“Don’t worry about being the next me. Be the first you”
Dwayne Johnson, in the movie “Fighting with My Family”
Yesterday, UK Israel Business, hosted Innovate 19’ – a half day conference that brought to London Israeli scaleups and startups across AI, BlockChain, Cyber Security, Computer Vision, HealthTech, Quantum Computing and Food tech hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The content was very informative with strong presentations by Syte, SparkBeyond, Jolt.io, Future Meat Technologies, Alan Feld, Riskified, Wi-Charge, QuantLR, Amenity Analytics, Clear Blockchain Technologies, Infibond and Vault Technologies which will soon be online.
As a board member of UK Israel Business, dual citizen based in the UK for the past 11 years and someone who spends much of his time working in both markets, I was asked to share my thoughts on how we can bring the UK and Israel closer together by learning from each other’s strengths.
UK and Israel Trade is on the Rise
- In 2018 the bi-lateral trade between the countries reached $11 billion. UK is Israel’s strongest trade partner in Europe and 3rd globally. This is a 15% YoY growth
- There are 400 Israeli companies active in the UK, of which 29 are publicly traded and about 80 are startups operating mainly in London.
- 25 UK corporates have startup related activities in Israel including Barclays, Sky, Tesco, JLR, RBS and others.
But clearly there’s a big GAP
Despite the geographical proximity to UK/Europe, Israel is much ‘closer’ the US
- US Israel trade in 2018 was $35 billion.
- Israeli startups don’t stay in the local market for very long, given the local market is small and almost negligible. Most expand immediately to the US, often ‘skipping’ Europe until much later. Some exceptions apply in fintech.
- 295 US corporates are active in Israel, representing 55% of the total MNCs. The UK figure pales in comparison.
Can Tech Nation and Startup Nation learn from each other?
Each market has its own unique characteristics that are very hard to replicate: London one of the financial capital’s of the world with all the major banks and insurance companies located in the square mile of the City and Canary Wharf. There’s Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL, King’s College – world leading academic institutions attracting a steady flow of talent, and there’s also a huge concentration of Venture Capital money looking for ambitious entrepreneur. Startups are a relatively new phenomenon here, boosted by the 2008 financial crisis, government policy and activities like Campus London, which I had the privilege of leading.
Israel on the other hand leads globally in R&D spend per capita, startups per capita and VC investments per capita. A small country with approximately 8 million people, Israel punches way above its weight. With leading universities, 535 multinational corporations with activities in Israel, over 21 unicorns and many publicly traded companies on Nasdaq, Israel has a strong pool of talent with strong entrepreneurial drive.
The IDF, Israel’s mandatory military service, is an incubator for talent, offering the brightest minds ‘on the job training’ solving cutting edge problems in AI, computer vision, machine learning etc, which many later on apply in the creation of cutting edge tech startups.
Given both the UK and Israel have very successful startup ecosystems by any measure (leaders in capital raising, number of unicorns, exits, etc) I thought it could be useful to learn from each other’s strengths when it comes to the startup ecosystem and entrepreneurial culture.
Let’s start with a Hebrew lesson
There are three Hebrew words that do a good job describing the mentality of startup nation
Vice versa, there’s a lot Israel can learn from the UK
1. Fertiliser – “no problem” said the Texan. I got the best money can buy.
2. Water it every day. “You got it”, said the Texan. “I’ve invested in the best irrigation system”.
3. Do it for 700 years. <crickets>
Patience is not about inaction, but about attention to detail and working according to a process to get things right.
What can we all do to get the two markets closer together? Build stronger bridges
Thanks ?
I’d like to acknowledge several people who were instrumental in preparing this talk. Yariv Becher (Head of the Economic Trade Mission, Embassy of Israel in the UK), Ayelet Mavor (CEO of UK Israel Hub), Dona Haj (head of UK at UK Israel Tech Hub) for the data used to prepare this talk. Thanks also to David Fogel (ADV), Sagi Shorrer (Angel investor), Gadi Weiszlovits Lahav (Financial Times), co-founders of the Israeli tech parliament, for the ideas and feedback. Finally, thanks Hugo Bieber and Dor Bershadsky for the excellent execution of the event and Asaf Anolik (Head of Innovation, AWS) for hosting us.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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