I read with interest a whole set of blog posts about the age of successful entrepreneurs in the US (one of the better ones was by Marc Andreessen, you can find it here  Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data). In my opinion it was a debate over whether youth and enthusiasism trumped age and experience in the high-tech startup world. One thing that immediately jumps up at you is that most of the high-tech entrepreneurial super stars were young (e.g. Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin).

I was wondering whether anyone had done any real studies on how things worked in Israel.  Even though the Israeli VC and start-up model is based on the US model, the culture, environment and people are different than in the US.  Thigs work diffefrently here (and I think the Israeli VCs will need to change in order to adopt - but I’ll write more on that in a separate post). For example, most Israeli entrepreneurs go through maniditory army service - for three years or more (and many Israeli high tech companies started are based on teams that worked together during their Army service). I guess that is why Israeli work better in teams than Americans - and the list of differences go on and on (probably write a post on that too:)

That leads me to an article I read yesterday in the Marker (an Israeli business daily) that quotes a study by Dr. Eli Gimon (sp?). I would have put up a link but I couldn’t find the article on the web - and both the article and summary I found was only in hebrew….

I thought it was telling to see what he actually measured - whether a company that started in a high-tech incubator was around for at least seven years. That was his definition of success. I am not sure any VC would agree with that definition - but it does make sense in an Israeli context. While most US VCs (and Israeli too) are looking for the elusive “home-run” - Israeli produces very few of those. It mostly produces companies with innovative, solid technology - which is why so many Israeli companies are snapped up by overseas companies - they provide technology innovation, depth and skills. These companies get acquired for anywhere between $10M-$200M - where over $100M is rare and high-end. Very different than the US model…

Bottom line - what Dr. Gimon (sp?) found was that the most important ingredient to success for an Israeli start-up is management skill and experience - not age, sex, schooling or national origin of the founder. Also whether they built the company based on their own technology made a difference.

I imagine these findings are probably very different than in the US…

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 9:51 pm and is filed under IP, Israel, Startups, VC, Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.