The world is full of innovation more important than ad algorithms

THE WORLD IS FULL OF INNOVATION MORE IMPORTANT THAN AD ALGORITHMS To find them, you just need to look beyond Silicon Valley. June 6, 2019 at 6:00 AM EDT This article is part of the June 10,

2019 issue of businessweek.Chevron Right The scene played out much like you see on television, only scarier. It was May 2017, and a fight between young Palestinian men and Israel Defense

Forces soldiers broke out on a street in Ramallah. A handful of troops were barricaded behind two military vehicles stopped in the middle of the road, and now and again the young Palestinian

men would rush up, sling rocks at the soldiers, then retreat. This back-and-forth went on for 20 minutes before the youngsters grew more brazen, lighting a dumpster on fire and pushing it

toward the IDF position. Standing amid other onlookers on a dry, scrub-covered hill about 100 yards away, I wondered what would happen next, when a flood of IDF soldiers appeared out of

nowhere. They peppered the area with rubber bullets and charged the Palestinians and those of us on the hill. People ran for cover. The acrid smell of tear gas hit nostrils. Ambulances

reversed in haste with bleeding rock hurlers inside. I dashed from the hill and made my way through a few city blocks where people drank tea outside cafes and tried to act as if nothing out

of the ordinary had happened. My destination was Leaders, a kind of industrial park for startups, which had a banner day planned. Patrick Collison, the billionaire co-founder of the online

payment company Stripe Inc., had come to Ramallah to speak with young entrepreneurs about his experience building a startup and about how technology could bring them economic opportunity.

Dozens of people packed the conference room, many of them Arabs from East Jerusalem who needed to wait for several hours at security checkpoints to hear Collison. The red-haired Irishman

began by apologizing for not speaking Arabic, then explained how he’d grown up in a rural setting and could perhaps relate to a feeling of isolation and the struggle to make an impact on the

world. “There is that sense of comparative inferiority,” he said, recalling his own childhood in Dromineer, a village in central Ireland. “You are clearly much less significant than the

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