In 2009, Dan Senor and Saul Singer wrote a book called "Start-Up Nation" about Israel's incredible propensity for creating start-up companies. The book tried to understand the factors which turned tiny Israel into a global tech power, and in doing so, gave a new nickname to the country. Yet a decade and over a dozen billion dollar exits later, two questions arise. Are we still the start-up nation or have we now morphed into something else? And, perhaps more importantly, does anyone actually think of us as the start-up nation anymore?
As a tour guide of Israel, I lead a tech tour of Israel every year, and sometimes more than one. People are still interested in this story and what Israel has to offer, how they do it and what they can learn from it. They want to see the newest cutting-edge technology even before it hits the market. Yet the truth is that in the last five years, instead of "starting-up," we've been "scaling up." In basic terms, instead of building companies only to sell them in exits (sometimes of hundreds of million or even billions of dollars) to major corporations, Israel has been building up their own companies to the extent that the number of Israeli unicorns (companies with billion-dollar valuations) has doubled or tripled just in the last year or two alone and now dwarfs the number of billion-dollar exits. For more on this phenomenon click my previous post on the subject here: https://www.tourguideofisrael.com/post/unicorns-israel-goes-from-startup-to-scaleup-nation
Yet perhaps the bigger question is - does anyone in the world even think about us when they think about startups? We might like to refer to ourselves as it - even our new cycling team is called "Team Israel Startup Nation" but has the moniker even stuck? And if not, what does that mean? Well a survey has actually been done about it and the answers might surprise you.
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