United Hatzalah is a volunteer emergency network in Israel with 18,000 volunteers who handle 2,000 calls per day. Their goal is a 90-second response time, and they currently hit about 2–3 minutes — versus the standard 12-minute ambulance. It was built because a child choked and died while a nearby doctor had no idea.
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At 9:03 · chapter starts 7:36
Sam Parr sat down for dinner with Mark, who co-founded both the expert-network giant GLG and a very different kind of venture: United Hatzalah. The origin story is stark. A child was choking. An ambulance was called. The ambulance didn't arrive in time. The child died — even though a doctor lived nearby and had no idea anything was happening. That frustration drove a man named Eli to start a small network of trained volunteers who could be dispatched faster than any ambulance. He started with 6 to 12 people, trained in CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, and emergency delivery, each carrying a 40-pound supply backpack. Mark gave him $18,000 and became his co-founder. [1] — Sam Parr "United Hatzalah is a volunteer emergency network in Israel with 18,000 volunteers who handle 2,000 calls per day. Their goal is a 90-second…" 09:03 Eighteen years later, United Hatzalah has 18,000 volunteers across Israel, handles 2,000 calls a day — one every 45 seconds — and operates with an average response time of 2–3 minutes against a 12-minute ambulance benchmark. Their goal is 90 seconds. They use AI trained on 18 years of data (heart attacks peak in the morning; people are home, not at the office) to pre-position volunteers. The network is powered entirely by donations and spends tens of millions of dollars per year. It's also, Mark told Sam, one of the only places in Israel where ultra-Orthodox Jews, secular Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and Christians work side by side — not through dialogue, but through shared action.
Shaan Puri attempted to use the rule of reciprocity by bringing Diet Cokes to a tense meeting with a school principal, but the principal refused the drink and shut down his program anyway.
GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group), the expert network company, generates over $100 million a year in profit and cash flow based on public filings from when it attempted to go public.
United Hatzalah's mission is to reach any emergency in Israel within 90 seconds; they currently achieve an average response time of about 2–3 minutes, versus the standard 10–12 minutes for ambulances.
United Hatzalah, Israel's volunteer emergency network, handles approximately 2,000 calls a day with around 9,000 volunteers across the country.
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