Episode 11 - Inside Israel's Startup Industry with Doron Nir

(upbeat music) ♪ Life of Tel Aviv, two nice Jewish boys ♪ ♪ Eight in Weinstein, and not or mini-gur ♪ (upbeat music) - And today we are three nice Jewish boys. - I feel like I can't begin. I didn't hear the two, I feel like a three. - You need to sing it to me. - Oh God. - Of Nagila. - There we go. - There we go. - Why is it that you always, I mean, if you're talking about American Jews, you immediately go to have a Nagila. What's the thing about that? - It wasn't a decision of ours. - Really? - It's a law, actually. - Yeah. - But why, why is it? - Is it a biblical law or is it a biblical law? - It's a law. - It's a law, it's a law. - That's very nice. - It's part of the Jewish law. - So we're three nice Jewish boys today because we have door on near with us. Thank you so much for coming. - Thank you for inviting me. - The beer is very cold, I enjoy that. - Great. So yeah, you're our first guest. - Really? Congratulations. - Which episode is that? - It's an honor. - 11. - Whoa, you went through 11 episodes without guests. - Yeah. - Yeah. - But we have Aiton. - Nobody's gonna hear those 10 first episode, man. - Probably. - No one's gonna hear this one either. - Yeah, that's probably true. I became aware very quickly with our podcast that if you don't have a guest, you're just dead in the water. It's just so horrible. You just sit there. - Yeah, you need to add something interesting. - What did you talk about for 10 episodes? - It was mostly quiet. - It was mostly just quiet. It was just us sitting in front of each other awkwardly. There was a cricket once in a while. - Did you play any songs? - Yeah, yeah, we have music actually. - Really? - I just approached Indy, Israeli musicians who do English music and I asked for their permission to play their songs. - And they-- - They always agree. - They always agree. And there's such a vast amount of good, high quality music here done in English. - Who did you play in previous episodes? What did I miss? - We had Russo and Weinberg, if you know them. - I heard about them. - Actually, my partner in the economy, Reem Sherman. - Yeah. - Would you say a podcast? - Yes, my podcast. If you understand Hebrew please listen to it. It's, you can find it on iTunes. Just look up the economy. - Yeah, it's amazing. - So Reem was a music critic basically. He used to go to shows and live shows and post it on an Israeli website called Mako. So he has a real wide range of knowledge and music. He writes very eloquently and he knows how to describe stuff very in a very detailed manner. So he was doing that for a couple of years. - So we had them, we had so many more. We had Dwight Willow's who are a great indie band but maybe first we'll introduce you. - Really? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Very foreign though. - The boring part. - Yeah, just a little bit more. - Yeah, go for it. - You're a podcaster, correct me if I'm wrong, right? - You are not wrong, I am a podcaster. I am a father of two. - I met your son, his incredible. - Easy? - Yeah. - He's, I hope he doesn't listen to this. - He's not incredible. - He's like, he's a normal boy. He's just a redhead normal boy. - He's just average. - Listen, I have a good friend. I was, I was with him in the army. And I'm really not very much for the, my son is magnificent kind of parenting. - Right. - And actually he's also not into the, my son is magnificent type of parenting. And he told me that every time that he meets with friends and somebody says something like, my kid is amazing or everybody loves him in kindergarten, then he always replies with something like, my kid is totally ordinary. He's just an ordinary kid. - Yeah. - He's liked by some and not liked by some others and he's just a normal ordinary kid. - What's your son's name? - Jonathan, Jonathan or more accurately, Yehonathan. - Yehonathan. - Good luck, Jonathan. - Yeah, exactly. - Well, I think, I think there's a horrifying example right now of what happens when parents take that approach with Trump. - You think his mother told him that he's amazing? - I think they, yeah. - You're blessed, my son. - Yes, you're blessed. - You're gonna be the president with it. - I think with Trump, I actually don't know his biography, but he did mention his parents in his, how do you call that? His acceptance speech? Is that an acceptance? No, inauguration is gonna happen. - This later is in the end of January. - Yeah, I think acceptance speech. So he said that he wants to thank his parents and his parents are amazing. He actually did a very decent, very peaceful, very, you know, trying to calm everybody down. Don't worry, I'm not gonna push the button or throw. - Puss fist. (laughs) - Not pacifist, but definitely I first, you know, the biggest concern for somebody like this is the stock. - Right. - And if he came with an acceptance speech that had the tones of the campaign, then the stock market today would have probably crashed much badly. It's now about - It started going down. - No, no, it's down. - Yeah, yeah. - It's down. Most of the stock is one to two percent down and some of them are actually even worse. Tesla is five percent down and some other companies. But it could have been a lot worse, man. - Yeah. - Could have been. - But do they always go down around alike? 