User:R1237h/Ami Dror

Biography

Ami Dror was born and raised in Ashkelon to Aviva (née Laskov) and Aryeh Dror. His father was a Holocaust survivor from Romania, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family, and his mother was born in Israel. As a member of a national religious family, he was educated at the Sinai School in Ashkelon and was active in the Bnei Akiva movement.

He served in the IDF as a tank commander in the Armored Corps.

After his release from the IDF, he participated in an aircraft security course and the day after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he joined the state unit for the security of personnel and delegations, in which he secured Shimon Peres and was the commander of the security squad for Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. After finishing his service in the unit in 2000, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served in Dublin and Marseille, until The year 2003.

Dror graduated with a degree in computer science from the Open University.

Divorced and father of three children. Lives in Tel Aviv.

Business activity

In 2005, Ami Dror founded the XpanD 3D company with Maria Kostira, which developed technology for showing 3D movies, and served as its strategic manager. Film director James Cameron presented the film Avatar using the company's technology in 2009.[1][2][3] Within the company, Dror led the development of a uniform standard for 3D televisions in collaboration with the companies Panasonic, Samsung and Sony.

In 2014, Dror founded the investment company Zeyton Ventures with Porsan Hossein. The company supported high-tech companies and required them to reach within three years a situation where at least 30% of their employees belong to one of the populations suffering from underrepresentation in the labor market.[6][7] That same year, Dror served as a judge in the innovation category of the Cannes Advertising Festival.

In 2016, Dror moved with his family to Shanghai to establish the company LeapLearner with his Chinese partners Aaron Tien and Lao Zho.[9][10][11] LeapLearner developed software for learning programming for children.[12] The idea to establish the company arose when he was looking for a way to teach his daughters programming and discovered that there was no suitable solution in the schools. Examining the subject found that the greatest need existed in China. In 2018, Dror was selected as one of the ten most brilliant entrepreneurs in China and won an award on behalf of Shanghai Media Group, the largest media corporation in China.

In 2022 Dror founded the BriBooks company which allows children to write, publish, and sell books.[14][15] The idea to establish the company arose when Dror published a children's book, realized how complicated and expensive the process of publishing and selling a book is, and decided to make it accessible to every child. The company won the Red Herring Award as one of the 100 most promising technology companies in the world

Leadership development and education in the world

In 2014, Dror was accepted as a fellow in the Henry Crown Fellowship, the flagship program of the Aspen Institute.[17] In 2018, he became a facilitator in the program and since then he has been delivering leadership programs in Aspen and Harvard University. He also gives lectures and other leadership workshops around the world.

In 2019, a book was published that Dror wrote in partnership with Jordan Huang, an expert in Chinese education, which deals with successful practices for educating children for innovation, based on the Jewish and Chinese cultures. The book was published in an English edition[20] and a Chinese edition.[21] In the same year, as part of his work at LeapLearner, he initiated and was a partner in promoting technological education in African countries. As part of this, he helped establish programming schools for youth in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Kenya.[22] He also served as an advisor to the King of Bhutan in the process of modernizing the education system in the kingdom.

In March 2020, with the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, Dror initiated a crowdfunding campaign for N95 masks for doctors, due to the lack of these masks in the hospitals

Dror is a board member of the American philanthropic organization Space for Humanity, which flies social entrepreneurs as part of private space flights.

As part of an activity to promote education in the world, Dror cooperated with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as part of the Hong Kong Conference for Social Justice

Activity as part of the protest against the legal reform

In January 2023, after Justice Minister Yariv Levin's announcement of the planned legislative measures, Dror joined the protest activity as part of the "high-tech protest". In an interview with him he said that he left the management of BriBooks to his partner in the company while he devotes his time to activities within the protest.

Dror is a central field activist in the protest, leading update groups of activists. He is interviewed on protest issues in the media[29][30] and speaks at demonstrations throughout the country.

On July 18, 2023, together with other protest leaders (Shakma Bressler, Moshe Redman and Ran Har Nevo), he initiated a mass foot march from Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as an act of protest against the coalition's intentions to approve in second and third reading the law to reduce the probable cause

At the beginning of August 2023, he was detained for questioning by the police as part of a protest action, and was released after a short time.

Bibliography


 * (2019) Raising Future Innovators: Leveraging Jewish & Chinese Best Practices in Education
 * (2022) Python The Super Hero