Early exits
A little while back, Aner Ravon wrote a heartfelt post about the state of Israeli high tech, specifically the fact that Israeli startups tend to exit too early (generally via acquisition) instead of developing into large, mature companies.
The Israeli high tech scene fails to produce sustainable, ongoingly growing, companies. The problem is not the Israeli landscape, the problem is probably with having a wrong dream.
When it’s all about the Exit, focus shifts from succeeding as a company to succeeding as investors, speculators. From creating to trading. Operational record is overlooked for dream weaving. This is why Boaz Eitan walks out with $100M for having successfully sold a multi billion dollar balloon to investors despite having no operational evidence at any point.
The question why this is so often comes up for discussion by people inside the country’s high-tech industry. (Daniel Cohen addressed it in a piece about “The Quest to Create an Israeli Nokia”). While Israel has shown itself capable of creating international category leaders – Teva, Check Point, and Amdocs spring to mind – the actual number of these is small, and none have really sprung up for nearly 15 years.
Aner lays most of the blame with the money guys:
Most Israeli startups are funded by VCs, Israeli and American, who in turn get most of their funding from out of Israel investors. This is good and bad. The VC model is based on selling their share for the highest amount in the shortest time. The fundamental focus of a “business” is to create a profit. Unfortunately, these two foci’s correlate less often then they do. An IPO may mean such correlation, as the VC can sell it’s share and the company can grow. However, very few companies fit the IPO model, and most companies are forced to think about their “business” in different terms. Terms such as “comparables”, “size of the (exit) opportunity”, “exit strategy” and “fitting the investment portfolio” take precedence and management attention away from real business decisions. Innovation becomes more important than operations because ideas can be sold earlier in the lifecycle. This means the company must be sold to a company who believes it can turn innovation to operations. Sold to, not become one.
I don’t want to argue that he is wrong, because a lot of these points have merit. The venture capital model does present certain problems (mainly the time horizon) when it comes to growing a big company. There have certainly been cases where investors have pressured companies to exit when they had the potential to become much larger. And yet, at the risk of being an apologist for the VC industry, the situation is a lot more complicated.
Other factors contributing to the relative paucity in the development of large-scale tech companies in Israel include:
- The entrepreneurs themselves – In some cases, as mentioned, investors will push entrepreneurs into exiting too early. But in many other cases it can be argued that VCs try to keep entrepreneurs from going for exits in the mid- ten million range that might be good for the entrepreneurs but lousy for the investors.
To put another way, it is the rare entrepreneur (especially in Israel) who won’t give in to the temptations of a $200M exit. Very, very few people have the cojones of a Mark Zuckerberg.
- The lack of a local market – The fact that Israel has managed to grow a tech industry at all is impressive given its basic situation. We are a tiny little country, whose inhabitants speak a native tongue that nobody else does, cut off geographically from all of its potential markets. All this means that Israeli companies need by definition to be oriented towards overseas markets. As a result, a lot of non-technological functions end up being shipped off overseas instead of staying in Israel. This leads to…
- Management issues – Israel has traditionally had problems growing management capable of making the jump from a $100 million-level company to a $1 billion level company. The situation has improved in recent years, ironically as more Israeli executives have served time in international companies. But there are still way too few international-grade managers to go around.
- The financial environment – You should also remember not to discount the general financial environment. The wild IPO environment in the late ‘90s and beginning of this decade has been dampened for years. And while the TASE is growing continuously, it is still considered a backwater financial market. Meanwhile, investment banking and other financial services are still relatively primitive. All this has led to greater M&A (well, A) activity rather than IPOs.
It should also be pointed out that Israel doesn’t necessarily want a Nokia, in the sense that Nokia completely dominates Finland’s technology industry.
The question is whether this is all leading in one direction – as Aner suggests – that direction being downwards. But that is a question for another day.
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