The main point these types of articles ignore is the huge wave of immigration from Soviet Union in the 90's. It was extremely skilled population with many phd's , professors that worked on pretty amazing stuff back in USSR.
Then to help these 1 million (20% of country's population) the government just helped everyone a bit with their ideas.<p>THAT'S ALL , the rest is history!<p>I remember my backwater desert town 50k population where they quickly build cheap office buildings and stuffed them with all these 1-2 person "startups" full of bearded Soviet Phd's. They called them "hothouses" (of ideas).
What happened to Israel can not be repeated again unless
US collapses and 1 million of Silicon Valley engineers(not that they have so much) will move back to India or China.
I havent gotten round to reading the book yet, but there is further evidence of this in the book "Startup Nation: The story of Israel's economic miracle" By Dan Senor.<p>He also did an introductory talk which was brilliant, on Fora.tv.
I'll post the link here, but it may be affected by the new Pay Wall.<p><a href="http://fora.tv/2009/11/03/Start-Up_Nation_The_Story_of_Israels_Economic_Miracle" rel="nofollow">http://fora.tv/2009/11/03/Start-Up_Nation_The_Story_of_Israe...</a>
Briefly: this reads like Steve Blank is wandering the Earth trying to get companies to legislatively promote venture capital as the preferred vector for starting companies.
Wouldn't a better (read less link baiting) title be. What one country got right in one example of funding start-ups?
The article basically describes a bunch of different business models and then hails the Yozma program. I don't know anything about it and maybe it's been immensely successful but I would have thought it would be far more interesting if it told me why and how it had been successful.
To be honest I would have thought a better explanation of the success of entrepreneurs in Israel would be the large number of highly skilled/motivated first/second/third generation immigrants moving into the country.