'Cause I feel like investors are terrified of change. There is always the candidate that will take the markets up and the candidate that will take the markets down. If Hillary Clinton would have won, the markets would have gone plus two today, cross the board. - But, you know, I'm actually pretty happy you're here today and we're doing this episode about startups because to me, it's the best timing. You know, now all the Jews from the American Jews who wanna come here. - They're gonna come back to Israel. - Come back and wanna start the lives, but wanna be entrepreneurs. - That's not gonna happen, man. Everybody who's in the States are gonna stay in the States. They're not, you know, they're Jewish, but they don't. They're not coming to Israel. - What's Aiton? - When did you come to Israel? - It turned out great for me. (laughing) - When did you go? - I came here 10 years ago. - Did you make Aliah? - Yeah, yeah, 10 years ago. - You were a full citizen. - I'm a full on Israeli. - Did you do an army service? - Can't you hear it? - Yeah, I did. - I did, I did. - How much? - It was in Naqal for two and a half years. - Dude! - Yeah. - I went the whole nine yards. - You're in Israel, man. - Did you kill anyone? - I have a kid talk about that. - Yeah, okay. - But no. (laughing) - No. - Did you wanna kill someone? - I came here with that illusion. - Really? - Yeah. - You thought you were gonna kill someone? - Yeah, absolutely. I came here with that like, I thought I was gonna be James Bond. I was like, I'm gonna be in a sasset. And I'm gonna kill the most important terrorists. Not the like, the little ones. - Yeah, yeah. - Only the most important ones. - Like Bin Laden. - Yeah. - Like that guys on my way. - Really should Bin Laden. - And then I came here in this like 18 year old like guy from Nadia is yelling at me. (laughing) And yeah. - That's a bubble as burst, yeah. - Right. - That's very disillusioning. - Very disillusioning. - But let's assume there are Americans who want to come here and become entrepreneurs or people abroad who are interested in the startup community here and the startup nation. Which, are we a startup nation, by the way? - Yes, we are. We have a, we still have, I think, one of the highest ratios of startups per, I don't know, cap it up. - A million people. - Yeah. - It's not per capita, it's per million people. - And if you don't count the Arabs in there. - No, we count everybody. Because some startups, there are actually some very interesting programs for startups for the Arab population and the Orthodox population. - Right. - You have about 5,500 startups in Israel. - Uh-huh. - That's a massive number compared to countries our size. If you compare that to Sweden, which is roughly our size or Austria, which is roughly our size, we have more than, I don't know, 50X, what they have. - Right, so that's, that's-- - We're a startup nation. We're not, we're not, first of all, it's not growing. So the 5,500 startups per 8 million people that the country has, to my understanding, and I really don't know that much about it, but to my understanding, that number hasn't been growing. So we had 5,500 startups when we were 7 million as well. - A lot of those people are probably coming from certain demographics that aren't necessarily. - Uh, I think it's more than that. I think that it's really, we had a massive boom, and I think it's calming down a bit. I think startups are not a lifestyle that a lot of people in Israel want for themselves. Uh, it's still massively stronger than other countries, but people are starting to understand that it's a huge risk, and if I can get a decent job with a decent pay, there's a disillusionment from startups in Israel, I think. - Yeah. It doesn't mean that it doesn't. happen is they're still a very healthy ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors but it's not it's definitely not growing. So Doron as a start-upist who had known failure I was wondering if there's such a thing as a good failure here in the start-up industry or is it always awful? There was a movie I don't remember its name that the directors nobody came to see it so they decided to open it for free so because they were so frustrated the filmmakers that they said on this date it's going to be completely free to see this movie it's an awesome movie just come and see it it's free and also nobody came which I thought was a very interesting day because you're saying okay it's not the price people would pay the price if they thought the movie is going to be good or the premise is going to be nicer you just made a shitty movie I think that's a worst kind of failure if you're giving your product for free and nobody's taking it right that's that's the worst kind of failure I think the the failures that I had were slightly better because we had a lot of users but we didn't make any money hundreds of thousands of users not millions not billions if we had millions and billions we probably would have just sold the company for should you tell us a little bit about the yeah yeah the the last company was called happy sale and it was basically a mobile application for a Craigslist type of marketplace so post your shit and and somebody else would buy it and we had messaging built-in so you would just approach the person and and it was good we got about I don't know 500 almost a million installs and we had about a million installs by the way is nothing in consumer mobile it's not the magic number these days is a 10 million and even that is not enough I mean you would probably have to get not just to the 10 million mark but have at least I don't know a million out of those to become avid active users active users to get a snowball rolling just to be a valid business and we didn't make that mark and we we did some strategic alliances we built I mean eventually it got to the point where I was faced with the option of either spending the next year without any salary trying to make this successful in some way I don't know in what way or just let it go and I was I have two kids so the choice for me was very clear I need them to eat I need them to sleep under a decent roof I need to pay rent and you know electricity bills and stuff so for me it was very clear at that point I I said I'm not gonna risk my life savings or I'm not gonna risk the the happiness of my family or the stability of my marriage which if I would have gone that way probably would have put it at risk I know a lot of entrepreneurs that at these points in their in their company's life cycle their marriage broke up their family you know