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Dan Singer: Start-up Nation

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Those who survived had to struggle to thrive in a stagnant economy. “Everything was rationed,” complained one new arrival. “We had coupon books, one egg a week, long lines.”9 The average standard of living for Israelis was comparable to that of Americans in the 1800s.10 How, then, did this “start-up” state not only survive but morph from a besieged backwater to a high-tech powerhouse that has achieved fiftyfold economic growth in sixty years? How did a community of penniless refugees transform a land that Mark Twain described as a “desolate country . . . a silent, mournful expanse,”11 into one of the most dynamic entrepreneurial economies in the world?

The fact that this question has been treated only in piecemeal fashion is unbelievable to Israeli political economist Gidi Grinstein: “Look, we doubled our economic situation relative to America while multiplying our population fivefold and fighting three wars. This is totally unmatched in the economic history of the world.” And, he told us, the Israeli entrepreneur continues to perform in unimaginable ways.12

While the Holy Land has for centuries attracted pilgrims, lately it has been flooded by seekers of a different sort. Google’s CEO and chairman, Eric Schmidt, told us that the United States is the number one place in the world for entrepreneurs, but “after the U.S., Israel is the best.” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has called Microsoft “an Israeli company as much as an American company” because of the size and centrality of its Israeli teams.13 Warren Buffett, the apostle of risk aversion, broke his decades-long record of not buying any foreign company with the purchase of an Israeli company—for $4.5 billion—just as Israel began to fight the 2006 Lebanon war.

It is impossible for major technology companies to ignore Israel, and most haven’t; almost half of the world’s top technology companies have bought start-ups or opened research and development centers in Israel. Cisco alone has acquired nine Israeli companies and is looking to buy more.14

“In two days in Israel, I saw more opportunities than in a year in the rest of the world,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president of Philips Medical.15 Gary Shainberg, British Telecom’s VP for technology and innovation, told us, “There are more new innovative ideas, as opposed to recycled ideas—or old ideas repackaged in a new box—coming out of Israel than there are out in [Silicon] Valley now. And it doesn’t slow during global economic downturns.”16

Though Israel’s technology story is becoming more widely known, those exposed to it for the first time are invariably baffled. As an NBC Universal vice president sent to scout for Israeli digital media companies wondered, “Why is all this happening in Israel? I’ve never seen so much chaos and so much innovation all in one tiny place.”17

That is the mystery this book aims to solve. Why Israel and not elsewhere?

One explanation is that adversity, like necessity, breeds inventiveness. Other small and threatened countries, such as South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, can also boast growth records that are as impressive as Israel’s. But none of them have produced an entrepreneurial culture—not to mention an array of start-ups—that compares with Israel’s.

Some people conjecture that there is something specifically Jewish at work. The notion that Jews are “smart” has become deeply embedded in the Western psyche. We saw this ourselves; when we told people we were writing a book about why Israel is so innovative, many reacted by saying, “It’s simple—Jews are smart, so it’s no surprise that Israel is innovative.” But pinning Israel’s success on a stereotype obscures more than it reveals.

For starters, the idea of a unitary Jewishness—whether genetic or cultural—would seem to have little applicability to a nation that, though small, is among the most heterogeneous in the world. Israel’s tiny population is made up of some seventy different nationalities. A Jewish refugee from Iraq and one from Poland or Ethiopia did not share a language, education, culture, or history—at least not for the two previous millennia. As Irish economist David McWilliams explains, “Israel is quite the opposite of a uni-dimensional, Jewish country. . . . It is a monotheistic melting pot of a diaspora that brought back with it the culture, language and customs of the four corners of the earth.”18

While a common prayer book and a shared legacy of persecution count for something, it was far from clear that this disparate group could form a functioning country at all, let alone one that would excel at—of all things—teamwork and innovation.

Indeed, Israel’s secret seems to lie in something more than just the talent of individuals. There are lots of places with talented people, certainly with many times the number of engineers that Israel has to offer. Singaporean students, for example, lead the world in science and mathematics test scores. Multinationals have set up shop in places like India and Ireland, too. “But we don’t set up our mission critical work in those countries,” an American executive from eBay told us. “Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, eBay . . . the list goes on. The best-kept secret is that we all live and die by the work of our Israeli teams. It’s much more than just outsourcing call centers to India or setting up IT services in Ireland. What we do in Israel is unlike what we do anywhere else in the world.”19

Another commonly cited factor in Israel’s success is the country’s military and defense industry, which has produced successful spin-off companies. This is part of the answer, but it does not explain why other countries that have conscription and large militaries do not see a similar impact on their private sectors. Pointing to the military just shifts the question: What is it about the Israeli military that seems to foster entrepreneurship? And even with the influence of the military, why is it that defense, counterterrorism, and homeland security companies today represent less than 5 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product?

The answer, we contend, must be broader and deeper. It must lie in the stories of individual entrepreneurs like Shai Agassi, which are emblematic of the state itself. As we will show, it is a story not just of talent but of tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity. Israel is replete with such stories. But Israelis themselves have been too busy building their start-ups to step back and try to stitch together how it happened and what others—governments, large companies, and start-up entrepreneurs—can learn from their experience.

It would be hard to imagine a time when understanding the story of Israel’s economic miracle could be more relevant. While the United States continues to be rated the world’s most competitive economy, there is a widespread sense that something fundamental has gone wrong.

Even before the global financial crisis that began in 2008, observers of the innovation race were sounding alarms. “India and China are a tsunami about to overwhelm us,” predicted Stanford Research Institute’s Curtis Carlson. He forecasts that America’s information technology, service, and medical-devices industries are about to be lost, costing “millions of jobs . . . like in the 1980s when the Japanese surged ahead.” The only way out, says Carlson, is “to learn the tools of innovation” and forge entirely new, knowledge-based industries in energy, biotechnology, and other science-based sectors.20

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