I was invited to talk, along with people from Genesis, JVP and Bessemer in a panel on Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship during the Harvard Business School seminar held in tel aviv last week. i had a lot of fun during this session (specially after meeting one on one with MBA students). During the panel on of the questions asked by the moderator, Dan Isenberg (himself ex JVP general partner) was to ask whether Israeli entrepreneurs have specificities? Some obvious and less obvious comments came up. Here are some of them
- Think Global: given the size of the country, the entrepreneur can t make a business out of the local market. The israeli entrepreneur is not afraid of travelling and meeting his peers to close business or even a VC round. Did not you notice that anywhere you go, you'll always find Israelis? They are open to the world more than any nation.
- Tempted by small exits: the colour of the money is often stronger than the initial ambition of the entrepreneur. For an entrepreneur, specially when first timer and young, a check of a few millions is a great thing. Does not mean it is for an investor. I believe in the web industry most exists will be small exits (as it was the case until now). By small i mean sub 50 million USD.
- Product creativity: one thing that i am always surprised by is the ability of Israeli entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas vs just applying an existing formula to a local market (this is very french and european in general).
- A Male industry: most engineers are male and therefore most of the industry is male. But beyond that i observe that in the web in Israel the number of woman CEO in the web is very small. One reason i believe is that the web industry is mostly driven by tech guys/product guys. In the room 45% of the audience from HBS was feminin. in France a substantial ratio of Web professional are women. Still not happening in Israel. But changing. I was asked later was is this specific to Israel. I think this has to do with the poor consumer culture that israel has vs entreprise culture. In France for example a big chunk of the women working in the web are coming from business schools and FMCGs like procter. In Israel there are just not enough business schools and consumer marketing culture
- Good at creating not at marketing: this is related to the previous observation. I find that israelis entrepreneur in the web are hungry and creative about new products but not as good about marketing them and driving usage at scale. This also explains the limitations that may drive entrepreneurs to sell early. You need the ability to run the marathon if you want to sell big. Which means being good a scaling marketing.
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