The “startup nation” is running out of steam
economist.com
economist.com
And yet, we have to remember that Israel is a small country, and that even if a large proportion of your population goes into high tech, that's still a far cry from everyone. Add to that the fact that our schools aren't pushing science and math nearly as well as they could, and I'm not hugely surprised that there are problems on the horizon, near- and long-term.
The problem would seem to be more for companies than for individual engineers. Individuals with high-tech skills will continue to be sought after. But if you're starting a company, and want to recruit talent, then the competition for such talent (already quite fierce) might well be even tougher.
The government is making a strong push for better math and CS education, to try to stem this problem. And I'd like to think that things will change, but I don't know by how much.
There was another article recently saying the same thing about (I think) Spain.
Let's take NASDAQ-listed companies for example. Israel (pop. 8 million) has 89 companies listed in the NASDAQ. Spain (pop. 48 million) has only 8. Yes, that's 66 times more per capita.
"highest concentration of startups per capita": http://www.forbes.com/sites/ilyapozin/2014/09/26/the-ten-sta...
There are also more investment dollars per capita: http://www.geektime.com/2016/01/11/annual-report-2015-startu...
For the number of NASDAQ-listed companies I queried the NASDAQ site: http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-region.aspx?reg... http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-region.aspx?reg...
The actual source for the Business Insider link appears to be this: http://blog.compass.co/the-2015-global-startup-ecosystem-ran...
For the 2015 report, they completely removed the "startups per capita" variable because they decided after lots of discussion with investors/etc that it was a worthless figure. Because of that, it doesn't really seem to make sense for you to push it as evidence that Israel is a good place for startups.
Additionally, they do not have data for China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, of which they expected Beijing to probably surpass Israel in ranking. This would definitely be the case if combined with Shanghai. As the comments also point out, they are missing a lot of other cities.
The data for this ranking seems to be done through surveys. They don't provide any information about this survey process, and because of that I have to think that it isn't providing very accurate results. There's also no definition of what a "startup" is. If I had to guess, it's any business using their tools. Because of this, it might make more sense to say "Israel has more users of Compass tools than any other country, per capita".
This 2015 report also apparently ranks based on dating going back to 2011. If you look at 2015 data alone, Israel is definitely not the top outside the US. Berlin beats it in every category.
Lastly, "It is typically regarded as the largest startup hub outside the US" is vague and doesn't really seem to be true. Largest by what standard? Because by any standard I can see, other than perhaps Compass users per capita, it is far from the largest.
In regards to "There are also more investment dollars per capita" this data also appears to be questionable. The link describes "investment dollars" without any qualifier for Israel, but cites a number for the US ($60 billion) that is specifically only investment from venture capital. If you look at "investment dollars" in general for startups in the US, the number is over $100 billion. The source is also one that focuses specifically on Israel, so their data gathering is possibly much more deep than the reports coming out of the US. This is one of the cases again where "per capita" doesn't really seem to mean much.
Where is the data supporting the statement "Berlin beats it in every category"?
Obviously Beijing has huge market opportunities that companies in other countries can only dream on. They will probably get to #2 in the near future, but I doubt that they are there yet. Otherwise, I can't explain the (relatively) small number of internet companies making a global impact coming out of China, nor can I explain how someone like Lee Ka-Shing (Horizons Ventures), born in China and living in Hong-Kong would make 24 investments in Israeli startups and just 1 in a Chinese startup. [1]
The compass.com link in my post, on the ranking table.
My point is that I asked for a source for your claims, and the one you provided disproves your own point of "Israel is typically regarded as the largest startup hub outside the US" and leaves the other point (highest per capita) as extremely questionable. I have no sources showing otherwise because I'm not going to waste my time trying to prove a negative.
Speaking from personal experience, Israel is the only place on earth with a startup ecosystem comparable to the Valley.
Hm. So, I guess when I was starting my company, the ability to make a lot of money myself made a huge difference; I was able to turn that money into a company... (Now, of course, I understand this isn't what most people do, and after doing it myself, I understand why most people don't do it that way. This isn't how I'm going to start my next company, if I ever start a company again.)
The problem with Israel, (in my experience, which is approaching a decade old) is just that the pay there was very dramatically less, to the point where, yeah, if I had money, I might want to start a company there, sure, but I couldn't do what I did in silicon valley; I couldn't use my own labor to bootstrap the capital required to start a company, because my labor would be worth a small fraction of what it's worth in silicon valley.
