Israel: 4,000 startups in the Greater Tel Aviv area, Israel is ranked 1st in the world for innovative capacity in 2014

Omar Téllez served as the president of the public transit mapping service Moovit and sits on the company’s advisory board; he before worked as an executive at Synchronoss Technlogies.

I’ll always remember my initial time at Ben ­Gurion airport.

After a 12-­hour trip from JFK, I was called to the front of the immigration line: “The guy wearing the Moovit t­shirt, please come forward!” For a second I thought I’d done something wrong and was going to get in trouble, but again the immigration officer said with a heavy accent “Welcome to Israel! We are proud of our startup and want the world to know that we are a high tech powerhouse,” as he gave me my passport and waved me off.

I must have saved at least an hour in the line, but all I could think about was how excited I was to be in a country in which even the immigration corps supported the ecosystem that I was part of, and, yes of course, how glad I was that I had worn that t­-shirt.

No wonder they call it “Start-up Country” I said to myself, as I took a cab to my hotel and wondered what other things I had to learn about this thriving ecosystem in Israel.

Uri Levine, a good friend from Silicon Valley and Waze founder, had asked me to come to Israel to check out two crazy guys that had done a soft launch of an app that they claimed to be “The Waze of Public Transportation”. Uri was on their board, and thought they could use some help to take Moovit internationally.

While I knew that the Israeli startup world was booming, I was blissfully unaware that on a per capita basis, the Israeli hi­gh-tech and venture capital sectors were larger than in any other country in the world. What’s even additional surprising, I would later learn, is that the Israeli hi­gh-tech startup exit amounts increased by 980% over the completed five years to a record of $9.2 billion in 2014 (like Mobileye, Viber and Waze are examples of recent record exits).

Smart, eager, tech savvy, native speakers of a variety of languages inclunding Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Russian, are always around. If you’re a startup that aims to be in 45 nations and 500 cities, in a 2­-year period, again these international resources can come in extremely handy.

It’s no wonder that with over 4,000 startups in the Better Tel Aviv area, Israel is ranked 1st in the world for innovative capacity in 2014 by the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook.

Getting used to long hours traveling and managing the side effects, comes with the territory at the same time as working with Israeli start­ups. However hard I tried, for some unknown reason, it was impossible to soothe the jet lag at the same time as I traveled to Tel Aviv for board meetings.

Similarly, being able to adapt to work in different time zones and managing the communication challenges to make the majority out of it is vital at the same time as working with Israeli startups. Meetings that kicked off at midnight, in which we looped in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, Madrid, Rome and Tel Aviv, were common. Preparing tight agendas and becoming masters with Google Hangout became a much-­valued skill to address this challenge.

While there’s an abundant VC offering for A and B rounds in Israel, capital availability for larger rounds can be limited, and as such pitching to Sand Hill Road becomes a necessity.

In fact, Dun & Bradstreet reports that there’s only two VC’s in Israel with over $1 billion in capital under management: Pitango and Star Ventures. But while there are large VCs like Sequoia that have offices in Herzliya and actively invest in Israel, to my huge amaze, there are others in the Valley that take the, “we do not invest in Israeli startups” position.

One clear pushback that we heard from these investors was how difficult it was for them to extrapolate success in Israel, with a people smaller than New York City, to the rest of the world.

In the end, the funny thing about Israelis is that they’ll be the initial ones to acknowledge that they’re hard to work with.

In fact, they’ll have a good loud laugh about it. They recognize that while their modus operandi can be perceived as abrasive, opinionated, free of bullshit and politics, it gets things done quicker than most.