I’ve since lived in San Francisco for almost nine years, and recently moved back to Tel Aviv. Luckily for me, a fancy new pedestrian bridge was built over the highway - the Yehudit bridge took 2.5 years to build and required a $20M investment. Look how nice it is - there is even shade to protect from the sun.

Oh, just one problem though - the bike path on the bridge doesn’t match the street on the other side.

I find it very typical Israeli: it seems impossible to live like this from outside, but Tel Aviv bikers just make it work somehow. Yotam Gutman wrote in his blog after coming back to Israel from a trip to Europe:

Immediately after the trip I hosted a group of colleagues, who were visiting our Tel Aviv office from abroad. They wondered about the traffic, the construction, and the dirt everywhere, and I apologized that the city is going through a major reconstruction, that is meant to upgrade its transportation infrastructure. They asked when it would end and I honestly answered ‘never’ - Tel Aviv is always in the process of demolition and rebuilding.

The gap between the “tradition” in Europe and the never ending construction in Israel is impossible to grasp, and so is the difference between our hectic lifestyle and their laid back one.

He claims that this is what makes Israelis build so many startups: their lives are never comfortable, so they constantly have to innovate.

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The Startup Nation book told the story of how Israeli startup Fraud Sciences was acquired. PayPal’s CTO at the time, Scott Thompson, was asked by a VC to help with due diligence, and thought that the Fraud Sciences approach for detecting fraudsters online was out of touch. Thompson gave them a challenge that required large scale data processing, and thought that would get these funny folks off his back for a few months. The Fraud Sciences team completed the analysis over a single weekend, and had far better results than PayPal’s internal risk model!

Fraud Sciences just figured out how to work around this seemingly impossible challenge. PayPal’s CTO was so impressed, that instead of an investment - he pushed for PayPal to acquire them.

Ilya Kogan posts videos about urbanism in Israel on his “Livable City” YouTube channel. In one of them he mentions that the last time he was able to take a leisurely walk on the street, relax and let his mind travel was when he was on a trip to Europe. In Tel Aviv there are e-scooters, e-bike and sometimes actual motorcycles flying by on the narrow sidewalks. You always have to be alert. One must exercise problem solving skills just to walk down the street in Tel Aviv.

Israelis are not great at long term planning, it’s mostly haphazard and short sighted. You can feel it driving on the highway, when suddenly the lanes can shift 10 inches to the left with no warning. The upside is that it keeps everyone on their toes, they’re constantly sharpening their creativity and thinking out of the box.

This makes Israelis very well suited to solve different problems in the ever evolving world of technology - there was no “long term planning” for the internet or semiconductors. New problems just keep on rising as technology advances, which is exactly the type of environment where Israeli entrepreneurs can feel at home.

Monday.com is a publicly traded Israeli tech company that is currently worth $5B, but early 2014 they were at a critical junction: their funding was running out, and the product was hardly getting any traction. Founders Roy Mann and Eran Zinman were able to convince their investors to give them a little more runway, so they could try out a new product concept: no-code highly customizable boards. The result was strong product-market-fit and tremendous growth.

This is the ultimate Israeli entrepreneurial ethos: at the 11th hour, against all odds - a spark of creativity wins the game.

The lack of planning resulted in Tel Aviv buildings being, how should I put it, not as easy on the eye as buildings in cities like Paris or Amsterdam. The mortar is peeling off and there are ugly solar heaters and AC units hanging outside each apartment.
The flip side of that is that the city, unlike in Paris or Amsterdam, is encouraging reconstruction. Here is a map I pulled from the Tel Aviv city website, showing all buildings who have filed for construction permits. Construction sites are marked in red:

In conjunction with rebuilding almost every building in the city, the Tel Aviv subway project that was designed in the 1970’s has finally broken ground in 2016. Now you might get why Ilya Kogan was complaining about the scooters and e-bikes rampaging through the sidewalks - there is just no other way to get around in a city that is entirely under construction.

After being postponed several times, the building of the first subway line - “the red line” - has finally been completed. Ilya Kogan posted a very optismitc video about the wonderful impact of the red line on its surrounding areas. What’s sad is that just a few weeks before the grand opening, it was once again delayed to an unknown date in 2023. Everything is ready, but they found unexpected safety issues with the trains.

Of course there are last minute safety issues - it seems un-Israeli to properly manage a long milestone-based project, so major problems have to wait until the last minute in order to trigger the known Israeli creativity under stress.