broke up and family for me is more important let me ask you was the idea initially was it yours was it yeah yeah it was mine I felt very passionate I don't know the idea is still an awesome idea yeah and the execution was also great I mean we saw a lot of users the business case is not there I mean the way to make money from these apps is still not in place there are some very large companies let go while a pop and offer up okay that are successful in the US they have millions of users they made the engagement marks that we didn't arrive at yeah they still don't make money and they're spending money like crazy because they they have to sustain this this audience with new users and advertising and everything and they still don't know how they're gonna make money and now Facebook came out with a competing product for marketplaces right which is it could kill everyone I'm not very optimistic about the entire category I think the the next couple of years are gonna show us whether these companies are developing into meaningful businesses or they're just gonna sell for scraps so how did you become an entrepreneur I grew up in a house where being having a decent job and getting a decent pay was the most important thing in life Jewish house that is yes being an entrepreneur was an idiotic things that only an idiotic thing that only crazy people do and what your parents did my father was a manager in several automobile companies the Israeli automobile industries mostly around heavy automobile so trucks and the I don't know what you call them the the thing that the thing that trucks carry trailers yes trailers yes trailers and and also all sorts of large vehicles and he was a great engineer and he became a manager and he was a manager of some of these companies and he was eventually he was an employee for all his life he tried at some point to become and you know an entrepreneur and start his own company it didn't go very well it's a very risky business and if you don't it didn't go very well so having a salary and having a job was what are we what are we doing here you want to move it yeah okay was very important in my house my mother was a teacher and a principle of a school in high foward I grew up I slowly became aware throughout my 20s that the value I bring companies that I work for is tremendously larger than what I'm earning tremendously larger as a rule of thumb yes throughout my 20s I saw the things that I build for the companies that hired me turn into millions of dollars and what I personally got was a small fraction of that which makes a lot of sense in terms of business I mean eventually the whole equation of employment is that you bring more value than you get paid and there are some companies that actually have a measurement for that so how much revenue do we make per employee doesn't matter which employee we have 10,000 employees we make a hundred billion dollars our revenue per employee is X and the more money you make per employee it means that you're an efficient company and the stock market is very rewarding for efficient companies the productivity is high etc etc I was a very very productive employee and I decided that if I'm a very productive employee and I know how to build things and create things that make a lot of money for my employees I should probably start doing it for myself and it was a very long process because when you grow up and you're and you keep getting pounded with the concept of being a good employee and my grandmother who I love deeply and she's no no longer with us the first question that she would ask me on on our weekly phone call was how's work and then after that are you being liked by your managers so are you are you you know are you good yeah are you a good employee and I decided that the beginning of my 30s that I'm gonna start doing things for myself and it's a which is today pretty late and right for an entrepreneur like no it's the average it's actually it's actually even early it is most of the successful entrepreneurs started their successful ventures in their mid-30s even even after that for some I mean we all know the Zuckerbergs and the bearings here they're a 200 yeah but it's it's really not like that it's really not like that most successful companies were built by people in their 30s and you've experienced you need you know a little bit you got to have a little bit of an experience so I I slowly started you know trying to find myself ways to be to have a little more of an upside in what I'm doing and in the first company I did it I just had some stock options you know I went for a risky or venture with a little more stock options and then after that I had more stock options and then I I was a co-founder and finally happy saying my latest failed company was the first company where I was a CEO and I really feel that I did the full cycle it took me it took me a fucking decade to get to the point where I'm not scared at all you see a ton he looks 30 but he's actually I'm 43 yeah I'm the opposite I look 20 I look 43 you know you look 27 I am you look like a 27 Tel Aviv hipster. I look like I've experienced the whole cycle, but I'm just at the beginning. Dude, stop complimenting yourself. You both look like a couple of young schnooks. I see. So that was it, basically. Let me tell you, for an entrepreneur, the two things that you really don't talk a lot about, because you talk about product and business and money and investors. You don't talk about fear, which is a huge factor of probably everything. I'm sure there's a lot of fear and filmmaking as well. It's so much alike, you know, as you tell it, I'm just. It's entrepreneurship. Filmmaking, especially in Israel, is entrepreneurship, per se. There's no other way to look at it, and it's scary as fuck. It's scary as fuck. Nobody tells you that, and nobody talks about that, because entrepreneurs are romance. They're liars, basically. They're constant liars. When you meet your friends, there