The American Dream is the belief that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.
The Startup Nation Dream is the belief that every Israeli boy and girl can be the founder of Israel’s next billion-dollar startup. After all, it was a neighbour/ high school friend/ army mate/ brother of the neighbour of the ex-girlfriend who shares the same butcher as you who founded Waze, Wix and Mobileye.
When I came to Israel 5 years ago, I thought I knew the trajectory of my career path. I would graduate from University and either join some humanitarian organisation or go on to join a big corporation, rise through the ranks and stay there till I retire, with a healthy and sizable retirement fund. Either way it would be a stable rice bowl that I would not have to worry about as long as I worked hard and hit all my KPIs.
But living in Israel changed me. It made me dream. It made me believe I could jump into my first business (with Rabea) straight out of University and succeed. I joined the ranks of the young and fresh-faced Israeli youths who were truly convicted that their ideas can change the world.
When Rabea and I were taking a much-needed breather from an intense year and a half of running our first company, he moved to Berlin and stumbled across Le Wagon.
Le Wagon is currently the highest rated coding bootcamp in the world with 27 offices operating in 27 cities all around the world. We are a product-driven bootcamp teaching Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML & CSS, APIs, Github, Heroku (among other things). The program brings coding skill to creative entrepreneurs to make them able to build their own application, find a job in the tech industry (as junior developer or product manager) and collaborate efficiently with their future dev team. It’s also one of the best entry tech communities for life, with more than 2400+ talented alumni worldwide that keep sharing tips, resources, job & freelance opportunities and learning together after the 11-week bootcamp.
Despite being a computer engineer by training, Rabea took the plunge. He called me at the end of Week 1 saying it was so easy. Lol. I didn’t hear from him for 9 weeks after. By the time Batch #111 ended, he was convinced that Tel Aviv needed Le Wagon and surprised it wasn’t here yet. It seemed a most logical and necessary pairing. It didn’t take him long to convince me.
This is just one of the many reasons we decided to bring Le Wagon to Tel Aviv, and why if you are an aspiring programmer, you simply have do it here. I’ll try to keep it brief. Yalla.
Silicon Wadi (that’s Valley in Arabic)
At approximately 1 startup per 1,000 inhabitants, Tel Aviv alone is the most startup-dense city in Europe. Israel has the highest density of tech start-ups in the world, attracting more venture capital dollars per person than any country — 2.5 times the U.S., 30 times Europe, 80 times India, and 300 times China. Israel has more companies on the tech-oriented NASDAQ than any country outside the U.S., more than all of Europe, Japan, Korea, India, and China combined. Almost every major tech company — Intel, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Motorola, Facebook and so on — has Israeli talent and technology playing a major role in keeping them on the cutting edge. (Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor and Saul Singer)
Culture of entrepreneurship
The great irony of this country that is only seventy years old and in a constant state of war since its founding, is that it has transformed the challenges it has faced into assets that form the bedrock of its culture of innovation. Adversity of all kinds, such as being under attack, small, isolated, with no natural resources, have forced Israelis to be resourceful, to do more with less, to innovate, and to be global from day one. This is how a modern metropolis (and Israel’s cyber capital CyberSpark) came to be established in the middle of the Negev, a barren but magical desert that takes up over 50% of Israel’s land mass. The miracle of Startup Nation is best exemplified by how Israel has successfully made the Negev desert the world’s only desert which is reversing the global trend of desertification. True to the vision of David Ben-Gurion, she has made the desert bloom.
How? Israelis don’t mind failing at all. They get back up, dust themselves off, and start all over again. And again. And again. It’s in their nature. In fact, their attitude to life is to live for today, because it could all end tomorrow. If things don’t go well, that’s life. Just start again.
The need to be global from inception
You see, in a small country of only 8.5 million of which 5% live in Tel Aviv, and of which half of that 5% are considered consumers and even fewer still to have access to capital, one thing is clear: you don’t launch your startup counting on any local measure of success.
In the U.S., many apps and services start out being available only within the country. In Israel, many startups launch outside the country by default. It is this mindset that has enabled Israeli social trading platform eToro to scale massively, and after $73 million of funding become one of the defacto stocks, commodities, and currency trading platforms globally (it’s not even available yet in the U.S.).
It helps that Tel Aviv is such a diverse city. It embraces people from all walks of life, all countries, all backgrounds, and all religious (or non-religious) persuasions. Although divisions and disagreements are commonplace on the streets of Tel Aviv, the startup community embraces diversity. You can find talented people speaking almost every language in Israel — not the final reason Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are so successful despite their size.
Chutzpah
This also falls under Israel’s culture of entrepreneurship but I decided it deserves a category of its own.
Chutzpah is hard to define. Something like supreme confidence. According to Yiddish scholar Leo Rosten, chutzpah is “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts,’ presumption, plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.”
Guy Kawasaki, who was Steve Jobs’ original marketing man, “described chutzpah as “calling up tech support to report a bug on pirated software.”
The time is now
Israel’s hi-tech industry is hungry for quality engineers.
The Israel Innovation Authority is kicking off a new NIS 10 million ($2.8 million) incentive program to combat the acute shortage of quality engineers and computer programmers in the hi-tech workforce. As of April 2017, market demand for programmers exceeded those available by 2.5 times. By the end of this decade, the industry will lack more than 10,000 engineers. The goal is to create an alternative route (via coding bootcamps) to joining the high-tech workforce, focused on market needs.
There is no better moment than now for the №1 coding bootcamp in the world to arrive on the sunny shores of Tel Aviv.
If you’re joining our bootcamp from overseas, there will be a few challenges you’ll have to overcome but soon learn to embrace. Two of them are Israelis’ very direct communication style and their passion to be on call 24/7. Don’t get me wrong, they do a mean happy hour, but right after that don’t be surprised to find them back on their work emails arguing with a client. You’ll come to toughen your skin. You’ll come to love this people who can be so hard to work with.
Well, it’s time for Shishi (Friday) drinks with my friends in the Old City of Jaffa (whaaat yes, amidst all this hi-tech talk Israel is still a charming country of tradition and religion and arguably the most significant place in history. Take Jerusalem — a city that has been destroyed and rebuilt (at least) two times, attacked 52 times, and besieged 23 times. Jerusalem is a reminder of our human condition — the divisions, wars, and differences that perpetually pull us apart, even when we want to come together. Jerusalem is a reminder that life is non-stop invention, endless innovation.), yalla bye.
Applications are now open for our inaugural batch beginning April 22! Don’t miss this unique opportunity. Register now.
P.S. If you’re an Israeli reading this: Achi/ achoti, don’t waste your life. Statistics show that hi-tech wages are 2.5 times higher than the average Israeli salary. If you ever wondered how you can have a chance of living the dream of Startup Nation, this is the moment. Le Wagon Tel Aviv is your chance. We promise you that by the time you finish our 11-week bootcamp, you’ll be ready for the hi-tech workforce. You’ll be able to create any product you want or easily learn any new coding language you desire. Lehitraot.
