What Australians need to learn from Israel

I recently spent a week in Israel as part of a Startup Catalyst mission delivered by the Australian Landing Pad in Tel Aviv, and funded by Advance Queensland. It was a week of meetings, presentations, tours, pitches, dinners, and other social events, with local Israeli startups, incubators, investors, lawyers, hubs, and startup ecosystem leaders. The mission was curated by the awesome Omri Wislizki, who is the Australian landing pad manager in Tel Aviv.
There are already several posts on what we did, which also cover some of the information on the local startup scene (see day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, and day 6). But in this blog I’m skipping all that, and instead I want to share my reflections and takeaways on what Australia can learn from Israel.
As with every other Catalyst trip we do, the real impact of this mission came from the people we met — the conversations and the cultural aspects — but in this case, also from the guided-tours to the holocaust centre and the Old City of Jerusalem (including the Wailing Wall).

More than just learning about the local startup scene, during the week we heard personal stories of loved ones lost, torture, war, violence, terrorism, and death. These were not just in the context of Israel, but also with some of the mission participants sharing their own personal stories of hardship and experiences that no person should have to witness.
The insights
I think there is a lot we can learn from Israel to improve the Australian entrepreneurial community, with the key points being:
- Israel founders go global from day one. Israel’s small population of 8 million people, and what we witnessed as low levels of tech adoption, mean that local startups have no choice but to go global from day one. Even the 350+ multinationals that are based there are not selling to the local market; rather they are only there for R&D and access to startups. As an example of their global mindset, during a round-table pitch session to local investors they asked us to stop referring to Australia as a market: “Australia is too small to be a market. Please stop telling us about your Australian customer base.” Lesson: a reminder to focus on bigger markets.
- It’s easier for Aussie startups to access multinationals from Israel than from Australia. (I originally titled this dot point as “Australian corporates don’t get it”.) The 350+ multinationals based in Israel are actively hunting to do business with startups — indeed it is a large part of their R&D model. And by “do business with”, I mean “be a customer of, invest in, or acquire”. Aussie founders on our mission, who had wasted time and effort back home to get access to local corporates or domestic offices of multinationals, were able to meet almost immediately with those same multinationals in Israel and achieve much better outcomes, much faster. Lesson: bypass local corporates and head straight to multinationals, even if you have to get on a plane to meet them.
- Israeli Government intervention in the startup sector has been transformational. Speaking with the local incubators and also Startup Nation Central, it appears universally recognised in Israel that a lot of the current success of the Israeli startup ecosystem is attributed to Israeli Government funding and programs that were implemented over the last 10 to 20 years or more, particularly Yozma and the technology incubator funding support programs. Lesson: it is worth investing our time in lobbying for and advising Government on startup policies.
- Australian startup talent is world class, but far less ambitious. Across all the meetings we had (and admittedly this is a tiny small fraction of the local startup scene), I have to say that our Aussie founders and startups are easily just as good talent wise. Nothing in Israel really blew me away. But Israeli founders have much bigger visions for their companies (which equates to better story telling) and more importantly, they are truly global facing, so early traction numbers are often far more significant. One key difference however is that 27% of Israeli startup founders are repeat entrepreneurs (meaning they return to do another startup after they successfully exit). Lesson: we need to back ourselves to be more ambitious, and back our founders when they chase massive goals.
- Australians are in a comfort zone, and are more risk averse. Israel’s history is one of war, terrorism, and continuous threat to personal safety. The Iron Dome (a mobile all-weather anti-missile air defence system) has been operating 24/7 for close to 7 years, and last saw active use only a few years ago. And the most recent attack on security forces had occurred in Jerusalem less than 2 weeks before we landed. By comparison, we have it to so easy in Australia. I don’t want to wish adversity upon us, but the problem with the comfort zone we all enjoy in Australia is that many people see no reason to attempt to strive for something greater, no reason to grow, no reason to reach, and a tendency to give up too early. Lesson: Remove the risk-free option if you really want to drive results and outcomes.
- Israeli’s are impatient, because they recognise life is short. Israeli’s are direct, and will cut you off if you are boring them or waffling, but it never comes across as rude. Every honest and direct comment is also well meaning, even if delivered without detectable emotion. [Interestingly, the contradiction to this is that in Tel Aviv they will quite happily queue for an hour for food, at venues where the staff move so incredibly slowly, and where the entire operation could easily be streamlined to process more customers more efficiently.] But I also noticed through conversations in Israel that they look for and measure impact, not activity. They are focussed on getting results that matter. Lesson: Focus on what really matters.
- Israeli’s are hyper-connected to one-another. Omri made a great comment that “anyone you want to know in Israeli is only one SMS away.” This hyper-connectivity of two-degrees of separation isn’t just the result of a small population, it actually has more to do with the mandatory military service resulting in individuals serving with people from a variety of different demographics and social circles. This then translates into hyper-connectivity across traditional social groups, giving everyone access to almost everyone else. Lesson: Everything is about human-to-human connections. We need to better connect all the elements of our innovation ecosystems.
There is a lot more I could write about the impact of the mandatory military service, and how their military units run in some-ways like startups, but I’m not sure how to tie that back into lessons we can learn from and adopt into practice in Australia.
EDIT 27/09/17:
Some of the comments to the article pointed out that there are lots of other takeaways and lessons from Israel. However, I have focussed specifically on those of the startup community. Nonetheless, I did want to add this graph that was sent to me to highlight how Israeli VC funding compares as a percentage of GDP.

What I will do differently now post-Israel
In many ways, the trip to Israel reinforces all the same insights that we all gain from other missions to Europe and the USA, but specifically for me, I have a few personal changes that I will now focus on:
- I’ve vowed to work with more multinationals rather than domestic corporates. Multinationals have bigger budgets, provide access to international markets, and have a history of global innovation programs, meaning they already get it (we don’t need to educate them before we can start the conversation we actually want to have). As a result, we can do more, faster, with bigger upside, and less restrictions.
- I’ve vowed to be more direct, and help founders to chase the bigger impact. We need more Australian’s to have truely global, big-impact ambitions and visions for their startups. And we need everyone (investors, corporates, service provides) to lift to support those entrepreneurs. No more wasting time supporting yet-another-startup with a two-sided marketplace, iterative innovation, or a 7th generation of food delivery service. I’m sure that some of those may go on to make great businesses, but we need to push the needle.
If you would like to find out more about our Israel mission, what we did, learnt and saw, please come along to our debrief event with a panel of participants, being held at River City Labs on 4 September at 5:30pm.