are very few friends that I will get the truth about their venture, when I ask them. It's mostly. Everything's going amazing. We have that new product launching. It's going great. I think we're going to close the next round very easily, and we're making. Sounds like a classic CEO. Yeah. And I'm driven and I'm pumped. Nobody will tell you like, "Dude, we're fucked." We are so fucked. The ones that do tell you that, you know two things about them. First of all, they're really fucked. I mean, you can bet that the company's going to shut down any minute now. The second thing is that they're honest. They're honest. When an entrepreneur tells you that they're fucked, they're dead honest. You think there's a correlation, though, between that personality type and successful CEOs, or do you think that you can be honest and you can say we're fucked and be at that point where you're fucked and still. You cannot be honest. You can't be honest with yourself or with others. You can be honest with yourself. It's very important to be honest with yourself. It's also very important to be honest with your investors and your co-founders in the specific rooms where you can be honest. Behind the right doors. Exactly. It's very, very important to be honest. If you're not honest with your investors, you can go to jail eventually. Yeah. You cannot be dishonest with your investors. But you can't be honest with your employees. Not completely. You can't. You can't. No, okay. No way. You cannot be honest with your employees. You cannot be honest with your users, with your customers, with the people you want to. That's it. If you want to recruit somebody, usually when you're fucked, you don't recruit anyone because they're going to get fired anyway. Yeah, well, recruiting's like a sales pitch. You're trying to. Exactly. The thing is that a company is an entity that is sort of like. From the outside, it always needs to look successful. And the CEO is the person most responsible for projecting that. If you're fucked, then you're fucked. I made a point of not trying as hard as I can not be dishonest with my employees. And my level of dishonesty only came to the point where I wouldn't lie to them, but I wouldn't tell them everything. So I would never lie to them. If they were to ask me how much money we have, I would tell probably for about four, six months. And that was true. We had money for about four to six months. But I didn't, for example, tell them if I stop believing in the venture. Because you don't share these. I mean, there's no point. There's no good to share those emotional. And also most of the time you still believe. That's, I guess, my question is, do you think that you have to be inherently optimistic? Because there's the executive type which is generally pessimistic and says no to everything. And then there's the optimist, I think, which is constantly telling himself, "It's going to happen. It's going to happen." So if you feel that something is not going to happen, you should stop being the CEO of the company. That would be, you know, the number one role for a CEO is to serve the investors. That is your role in life. You have stockholders. Whether you're a public company or not, it doesn't matter. And your job is to take something that you got an investment, let's say, for example, for a valuation, a company valuation of a million dollars. Okay? The number one job, everything else is irrelevant. The number one job of a CEO is to turn that one million dollar valuation into more. Okay? And the more you raise the valuation of the company, the better you are as a CEO, and the more it's less about generating revenue, and it's more about raising the valuation of the company. Revenue is top, not important. I'm not saying, but there are a lot of companies that still don't make money. Zingai is not profitable yet. For example, Uber is spending money like crazy, but the valuation keeps going up, so the company is good. As long as it's growing. Exactly. How much money is being invested in Israel and startups? Because I heard from entrepreneur friends that like money in late years, money's like being flowing around like crazy, just looking to get invested. I've been hearing that true. I've been hearing that too. I don't know. It's not flowing in my direction. Let me tell you. After this show, I'm not bitter about it, by the way. Money is flowing into Israeli companies. I think most interesting and good companies that I saw in the last years in Israel are getting a lot of money. I honestly don't know the total numbers. You get an angel investment, like the first investment, the seed investment. How easy would it be if you have a decent, good idea? Very, very difficult. Very difficult. Yeah. An idea is nothing. Well, an idea and the base, okay. How can I rephrase the question so that the answer would be it's easy? No. Let me tell you. Let me tell you what it takes to get an angel investment. Let me tell you what would be an easy way to get an investment. Great idea. Yes. In a super hot market, with an amazing team that's going to execute it. That would be composed, let's say, for a technology company. That would be composed of somebody who's an amazing technology leader, a great business leader, and great chemistry between them. If one of these founders also had a successful company making an exit in a previous cycle of their interpenor life, that would probably be the easiest way I can imagine for a company to get a seed investment from an angel after a couple of meetings. But all those Cinderella stories that I know of people with no background. Give me an example. I have good friends. We are, we started in the cinema school in Tel Aviv University. Many entrepreneurs go out from there. One of my friend of mine, for example, they made a game, virtual reality game, augmented reality, and they invested like 40,000 shakles or something. They made a prototype of the game. They show that it has an audience. They put