Considering opening a front office in the US? Agonizing over whether CA or NY is the best option? It’s a very valid question these days for promising young Israeli startups with NYC quickly catching up to the bay area in terms of investment and advertising dollars, a hotbed of new startups and an entrepreneur-friendly ecosystem. Here’s a useful interactive infographic to help you think thru it:
Via MBA@UNC: Online MBA
Last month at the TechAviv Founders Club meetup in Herzliya we held our first session of “TechAviv Office Hours‘. Inspired by Paul Graham’s take on rapid startup mentoring, we had five brand new startups on stage getting quality realtime feedback and advice from Saul Klein, founder of Seedcamp, partner at Index Ventures, angel investor and serial entrepreneur. Unfortunetly he was not mic’d up in this video so turn up the speakers and listen close. It’s worth it. Show starts at min 43:00. See photos here.
Participating Startups:
SleepRate – Uri Keren, Founder & CEO
Gigantt – Assaf Lavie, Founder & CEO
Grippity – Jacob Eichbaum, Founder & CEO
Clipop – Moshe Friedman, Founder & CEO
BitMint – Gideon Samid, Founder & CEO
Eran Ben-Shushan, Founder & CEO of Bizzabo
Last night at the Aug 2011 TechAviv Founders Club meetup 150 of Israel’s startup founders and investors got a chance to take our at-event networking to the next level thanks to a new iPhone app by members Bizzabo. Bizzabo puts an interactive attendee list in your hands and helps you identify and connect with the right people in the room to achieve your goals for being there. The experience and on stage demo was enough to win Founder/CEO Eran Ben-Shushan and team this month’s TechAviv Peer Award for top demo. Congrats guys, we hope Bizzabo will become a fixture at TechAviv and a standard at events worldwide.
TechAviv Founders Club Aug 2011
The following guest post was contributed by Adam Fisher, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. It originally appeared on his blog Savants in the Levant.
This is a post that has been in draft for almost a year based on hundreds of interactions I have had with start-ups and high tech execs in Israel and abroad. The issues are broad and provocative, and because a blog post risks being an oversimplification, I welcome my readers’ comments and critique.
If there ever is to be a sequel to the book Start-up Nation, Israeli high tech must become as serious about product design, customer experience, and business models as it currently is about technology and R&D. Over the last decade, Israel has mastered an entrepreneurial/venture model, which involves sourcing entrepreneurs from military technology units, creating cutting edge technology products and ultimately selling a company, its IP and personnel to one of many foreign multinationals that have come to appreciate the Israeli brain trust. While this model of start-up creation has served us reliably, it is vulnerable to macroeconomic headwinds and is increasingly unsustainable in the face of technology commoditization that is rapidly approaching our shores in the form of competition from China, Korea and Taiwan. As it turns out, our over reliance on technology creates an endless demand for more technology talent, which prevents us from nurturing vital competencies in product, design and business. The resulting ‘tech crutch’ is a self-perpetuating cycle that threatens the future of Israeli high tech. Continued …
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