global CEO routine.

In Silicon Valley, business is war and one of the weapons is being on 24/7. That’s why you can find Cohen, who spends the equivalent of 30 days a year on airplanes or getting to and from them, working anywhere and nearly anytime.

But never on the Sabbath. Cohen is an observant Orthodox Jew, which means that from roughly sundown Friday to sundown Saturday he unplugs. No phone. No e-mail. No Twitter. No travel. And no work.

“I thought it was a very good digital detox strategy,” says Cohen, CEO of Milpitas-based Harmon.ie, a company that sells collaboration and e-mail management tools for business. “And it’s from 5,000 years ago.”

No doubt there are plenty of faithful Silicon Valley executives, but Cohen stands out for the extent to which he’s weaved his deep religious faith into his faith in the world of business. Religion and business can seem an awkward mix. In a valley that is known for hard-nosed competition and the cold calculus of technology, religion can seem out-of-place, almost a weakness. But Cohen doesn’t buy it.

“As I got deeper into Judaism and what it really means,” he says, “I realized it was a way of life. Business life is actually a perfect place to actually implement the Torah.”

In some ways, Cohen’s life has been a faith journey. He grew up in France and moved to Israel as a teenager to study the Torah, the founding text

of Judaism. After a stint in the Israeli Navy, he went to work for Harmon.ie in Israel. Cohen was promoted to president in late 1999 and he and his growing family moved to Silicon Valley, where he took over as Harmon.ie CEO in 2000. But no matter where he lived, Israel was always home.

“I felt connected with the Jewish heritage and everything that happened to the Jewish people,” Cohen, 45, says. “I thought the story of the state of Israel was a story that I wanted to be a part of.”

Cohen is back in Israel now, having decided in 2005 that he could manage the global company from the center of his spirituality just as well as he could run it from the center of technology. He lives in the small Orthodox town of Nof Ayalon with his wife, Yael, a microbiologist who is training to be a midwife, and his eight kids, ranging in age from three to 18.

Yes, home life is hectic, especially when Yaacov is traveling, which he is at least one week a month. How does Yael manage work, school and family? Multitasking. When she is cooking, she invites one child to join her in the kitchen for some one-on-one time. She never sits down to drink a cup of coffee without taking on a task, too, such as making a phone call.

And there is Nof Ayalon itself, which Yaacov describes as the kind of place where neighbors bring neighbors meals when someone is sick; a place in which the adults take turns teaching children Torah lessons; a town that observes the Sabbath, which Yael says is a godsend to Yaacov and her family.

“All of us have one day that we know he’s only with the family and me,” Yael, 40, says. “It’s a very pleasant moment. We are waiting for Saturday every day of the week.”

It is a time, Yaacov says, when the family has good food, conversation and each other.

“Nobody can look at his screen. Nobody can look at Facebook. No Twitter. And you end up going back to what’s really important.”

There are trade-offs. The travel, for one. And Yaacov sometimes misses the valley.

“I love the energy of the valley,” he says. “I love the fact that technology is just being talked about in the streets, in Starbucks, you just feel it.”

But of course he gets back regularly. I met up with Yaacov in Palo Alto at a hotel he selected because it was close to the synagogue he once attended and still goes to at 6:30 a.m. to pray when he’s in town. He’d just flown in from Chicago, which he had flown to from London. He was leaving the next day for New York and then onto to Tel Aviv the following day, arriving home in time to observe the Sabbath. (He hasn’t missed one at home, yet.)

There are times when Yaacov is unplugged that it would be really nice to have a CEO around. Mike Gullard, a semi-retired Menlo Park venture capitalist, was Harmon.ie’s chairman from 2000 to 2008, back when the company was called Mainsoft. He remembers a crisis involving some leaked Microsoft source code that the company had legal access to. The evidence pointed to a Mainsoft employee.

“It happened on a Friday,” Gullard says, meaning after sunset on Friday in Israel, where it is hours later, “and Yaacov was not available to deal with it.” But no one expected him to be available. Gullard himself stepped in to handle the problem “and it worked fine.”

“It was just one of those things where technology said he could be available 24/7,” Gullard says, “but from a religious perspective, he could be available 24/6.”

Gullard says he admires Cohen’s devoutness. “I think it’s having some balance and not feeling that compulsion that you always have to be available.”

Cohen doesn’t feel the compulsion. For him, it’s simply an article of faith.

http://harmon.ie/