it in malls and filmed kids getting high on it, and then raised money on it. After they proved that the product has a potential. Nordo Interactive, I know them. That's an example, but also I know. Nordo Interactive, look at what you just told me. You said we had a great team of entrepreneurs with an idea for a category that's super hot like augmented reality and games which are proven to be a category of successful consumer products. They executed a prototype in a way that actually demonstrated that they can make money off that shit, and then they went to investors. That's actually quite a good story. Now I know them well enough to tell you that they didn't get a ton of money. They got a little bit of money and then they need to prove that they can make it to the next level where they would get more money and they would take it to the next level. And hopefully one day they're going to be blizzard. It's something to do with the fact that they don't really have a track record. I mean, these are young guys, right? But what you just described is actually a very good story for a first cycle of entrepreneurs. And I can also tell you that there are some family connections there that don't hurt. Not saying that they got anything because of their family. Tell us more. Tell us more. Is that important to you? No, no, no. I don't even know these guys. He still connected that. I'm just saying that the fact that you're very well networked is a huge bonus when you're trying to raise funds. Because eventually in Israel, everybody knows everybody. You want to raise money. You're going to go to this investor, he's going to pick up a phone to a couple of friends and say, listen, these guys, we're with me. I saw the deck. It looks interesting. What do you think? I don't know, send them over. How many? How many startups in Israel do you think are actually invested by their founders? Like the founders putting money in them? Yeah. I don't know. That's a common practice or is it? I don't know. That's a very good question. I have some friends who put money into their companies, the ones that were successful were very happy about it, the ones that were not were very sad about it, which makes a lot of sense. What does, would you say there's a good, like, correlations or, like, yeah, correlation. That's a word. Yeah, it is a word. It is a word. Military service and us being the startup nation, I mean, no, there isn't. I don't, I don't think military service and military, I think it's deeper in Israel. How so? I definitely think that the military, the specific military in Israel, the IDF is very encouraging for the interpreneurship spirit. So we actually, in our last episode of the economy, we interviewed Inón Bracha, which is, he was a successful CEO of two companies, both making massive exits. One of them was IPO'd for over $700 million, and then it crashed back badly. After he sold it though? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much money he made. I'll ask him that. And the second company sold for about $350 million to Apple. The company was called Prime Sense. The second company and that was the technology powering the Xbox Connect. And he talked a lot about how the interpreneurship spirit is encouraged in the military units that he was a member of. So I think in some parts of the army, cultivating new ideas and experimenting new stuff to get things done is really the lore of that unit. I think personally, well, my personal belief about a lot of things that have to do with Israel is that it all comes from the Holocaust. So it's a big thing for me. I have a lot of family stories that involve with that. But I think that when you look at, I'm a big believer in evolution. And when you look at what happened in the Holocaust, this is my theory, by the way. It's not backed by any science or social research. It sends you my publisher. Okay. It's just my own private theory that I developed about where this interpreneurship spirit comes from. Okay. Okay. This is fact, guys. I think that the Holocaust, what it basically did, imagine that you were to take a huge population of not humans, but animals. And you were to put them in something as horrifying as the Holocaust. Who would survive that? The ones who survived the Holocaust were the crazy people. The ones that jumped off the train, the ones that hid in the sewer, the ones that wouldn't accept being huddled, the ones that wouldn't accept being shipped anywhere. Faked today. I didn't. Everything. Everything that you had to do to survive in the Holocaust basically comes from a personality that completely rejects the reality that's being tried to impose on you and demands to act in its own free will with a very strong survival instinct. At least that's what I know about the stories in the Holocaust. Now the reason why it might be a completely preposterous theory is because a lot of that has to do with luck, a lot of the stories. But one of the interesting things are that luck is also, it's totally unproven, but luck is something that has been viewed in many social systems as something that people have. Okay. Have you seen the movie Cooler? No. Which movie? Cooler. Cooler. Cooler is a movie about a guy, I think it's William H. Macy, about a guy that works in a casino in a role that's called the Cooler. And the role of the Cooler is that if somebody is doing too well in a gambling table, they would come and they would touch them and their luck would run out. This is based on real. This is real. There were actually coolers in casinos in the U.S. in Las Vegas. So this guy is basically a guy whose job is to bring bad fortune upon people. And he's really. Yeah, bad karma. And I think when you look at what happened in Israel is that eventually this country was founded and was populated by a lot of populations that are interpenores by nature. Yeah, by how do you say, how do you call this in evolution, the natural choice by natural selection through this horrifying experience of the Holocaust. And it's probably a lot less true today because but it did create a certain DNA. And this DNA was anew because the people that came here originally, the original Zionist that came to Israel to start a nation. And think about how crazy bad shit this idea is. Think about yourself being a Russian guy back in 1900 sitting in your fucking village in Russia. It's cold as shit outside and you're a Jew and you're talking to a friend and he tells you, dude, let's go to Israel. Let's go to another shit hole. Let's go. Let's go someplace where we would have a home where we would build a country and we're going to adopt a language called Hebrew and we're going to start talking Hebrew. Man, if somebody would come to you and say, we're going to start a trekkie nation, okay? And we're all going to talk Klingon in that nation. So we're going to start talking Klingon between ourselves and we're going to practice Klingon so that when we get to that place where we start our trekkie nation, trekkie country, this is going to be a home for trekkies from all over. And they're all going to talk Klingon and let's start doing that right now. Like 50 years. Let's go. Let's fucking go. But think how crazy this idea is. So the country was founded by crazy people. I also think it's an unbelievable miracle. The fact that 120 years ago, or 140 years ago, some people met up and have this huge conference. And they said, yeah, we're going to start working on building a country for Jews and it's going to be, you know, when we have this drunk person, Herzl, and he wrote a book and then you should read the book. It's a really good book and we're going to do it. Really good sci-fi. It's amazing, man. He's going to do it. It's basically the Scientologists. It's bad. It's crazy. They are. And it happened. Herzl's like a successful Elrond Hubbard, I think. I think Elrond Hubbard was a successful Elrond Hubbard. They don't have a country, but, you know, if they would want to, they probably have to. But it's a really crazy idea. It's a really crazy idea. So the fact that we are here 140 years later, there's an unbelievable economy built on that sci-fi book, is in terms of looking at history, it's a pretty crazy idea. Yeah. I actually, I like your theory on the Holocaust, though. I think I've heard theories that actually trauma, like in one generation, can affect the next generation, that when someone is traumatized, that it gets passed down in the genes, meaning it's not only just inherit genes, they get passed down, but actually experiences. So I think maybe it's not necessarily just the fact that these are the people that survive, but the things that happen to those people in the Holocaust affected the next generation. That could be true as well. I was wondering, Doron, because, okay, we are just start-up nation, we have so many startups, but it feels like we're a very exit oriented startup culture. And very much into doing the exit vis-a-vis selling the company and becoming rich, as opposed to building the big company like Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber, would such companies even could have been built here in this culture of ours, and is it a good thing or a bad thing? How do you perceive it? I don't think a company could like Amazon could have been built in Israel. I think the problem with Israel in terms of building massive companies is that we can't build massive companies that are not based on a digital offering. Amazon, one of the massive factors of its success is the fact that they digitized or they build a digital business around a real commerce activity. I mean, you buy books and I think that wouldn't have worked in Israel because there's a lot of logistics stuff that you need to solve and eventually, you know, you got to be where the market is. And also, you need to remember that when Amazon started, Israel was much younger and businesses, technology oriented businesses, nobody was really figuring it out. You got to have so many, you know, I always tell my co-founders and whatever company we're working on that you need a very, very long series of small miracles for a company to succeed. There is no silver bullet. It's just a very, very, very long series of miracles that happens. Some of it is thanks to networking and execution and just luck, but you need a really long series of these miracles. Since we're a small country, the probability of this such a long series of miracles is reduced dramatically. I think the U.S. is much larger, so the probability for these miracles to happen is larger. And I also think it has to do with a personality type. I think we have Teva, though. Teva is a massive company and a very successful one, which is great. We also have mobile line. We have several billion or several billions worth of companies, checkpoint. We don't have a hundred billion dollar company in Israel. I think that it's going to be a while before we do. When you look at the hundred billion dollar companies that we have in Israel, I don't know. I heard a lot of theories. I don't know if any of them, any specific one of them is true. We used to be a startup nation. We need to be a scale up nation. There's a lot of that kind of work. Yeah, that's what I'm referring to in question. There's maturity. There's a lot of things. Israelis are really good at saying things like if this schmuck next to me can do it, I can probably do it too. So you have to have one really successful company and then a lot of other people are going to say we're going to try and do it as well. And it takes time. You know, it takes time. I'm very passionate about games, digital games specifically, not necessarily video games, like consoles, PlayStation and PC, but I'm very passionate about that and I always wanted to work for companies like Blizzard or Electronic Arts. And there were none of these companies in Israel when I was, I don't know, 25 or 22. Now there are some companies that are as large, but are not doing these types of games, you know, narrative driven, art driven. We don't have amazing art. Or Sheldon Adelson driven kind of games. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Casino. Casino. But some companies are actually starting to be like that. So you have a company like Plarium, which are, I would say they're probably at a value of about half a billion dollars, which is very decent for a game company. And they're making strategy games and they're making sci-fi games. Some of them are developed in Israel. Some of them are not. They're developed in Eastern Europe, but the headquarters are here. We have a problem with games because we don't have, you know, we don't have great art schools, not enough of them at least. We do have great artists, artists though. And we have some great artists, we don't have pipeline artists. A pipeline artist is basically somebody who dedicates their life to be a cog in an art machine. When you look at the credits of a Disney movie, you see credits for, you see the names of hundreds and hundreds of artists. And these people are working, they were, they finished art school and then they went to work as artists for not a lot of money. These guys don't make a lot of money. Israel is a very expensive country. Artists need to make a lot of money to be, you know, just to live here. It doesn't work like that in Ukraine, for example, or in Korea, or in China, where you can get cheap artists, you can get artists, and that's what Disney is doing. You know, most of the, most of the creation of art for movies these days is not happening in the US. You have the creative director in the US, but pipeline art. The ones who have to draw Elsa, I know, five million times until you get it right, are not in the US. We're not good at manufacturing, that's the thing. Israel is not good at manufacturing. We're not good at having hordes of people do monotonous tasks for an end goal that is perfection. We're not good at that. Because of our interprenor mentality and because everybody wants to be a unique snowflake in whatever they do, that's by the way what art schools teach you. If you ever went to Betzalel, they would try to teach you to be unique. They wouldn't teach you. Yeah. They wouldn't teach you how to do genre movies. They wouldn't teach you how to do soap operas so you can make a fucking living as a soap opera director. They would teach you how to be unique. Right. That's a horrible thing. You can't make a living being unique. Right. You just can't be in the consensus. There's an industry. The industry is based on templates. You want a romantic comedy. I need you to write a fucking romantic comedy. I need a sitcom, give me 12 episodes of a decent sitcom that I can maybe have a nice twist about it. I don't know. One of the characters is Secretly Gay and it creates a lot of, I don't know, situations like three's company had this undertone of Jack Trip or being gay. That could be interesting. But I need a sitcom. I need gags and punchlines and there are no schools in Israel that teach you that. I think it's, by the way, a horrible, horrible thing because if people were taught not to be unique, but how to do amazing work in a specific genre, their ability to make money was much higher and the industry would go much faster. Right. But it is what it is. You know, everybody wants to do something unique. That speaks with your parenting style. Yeah. Exactly. You know, you're, yeah, my parenting, I do tell my kids that they're special when I talk to them. Yeah. And I really boast their ego, ego like, I just enjoy that, man, it's really fun to tell your son that you really love him and that he's awesome. It's fun. He gets that weird light in his eyes and he feels good about it. And then he goes to school and he realized that he's really just a normal kid. I've been lied to. Exactly. I'm going to fuck him up completely. I just destroyed the real fun part. Sounds familiar. Sounds so familiar. I just destroy my child's future by making him think that he's unique. No, but I say that because it's a mentality. I mean, that's like what you're saying is that people should kind of accept, but it's kind of, it's somewhat socialist, which is interesting, I think, but it's kind of saying like, you know, we, we, and not everybody can be extraordinary, you know, certain people need to take their place in the, in the system, circle of life, yeah, which is interesting. But I wonder if that like aligns with, with your, I am definitely not a socialist. No, not socialist. I am. I'm a socialist. No, no, no, I'm, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a massive capitalist. I do believe that people need to focus about bringing value to where they are. Okay. And I just had a conversation with a friend today. And he talked to me about the fact that he's, he's not young anymore. He's 40, he's applying to jobs where he, you know, goes all the way to being the one of two interviewees for the job and then he gets bumped out. Somebody else gets the job and he's very depressed about that. And one of the things that I told him is that he probably needs to realize that he is not perceived as somebody who can bring enough value. He's not young anymore. He's not sexy anymore. He's not willing to do, and, you know, do a massive amount of work for a low pay, which is what young people usually agree to do because they think of how it will advance their career or the opportunity that he's not looking at opportunities anymore. He's looking at what can I do to. you know, to make my life better, to make my family's life better. And you need to realize that, that's, that's how it is. Yeah. You can't be depressed about that. Yeah. Everybody is going to become less new and more unattractive. And, and you, unless you find a way to be happy about where you are in your 40s and your 50s and your 60s and this goes on, man, I mean, people in my generation are going to live to be a