Your curating team travels the world in search of unique articles that can help you grow. Recently we had a chance to visit Start-up Nation, Israel. Few places, if any, have the density and quality of startups in one place.
Some early standouts in the Israeli tech scene include ICQ, which sold in the 90s to AOL for over $400M, and security firewall provider, Checkpoint, which is listed on the NASDAQ. Speaking of which, there are more Israeli companies listed on the NASDAQ than Europe, Japan, Korea, and China combined.
Today many of the services we know and love come from Israel, including Waze, Viber, Billguard, and Meerkat. So many more Israeli techs are behind other services and products we love that it would require a phone book* to cover them all.
What makes Silicon Wadi, Wadi being the Arabic name for Valley, a startup haven? Many theories are out there. Necessity, it's a geographically small country with only 8 million people making it a requirement for startups to think globally. Focus on higher education, some of the top technical schools, including Technion, Tel Aviv U, Hebrew U, and IDC, are there. The military, including the famous 8200 or Shmoneh-Matayim intelligence unit, known for cyber security and other cool tech. Or perhaps it's simply, Chutzpah, the Yiddish word that is hard to define but close to audacity and resilience.
This week's edition highlights articles written by Israelis. There are some incredibly useful nuggets to help you grow your startup so read well.
Shalom <-- Hebrew for "prosperity"
*Definition for Millennials: Phone books were primarily used in the previous century to list the phone numbers of people and businesses in one place. Taking the form of a book, each entry is listed alphabetically. It was not uncommon to find phone books that were thousands of pages in size. |
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