The people of Tel Aviv have been waiting for a subway for 50 years now, they can wait a few months longer. It’s yet another opportunity for them to practice dealing with unexpected problems. And as for the Israeli engineers working on the safety issues - I’m sure they would solve them, no matter how complex they might be. Just like the bike riders on the Yehudit bridge don't get too worried about the confusing directions.

When you have to tackle hard challenges just to get to work in the morning, no wonder you won’t be intimidated by facing hard challenges at work.

I was so inspired back then that I named a new company after the coral reef, but that is a story for a different post.

Both that company as well as the Academy of Science shut down when the pandemic hit, and after an 18 months hiatus - I took my son to the academy as soon as they reopened. Some things were different. We had to book our visit in advance, we wore masks, and oh yes - they were not doing the coral reef talks anymore. I suppose they didn’t want too many people crowded in a small space. So visitors are no longer hearing that coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the oceans yet provide home for more than 25% of marine species. But I know it, and it’s kept under the “wonderful pre-Covid memories” section of my brain.

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This is somewhat similar to how  large cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth’s land, yet provide a home for a large portion of the human population. What’s more extreme is that only a small portion of the world’s wonderful cities are home to innovation hubs. While somewhat more distributed post-Covid, even in the last year more venture capital investments were made in SF Bay Area companies than in the next five regions combined.

My wife and I were on a trip to Australia just before we became parents and visited the Great Barrier Reef, which is incredibly beautiful and also the largest coral reef on earth - so large that it can be seen from outer space. It is about three times larger than the second largest - the Belize Barrier Reef (which I also hope to visit one day). Charles Darwin pointed out that coral reefs were found in some tropical areas but not others, and I sometimes wonder why significant technology and innovation hubs develop in some wonderful cities but not in others.

Not as large and impressive as the “reef” of the SF Bay Area, Tel Aviv also stands out as a technological innovation hub. Some track the origins of the Israeli startup scene to the Yozma program of the 1990’s, where the Israeli government invested $100M in ten local VC funds. Government officials convinced a group of former Israelis to return from the US and start local VC funds. They were implementing what they had learned in places like Silicon Valley, New York and Boston, and leveraging their networks to support Israeli founders.

I started my career as a software engineer in the Tel Aviv reef, before moving to the great reef of Silicon Valley.

According to Wikipedia, coral reefs form some of the world's most productive ecosystems, forming a complex and interconnected food chain. There are many symbiotic relationships within the ecosystem, such as the cleaning fish that eats the parasites off of a larger fish.

The clownfish finds protection from predators within the poisonous tentacles of the sea anemone. The clownfish is immune thanks to its mucus coating layer, and helps feed the anemone by letting them eat their leftovers or by also luring fish over. Researchers have found a direct correlation between the number of clownfish and number of anemones in a reef.

This is how ecosystems work. Just like founders, product builders, salespeople and investors all depend on each other in order to succeed. Some are able to be successful from a remote location, but the majority tend to concentrate in the largest “tech reefs”. Just like you can see on HBO’s “Silicon Valley”, different “species” (data scientists, pre-sale engineers, B2B early stage investors to name a few) form different types of relationships in order to prosper on the reef.

I find coral reefs admirable, but I would totally watch an HBO show that is making fun of the intricacies between clownfish, anemones and other species in The Great Barrier Reef.

Coral reefs are extremely diverse - thousands of different species can be found in them, and different species thrive in different reefs. According to Wikipedia, often “a first (lucky winner) recruit to a territory is typically able to defend it against latecomers”, and in some other cases there is a fierce competition that forces less-competitive species to survive in poorer habitat. I am curious if those incumbent species who dominate certain reefs sometimes face Clay Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma”, by being too slow to adjust to disruptive changes in the reef ecosystem.

I have recently moved back to Tel Aviv with my family, to be closer to our extended families in Israel. The Israeli tech ecosystem was originally kickstarted by putting together corals and species from a mixture of other US “reefs”, similar to how the coral reef at the SF Academy of Science was extracted from a larger reef in the Philippines. Having lived in Silicon Valley for almost a decade, I am fascinated by the similarities but more so by the differences between these ecosystems. I feel like a researcher observing the different species and learning about their relationships.

My children and I have amazing memories from the Academy of Science, and now we are slowly discovering the interesting things that Tel Aviv has to offer. And I am working on finding the right place for me in this reef’s ecosystem.