Mind the Tech NY 2024Bridgewater CEO: “If Israel catches this tech wave, it can enter the most prosperous period in the country's history”
Mind the Tech NY 2024
Bridgewater CEO: “If Israel catches this tech wave, it can enter the most prosperous period in the country's history”
“If you want to be great, you have to be able to look at reality for what it is, see the problems for what they are, get to the bottom of those problems, solve those problems, learn and evolve really fast,” added Nir Bar Dea
Nir Bar Dea
(Elad Gershgoren, Tomeriko)
“It's one of the last organizations that puts the pursuit of truth at the center of everything. And I don't mean truth, my truth, my opinions, your opinions. I mean, a group of people that come together trying to figure things out together,” said Bridgewater CEO Nir Bar Dea in an interview at the Mind the Tech conference in New York on Monday. “And if you know the Israeli story, there's so much in common from the 1940s when people came together and said, ‘we gotta figure this out, otherwise we won't survive’. There is that sense of urgency and pursuit of truth at Bridgewater that made me click basically immediately.”
Bridgewater is the largest hedge fund in the world with over $97 billion in assets under management. Bar Dea was appointed as Co-CEO in January 2022. His career at Bridgewater began in the Research department in 2015. Prior to joining Bridgewater, Nir served as Advisor to the Israeli Mission to the United Nations in the 2014 General Assembly.
“Usually when I explain what Bridgewater is, I focus on three big building blocks that I think tell the entire story. And when I say those things, think about Israel and how much of that is going to sound familiar to you? Because I think if you see that analogy, you get a sense of why I click well at Bridgewater. So Bridgewater is a place that has this unbelievably audacious chutzpah, right? A mission of trying to map an understanding of how the world works, literally. So find fundamental timeless truths about economies and markets in order for us to trade them. That's so ambitious, right?
“It's almost as ambitious as trying to put together a country in 1948 with our backs to the wall. How do you do that? You take a group of people that share unique values, the best people. We literally look for the smartest people in every generation. And you have them operate in this way that keeps them pushing each other to learn faster, to be better, to be excellent, and not allowing any of the nonsense that happens in most of society to stand in the way of learning. Because if you want to be great, you have to be able to look at reality for what it is, see the problems for what they are, get to the bottom of those problems, solve those problems, learn and evolve really fast. That's what Bridgewater does. And again, if you take that to the story of Israel with our backs to the wall, having this audacious goal, having so much shared common values and coming together to do impossible things. That ethos was very, very helpful in my journey at Bridgewater.”
“The last couple of years have been horrendous for Israel,” Bar Dea noted. “From the judicial reform to the war, we almost had a civil war. There's really a lot of room to be super worried. But then you look back, and I always think about Israel like a surfer, like we're on a surfboard. We look back, there's this giant wave coming. And if we catch this wave, if we paddle well, we can enter probably the most prosperous period in the country's history. But I worry that when people look back and they read the book Startup Nation they're like ‘we're crushing it’. And when they look at how the tech sector has grown they're getting the wrong picture of how worried they should be. We have an inability to govern. And if we don't get our act together, straighten the surfboard and paddle very, very hard, we're going to miss the opportunity, and instead of riding that wave, we're gonna get drowned by it.”
Watch the full interview in the video above.
