The first thing I noticed about Erez Ben-Ishay was the tie. It was silk, dark blue, in a perfect Windsor knot, and he was wearing it in Herzliya, Israel, in April, at a hotel where every other man was in sandals.
I have spent a good deal of my adult life in Israel. I have met generals, tech founders, billionaires, and at least one person who I’m fairly certain had a live feed of the ayatollah on his iPhone. None of them wore a tie. The country doesn’t really do ties. A tie in Israel is like an umbrella in the desert. It’s not that it’s wrong, exactly, it’s that it raises a question about what the person thinks is going to happen.
I didn’t say any of this. I said, “Nice tie.”
Erez said, “This is how I do business.”
And that, more or less, is how I entered a two-year relationship…