The quest to create an Israeli Nokia

In the past year, the Israeli venture industry has finally realized that there is a need to create bigger companies. Venture Beat just published a commentary piece that I wrote on the quest to create an Israeli Nokia (Read it HERE). It will be great to get additional comments and thoughts on the topic, focusing on 2 key questions:

1. Why aren't there more large scale Israeli companies?
2. Will we see an Israeli Nokia/Google in the next decade?

In addition, my good friend Aner just published a post on this topic. He claims that the VCs are causing the small exit behavior, as they have no patience for building. I actually think it's a combination of hungry VCs (We want an exit!) and low-expectations-on-ROI entrepreneurs (We want an exit too!). Hopefully "both sides of the table" are starting to think about the bigger outcome and how to create long-term, idependent, large-scale companies.

Aner talked about Traiana, Saifun, and Interwise. Let's hope Mellanox and MobilEye (Raising $100M at $500M valuation) will be counter-examples.

Comments

[Will Cardwell]

Really interesting ideas -- we restle with the flipside here in Finland. Nokia is a fantastic company, but why can't we create companies like the ones you list (Comverse, Checkpoint, etc.). Our successful companies tend to burn out btw 25m and 100m market cap, and thus our VC industry has never taken off in any really significant way. The Finland/Israel contrast in an interesting one, I have always wondered if taking the best practices would create something unique?

[Tony Gregory]

Among the barriers to the billion $ company that Daniel sets forth clearly the greatest is attitude. Israeli managers rarely raise their heads above the level of mid-level managers in Europe, the Far East or the US. The personal attributes that hold them back are overheated pace (or lack of patience), fear of risk, and a habit of cutting corners (lack of due diligence). Until they truly internalize the entrepreneurial spirit they wont get any farther. Intelligence, resources, opportunities? All these exist. Like Pogo once said, "we have met the enemy and they are us."