Freedom Advocacy Network

Paul Biggar – Founder of Tech For Palestine – Freedom Advocacy Network – August 20, 2025

Hello friends,

On August 20, 2025, at 1 PM EST, I am honoured and excited to host Paul Biggar, founder of Tech For Palestine – https://techforpalestine.org/ 

Agenda:

Paul Biggar is the founder of Tech For Palestine. He will be talking about some of the great work T4P is doing. Tech for Palestine (“T4P”) is a coalition of thousands of founders, engineers, product marketers, investors and other professionals who are working in support of Palestinian liberation. The T4P Incubator helps pro-Palestine advocates build, grow, and scale their work towards a Free Palestine. We support projects — whether collections of individuals, registered non-profits, or even companies — whose mission helps Palestine, especially advocacy groups building technical products or in the tech space.

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Notes:

• TechForPalestine is an incubator for Palestinian advocacy – has 60+ projects under their belt
• Helps with volunteer, marketing, etc.
• Helps projects understand how to build things
• Helps with customer development, product market fit, etc. –
• Runs like a Silicon Valley incubator helping startups
• People can apply for the incubator: WHAT IS THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE – and HOW DOES THIS HELP PALESTINE
• Tech industry is very heavily zionists – both in big tech and startups
• Tech industry has lots of connections with IDF Unit 8200
• The T4P incubator is one of the main parts
• Also there is Entrepreneurs for Palestine, Investors for Palestine (very new) – just two months old – connecting investors and founders escape from Zionist venture capitalist eco system
• Very recently started a whistleblower part of T4P – can help protect people who want to leak information – help with legal stuff – will be launching in a couple of weeks
• Also doing advocacy within the tech industry – telling people why they are being yelled at by their users
• We also directly advocate ourselves – e.g. targeting companies that are taking money from Sequoia Capital – who has Islamophone Shaun Maguire on their board
• Running very much like a tech startup
• Tech for Palestine started about 18 months ago
• https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/
• Spent 15-20 years as a startup founder – moved to Silicon Valley – started 1 successful and 2 not successful companies
• Was in a very low risk situation – while writing https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ – realized that Paul himself is in a very low risk positions – and realized that others are in the same position
• Trying to help people learn more about Palestine and Israel – it’s important to name to perpetrator – tech industry is VERY complicit directly in genocide
• People who Paul followed, the VCs, it looked all like organized propaganda – the message, the content, the wording, etc. was ORGANIZED propaganda – learned about Hasbara for the first time
• “Seeing a kid being blown up and seeing someone I knew saying positive about Israel… I got very very depressed… this is the holocaust of our time”
• “What would you have done during the Nazi germany Holocaust… what can I do…”
• “The blog post was essentially… what is the biggest thing I can do… I had done similar things before”
• “I was attacked… but more than that, thousands of people reached out to me”
• “Lots of people were reaching out with projects”
• “Initially started with 25… then 40 a week later…”
• Pivoted to becoming an incubator – now supports 65 projects – adding about 2 projects a week
• Not all projects are successful – but many are
• https://www.findaprotest.info/?radius=15
• One of the projects was Find a Project
• Last week, they had 270,000 visitors!
• T4P helped them launch, helped with tech, etc. – before things were manual, now it’s much more automated
• The project leaders did the work, but, T4P provided critical success advice
• Normal startup incubators have 2% success rate – yCombinator for example takes best of the best – sometimes orgs apply and they get rejected
• T4P focuses on projects where people have a great idea but don’t know how to execute
• People that we get are people who feel very strong about what they are doing
• Sometimes projects think that advocacy startups are different – but T4P says they are not – each project is a product – you need to think through different lenses that successful startups think through
• A lot of value that we provide is identifying the direction and “nuggets of awesomeness” that are surrounded by less useful stuff
• We are willing to put in the works 
• In 2024, T4P was not funded – got a 501c3 – 
• Funded by high-net-worth individuals and also bottom-up-grassroots donations
• We do well with tech workers – they are relatively well off relative to others – we try to get recurring donations
• We don’t take any funding that has any restrictions whatsoever – we will take funding directed to particular projects
• Colin: People like you (Paul) are kind, moral people – but is that our achilles heel? They are willing to say and do anything – e.g. 40 beheaded babies, systematic rape, etc. e.g. US made up stories of Iraqi soldiers leaving babies out of incubators. What IDF terrorists are doing to real babies in Gaza is real. They are really good at lying. We are rubbish at it. We are restricted in our ability to be mean spirited.
  • Paul: I don’t think that is necessarily a negative. Biggest enemy of Israel is ISRAEL. Most people who get into this movement get into the movement by seeing the organized lies. I saw a US AIPAC supported politician, the audience was shouting at him – every lie he told put him further in the hole.
  • Lying would not help us at all.
  • We don’t have to be nice people who get steamrolled.
  • We are pushing back and fighting back.
  • Lying would be detrimental. We have the truth on our side. Truth is the truth forever. There’s cracks in their influence and lies.
  • Colin: We can still learn – by sending a BARRAGE of truth in a consistent manner.
  • Paul: Their timing is impeccable.
    • As soon as ICJ verdict came out, they got their entire movement to speak up against UNWRA – that’s something we can from – our movement is more distributed
    • We have lot of leftists – and we all have our own ways of doing things
• Ted: Power vs force – lying can get you force, but doesn’t get you integrity and power that comes from integrity. https://www.consciousnessexplorations.com/latest-info/power-vs-force#/
  • Paul: They don’t actually have a lot of power – they have influence – but they don’t have a lot of power. In the US congress, they have influence – in EU they have influence – but it’s not the same as power. The more awful and disgusting things that they do, they lose their influence
• Andre: Do you have anything cooking around ethical investment? I am learning a lot, but, I find it difficult to navigate that:
• Paul: https://www.racialjusticeinvesting.org/ ,  https://www.ethics.vc/ , https://investigate.afsc.org/fund-search?keyword=&strict=0 , https://www.zevin.com/, https://consciouswealth.ca/ 
• Salman: How should we deal with being open – strategy? Risks?
  • Paul: A lot of people in the movement have a risk profile that they have to maintain. People are in jail. T4P was born post-start of the genocide. One of the strategies that we took is that the “risk” aspect will get better. We are seeing that tide is turning. We are seeing less risk. There are significant changes in the price of speaking up. We are seeing with Trump that consequences aren’t what they used to be. E.g. antisemitism accusation doesn’t work anymore. It’s been over used. Before Oct 7, you couldn’t ignore accusations of antisemitism – but now you can. You have to weigh your personal risk tolerance – re-evaluating that regularly is a good idea.
  • They are going after Kneecap and and other big fish
  • We have to make sure to be squeaky clean – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have things on us