Yossi Vardi is one of Israel's pioneering tech entrepreneurs. In a career spanning 41 years, he has founded and helped build over 70 tech companies in diverse areas of software, energy, Internet,... mobile, electro-optics and clean water among others. In 1969, at the age of 26, he co-founded and was the first CEO of Tekem, one of the very first software houses in Israel, which would go on to become the largest software company at the time. In 1996, he became the founding investor of Mirabilis, the creator of ICQ, the first Internet-wide Instant Messaging system which sold to AOL for 400 million dollars just 19 months after it launched. Vardi is a co-holder of a patent on instant messaging on telephones and is founder of a global market leading Mobile VoIP service, as well as number of other ventures in the mobile space. Among the companies he invested in, or helped to build, are Answers.com, now public, Gteko, which sold to Microsoft, Airlink, which sold to Sierra, and many more. He was an advisor to the CEOs of AOL, Amazon.com, Allied-signal, Siemens-Albis and others. Vardi is a member of the World Economic Forum, on the advisory board of both Amdocs and Blackberry Ventures. He is the Co-Chair of the European Union - Israel Strategic Business Dialogue. Mr. Vardi has also acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy policy and strategy in the developing world.