Eric and I met the first day of Career Israel in August 2009. We were assigned to the same room during orientation and quickly became friends. Both of us had common interests in basketball, the New York Jets, and hanging out at Tel Aviv’s beaches.
Eric had a strong interest in start-ups and interned with a startup green energy company called Energymind. Energymind uses technology to convert seaweed and algae into biofuels. The internship was an amazing experience and consisted of a mix of financial modeling and helping with harvesting at a seaweed farm, a very different and interesting change of pace from his prior experience in the New York corporate world.
Following on my interest in finance, I worked at a financial software company, Superderivatives, on the derivative data team. The internship was a crash course on the world of financial derivatives and gave me great exposure and understanding to the products that helped contribute to the global financial crisis and have become so prolific in the financial world.
Following the end of the Career Israel program, Eric and I both stayed in Israel having been offered temporary jobs by the companies we had interned with. After a few months, we both returned to New York where we stayed friends and also worked together at a start-up green energy company. 
Two years ago, while returning from a summer vacation on a hot bus without air-conditioning and sweating like crazy, we had an idea to create an easy-to-carry, sleek, and disposable cooling wipe to help with everyday sweating. We pursued the idea and eventually created Zero K, our answer to the many times we found ourselves without something to help us cool off. It is a product that we both could have used commuting to our internships in Israel, on the beach or during nights out at the Namal (port).
Zero K just launched and they are currently raising money to manufacture their first batch of product through Kickstarter:
