Gaza Sky Geeks, a start-up accelerator co-founded in 2011 by Berkeley resident Iliana Montauk, provides guidance, support and limited funding to new tech projects in Gaza.
In Gaza, Montauk said, she found a community of creative entrepreneurs and technologists with impressive visions despite their often fragile circumstances. She recalls being pitched on an extensive range of projects, everything from a video game embedded in Arab culture and an e-commerce website for Arab moms to a betting app for soccer enthusiasts.
“(We) had 60 founders in the space all pitching their ideas to me and asking me for help preparing for their pitches to investors,” Montauk said.
Most cafes and homes had WiFi, and co-working spaces were everywhere, she said. That’s in part due to the sorely outdated telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza, where any major upgrade projects must first be approved by Israel.
“Palestinians were some of the first to get online and be connected on social networking and all of that because their people are starving for some connection to the outside world,” Montauk said. “As soon as email and social networks were available, [Palestinians] got onto it.”
Montauk remembers that when she was in Gaza, electricity was only available about four hours a day, further limiting connection.
“There’s just been a limit to how much electricity Gaza can provide for itself internally,” she said. “I’ll be working with people online, and they’ll be sitting in darkness because their electricity will get shut off, but they’ll have their WiFi attached to [battery] power and their laptop charged up so that they can keep working.”
Participants in her program would also just keep working through whatever unrest was going on at the time, Montauk said, recalling how “you could hear bombing in the background” during previous escalations.
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