Start-up Nation (3 page)

Agassi is proud of how his team solved the engineering problem of precisely, instantly, and reliably releasing a battery that
weighs hundreds of pounds. They employed the same hooks used to hold five-hundred-pound bombs in place on air force bombers.
There was no room for error in a bomb-release mechanism; the battery would be just as secure, yet removable, in electric cars.

If it succeeds, the global impact of Better Place on economics, politics, and the environment might well transcend that of
the most important technology companies in the world. And the idea will have spread from Israel throughout the world.

Companies like Better Place and entrepreneurs like Shai Agassi don’t appear every day. Yet a glance at Israel shows why it
is not so surprising that, as Boston’s Battery Ventures investor Scott Tobin predicted, “the next big idea will come from
Israel.”
⁵

Technology companies and global investors are beating a path to Israel and finding unique combinations of audacity, creativity,
and drive everywhere they look. Which may explain why, in addition to boasting the highest density of start-ups in the world
(a total of 3,850 start-ups, one for every 1,844 Israelis),
⁶
more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European continent.

And it’s not just the New York stock exchanges that have been drawn to Israel, but also the most critical and fungible measure
of technological promise: venture capital.

In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times
greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India. Comparing absolute numbers, Israel—a
country of just 7.1 million people—attracted close to $2 billion in venture capital, as much as flowed to the United Kingdom’s
61 million citizens or to the 145 million people living in Germany and France combined.
⁷
And Israel is the only country to experience a meaningful increase in venture capital from 2007 to 2008, as figure I.1 shows.
⁸

Figure I.1.
Sources:
Dow Jones, VentureSource; Thomson Reuters; U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,
World Fact Book
, 2007, 2008.

After the United States, Israel has more companies listed on the
NASDAQ
than any other country in the world, including India, China, Korea, Singapore, and Ireland, as figure I.2 shows. And, as figure I.3 makes clear, Israel is the world leader in the percentage of the economy that is spent on research and development.

Figure I.2.
Source:
NASDAQ
,
http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/ NonUsOutput.asp
, May 2009.

Figure I.3.
Source:
UNDP
(United Nations Development Programme) Report, 2007/2008.

Israel’s economy has also grown faster than the average for the developed economies of the world in most years since 1995,
as a chart on page
14
illustrates (figure I.4).

Even the wars Israel has repeatedly fought have not slowed the country down. During the six years following 2000, Israel was
hit not just by the bursting of the global tech bubble but by the most intense period of terrorist attacks in its history
and by the second Lebanon war. Yet Israel’s share of the global venture capital market did not drop—it
doubled
, from 15 percent to 31 percent. And the Tel Aviv stock exchange was higher on the last day of the Lebanon war than on the
first, as it was after the three-week military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2009.

Figure I.4.
Sources:
“Miracles and Mirages,”
Economist
, April 13, 2008; “GDP Growth Rates by Country and Region, 1970–2007,” Swivel,
http://www.swivel.com/data_columns/spreadsheet/2085677
.

The Israeli economic story becomes even more curious when one considers the nation’s dire state just a little over a half
century ago. Shai Agassi’s family immigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1950, two years after Israel’s founding. The Agassis were
part of a flood of a million refugees fleeing as a wave of violent pogroms swept the Arab world after the State of Israel’s
founding. At the time, the fledgling Jewish state simultaneously faced two seemingly insurmountable challenges: fighting an
existential war for independence and absorbing masses of refugees from postwar Europe and the surrounding Arab countries.

Israel’s population doubled in the first two years of its existence. Over the next seven years, the country grew by another
third. Two out of three Israelis were new arrivals. Right off the boat, many refugees were given a gun they had no idea how
to use and sent to fight. Some of those who had survived Nazi concentration camps fell in battle even before their names could
be recorded. Proportionately, more Israelis died in the war for Israel’s establishment than Americans in both world wars combined.

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