Silicon Valley Bank Tanked, Dragging Down 500 Israeli Startups | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Bank Tanked, Dragging Down 500 Israeli Startups

jewishpress.com

78 pointschewz28 comments

Were there a higher percentage of Israeli startups than startups from other nationalities? I'm not sure I see the point of this submission vs the sea of other SVB threads on here over the last few days.

> Were there a higher percentage of Israeli startups than startups from other nationalities? I'm not sure I see the point of this submission vs the sea of other SVB threads on here over the last few days.

There's nothing unusual about highlighting regional coverage of a topic, and said regional coverage is going to have a regional focus.

California companies affected by SVB's collapse are getting all the attention, but this is more evidence that it may have even more impact outside the US. British examples:

"'We can’t make payroll': scores of London tech firms in cash crisis amid Silicon Valley Bank collapse" <https://np.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/11olit9/we_ca...>

"Silicon Valley Bank collapse: UK tech firms at 'serious risk' from failure, warns Chancellor Jeremy Hunt" <https://np.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/11pck3w/silic...>

Hunt's comments are much more serious than what Janet Yellen has been saying. Perhaps UK startups had no alternatives to SVB UK, while in the US there were and are other banks willing to take on unprofitable companies as clients?

You'd expect to hear about Israeli startups in the Jewish Press.

And many HN'ers don't realize that SVB's fall will directly affect tiny cash strapped startups, so the article strikes a nerve.

Besides, the article is short and well written. And its closing line should be framed:

> SVB CEO Greg Becker said on Thursday: “I ask everyone to relax and support us as we supported you in difficult times.”

> And you thought bankers didn’t have a sense of humor.

I don't think SVB going bust is generally a big problem for a foreign startups that banked there. This is because typically(?) they are structured so that their US subsidiary has account there, not the main company. And especially if the US subsidiary is on the red, the US accounts for the foreign startup pretty much hold enough cash to do next payroll.

What these Israeli startups appear to have done is something entirely different and I truly sympathize and feel sorry for them for all the money lost. One might even argue that 'no good deed goes unpunished'.

Israel has a very large startup and VC culture, like California in some ways.

It does?

  Country Number of Startups
  The USA 72,560
  India 13,905
  The UK  6,396
  Canada  3,446
  Australia 2,399
  Indonesia 2,391
  Germany 2,320
  France  1,579
  Spain 1,411
  Brazil  1,165

source: https://www.demandsage.com/startup-statistics/

But #9 on overall funding, and #2 per capita in 2021:

[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/countries-most-startup-...

But more importantly, in general, for Israelis, the goal is always to break into bigger markets such as the USA and Europe with branches there and thus may be really affected by USA banks. Wonder if it is the same for Startups in Germany or India that have big market domestically.

Edit: SVB has branches [2] in 8 countries outside the US with Israel among them. So we can guess Israel startups had enough money in it (among the other 7) to be affected by the collapse.

[2] https://www.svb.com/locations

How is Singapore #1? I never hear about Singaporean tech, could that be tax-related?

Israel has only 9 million people, so in absolute terms it will still be small, but in relative terms, it punches hugely above its weight. It also depends on methodology; I am mostly familiar with Canada but am generally confused how 3446 would be produced, unless you’re counting very generously. (I can’t imagine the largest centers have more than 300-500 serious startups.) I’d propose that an easier metric might be looking at venture investment in the area; for example, this is on the first page of a quick search [1].

[1] https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/why-israel-drew-28-times-mor...

I think he's speaking of the _state sponsored_ cyber security, offensive tooling and exploit creation _start ups_.

> Israel has earned its reputation as ‘the start-up’ nation, accommodating 97 unicorns each valued over $1bn, according to global Israeli startup founders club Techaviv.

https://www.checkpoint.com/press-releases/check-point-softwa...

scylladb is one of the most technologically sophisticated companies in the world and their team has more expertise with the linux kernel and distributed systems than anyone even 100X their size in california. to claim that expertise in one technical field doesnt translate to others is just ignorant.

Do you consider scylladb a startup or an organization that would need the products of svb?

Many need SVB, we (ScyllaDB) received a great service from them in the past. Later on we just used them as one of our banks, obviously, going forward, we're diversifying our services.

The problem for startups is that debt provider who are also a bank require to move most of the business to that provider. It's not the case other types of debt providers. w.r.t debt - everybody use this mechanism, doesn't matter if you're small or big.

Don’t they need a checking/savings account for payroll?

A more useful measure of potential impact might be number of startups per capita, or number of people employed by startups per capita. Not in front of laptop right but might have a go later if no one gets to it first.

Do they even define startup? The 2-year old neighborhood pizzeria is a startup.

israel is a tiny country. putting up absolute numbers is not serious.

Those numbers would be more informative if they compared to country populations.

Israel is 9 million people my guy/gal/they/them

Per capita

is a thing

chud incel

Aren't foreign deposits of US banks not covered under FDIC?

2 days of cash flow freeze killed startups? Y’all need to rethink your finances.

They're not dragged down yet. We'll see this coming week

Why should we care what nationality they are?

Israeli companies have an large footprint in the computer security world that employs a lot of Americans. Many people were thinking this was an American problem on Friday and are now realizing this has world wide ramifications.

Well them being non-American is the important bit, and the website is literally "jewish press" so I'm not sure what you're expecting.

um, maybe because it's an article from "JewishPress.com - Bringing you the news from Israel and the Jewish World"?

The article seems to be referring to Israeli based companies banking with an Israeli based subsidiary of SVB.

I like the pun at the end of the article.

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