Why would no more Jewish engineers want to mve to Israel? There are more being born and growing up every year -- Jewish engineers are a renewable resource.
hm. My understanding is that it's just really easy for a Jewish person to immigrate to Israel - my understanding is that for the rest of us, it's still easier, say, than getting into America.
Also work visas are very sparse and are dominated by several human resource companies.
For a skilled worker, I'd say it's much easier to immigrate to America then it is to Israel.
People who live in a country usually know it better than foreigners, so if almost 40% of them are contemplating emigration, there are some deep economic and social problems within that society.
The last major immigration to Israel were eastern european jews leaving the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and that was only because Israel put enormous political pressure on the US to not allow them to come to the states instead.
I can't find a source for your claim the Israel put political pressure on the US to not allow Soviet Jews to immigrate. Your dates are also off by 1-2 decades, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah
Do you have a source for your claim?
Yes, the one you just linked and didn't read, at all. Literally the first sentence of the wikipedia article. The first sentence. From Wikipedia, the highest number of Jewish immigrants from The Soviet Union was in 1990. The first chart!
Further discussion of the reason for Jewish organizations in America and Israel supporting limiting the amount of Soviet Jewish immigration to the US can be found here:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/belin/13469761.0016.001/--we-are...
I can't imagine you're a good developer or a good project contributor, since not only are you not capable of reading the documentation or doing a google search, you correct people who are right by using sources that say that you're wrong.
Your other ad hominem comments seem pretty absurd.
Ie, most of the people who left in 1990 had already begun their applications and prepared to emigrate in 1989 or even earlier, unless you believe that the crumbling soviet bureaucracy moved at lighting speed and that it was easy for jews in central Asia to travel thousands of miles and spend potentially weeks applying for an exit visa in Moscow.
Citing wikipedia as a primary source is something that wikipedia explicitly discourages, in part because so many articles are constantly being degraded in quality by extremist political partisans: scientologists, objectivists, zionists, stalinists, neo-nazis, etc. Clearly I have a grasp of the facts of the matter, so why are you splitting hairs if not to distract from the other things I said that you have no response to.
The link I posted (of which you have said nothing, nor have you attempted a defense of why the Israeli government shut down a Finnish transit point that allowed soviet Jews to choose between the US and Israel) puts the period between 1989 and 1993. Furthermore, it provides exhaustive and nuanced evidence that the Israeli state was strongly opposed to allowing soviet jews freedom of choice. Ironically, the Israeli political mainstream is quite similar to the Soviet Union itself, in both its curtailing of human freedom, crude propaganda lies, and ugly ethno-nationalism.
It is pretty absurd that you would have this evidence but be in such a strong state of dissonance that you're not willing to contest or process them, you're only trying to block them out.
That sounds to me like a developer who ignores technical debt, isn't capable of learning new ways of thinking or disagreeing rationally, and insists on endless bikeshedding of irrelevant minutia instead of dealing with actual facts. I've known several great expat Israeli developers, and more than one of them left Israel precisely because they found that engineers and politicians with attitudes like the one I've described are destroying Israeli economic and social life.
(source: have been living in Israel my whole life, have friends who emigrated)
For people of non-jewish descent it is very hard to obtain citizenship, work visas are usually given for up to 5 years, after which you need to leave. In my opinion, this is a major weakness of the local startup ecosystem.
Because of their shitty treatment of Palestinians perhaps. :/
For me, something about being around heavily armed guards at every train stop and major road intersection all the time.
http://www.geektime.com/2016/06/30/is-the-startup-nation-run... has some details (and looks like it was written before the economist article).
Much of Apple's computer chip design operations are in Israel and the head of the computer chip design group is an Israeli Arab with a masters degree from Israel's Technion University.
Israeli drones protect NATO troops in Afghanistan. Germany will be leasing the newest Heron missile drones from Israel for over $600 million.
IMO the "hard tech" companies from Israel are pretty good (it infrastructure, cloud computing, data, microprocessors, etc).
The most of the 'consumer tech' startups are kinda lame and copycat-ish imo. Waze was a weird anomaly and sparked about 100 derivative geo startups in Israel.
There are a few other big consumer startups of renown that aren't copycatish - viber, wix, fiverr.
There's nothing unique about any of those companies.
I'm guessing its something in between - a global trend (mostly caused by increase in demand) and increased hype because people like to hear about it.