hundred in your generation, maybe even more. You got to get ready for a very long way down. Very long way down. Don't worry, there you always be attractive to me. Thank you. But, but, but be happy. There's, there's a, there's a shitty movie called summer school. Okay. With a, it's always a great way to introduce a movie. Kirstie Ali and Mark Harman in the lead roles where he's a substitute teacher. And he discovers that one of his summer school students is also a male stripper in a club. Sounds shitty. And, no, no, it's a, I, I don't know why I liked that movie. Yeah. And Ali Shidi, not Ali Shidi, Kirstie Ali is beautiful there. It's before she got fat and before she got old and she really, you know, she became a much less beautiful woman. She still looks amazing, I think. But there she was still very young and very beautiful. And that, uh, he discovers that one of his students is a male stripper and, the, and he, and he tells him, what are you doing, man? And he said, what are you talking about? I'm having an awesome time. I'm 18. You know what it is like after you're 18, it's all downhill from here. So the Mark Harman, who's probably in his late 30s is answering, yeah, but it's a hell of a ride. You got to make sure that the way down is going to be a hell of a ride. If you don't do, if you don't do that, if you can't find a way to be happy, by your career and your family in your 40s and your 50s, you are fucked because it's going to be so much time, so much time. You're 20s. You're almost over. How old are you 27 27? It's almost over, man. Yeah. Was it fun? It's pretty fun. Cool for you decent. Good. 30s is going to be amazing. 30s is your like in your prime. You make a lot of money. You're, you're still extremely sexually active. It's going to be fun. 40s. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know. 40s, you make it, you build a family, you start becoming concerned about things. You need to start taking care of other people. That sounds awful. And from that point on, it's all going to go downhill. Okay. 50s, you're going to start earning less money. 60s, even less. 67, you're going to retire with whatever the fuck is that. I don't know. It's just depressing to think about retire from what? I, I, what am I, what I do in the morning? I haven't even started. So a Hillary Clinton is thinking right now, probably. I'm not worried about her. She's going to give lectures for a should load of money. Right. Just like she's always been doing. She's not going to be president, though. Nope. That's a shame. Michelle, though. That's true. Is she going to run? You're more involved in the list. Either her Kanye, her, her, her, her, her. Before we wrap things up, could you give some advice? If we, if we do, if we will be listening in a certain point by, let's say, Oleh Hadash or someone who's going to come to Israel, he, he wants to, to, to be an entrepreneur, but he has no experience in coding. Did you give some or, or whatever? He never done such a thing before. Okay. Did you give him some advice where to start from? Yes. I, I'll give two very shallow advices. There, they are very true for all life in Israel. Life in Israel or being successful at anything in Israel requires that you will have no fear and that you will have an amazing network of people that you can approach. That's also true for other places. It's not different in Israel. I think in Israel, the network factor is a little bit more important than other places. But if you decide that you want to come to Israel, have no fear, be open, be honest and build an amazing network of people, identify who are people that are going to waste your time, who are people that will help you bring value to yourself for the ones that you feel that will bring value for the ones that you feel that will help you or they have good ideas, spend time in building the relationships. Building a relationship is actually very easy. You just have to stop thinking about yourself and think about the person on the other side and now you can help them achieve something. That would mean volunteer go to meetups and be a fun guy. You know, do, I'm thinking about the games industry. So do game jams. And wherever you can, whatever you can do, just bring value to other people and build your network. The last thing is that you mentioned coding. You don't really have to be a coder to, to be an entrepreneur. But you do need to have a distinct ability to get shit done. Doesn't matter if it's production skills or hiring skills or funding fundraising skills, you got to be able to have something where you're much, much better than other people. If there is nothing that you believe that you are better, much better than other people in, start working on being better than other people in something. You got to have one vertical skill set that you're really going to, you know, master. And if you manage to do that, if you're a master of one discipline of the entire entrepreneur, possible skill sets, and you have a great network, then you will find partners who will complete you for everything that you don't know. And together, you will be a force to be reckoned with. That's good advice. Yeah. Thank you so much. That's like very, it embodies the mentality of a CEO, because you started saying, if you don't have anything you believe that you do better than other people, and I was thinking, go, just don't come. Just give up now. And you're like, find something. It's very optimistic. I am optimistic. I am optimistic. Yeah. It's admirable. Doron, thank you so much. It was amazing. Thank you. And good luck with all I can I say, can I say one more thing? Of course, absolutely. You sat me in this chair. I thought we were going to talk about something completely different. And now I realize that I'm sitting here as this sort of guru for entrepreneurship. And I just want to say that I'm, I'm really not successful to the measure of somebody should listen to what I'm saying. I'm giving you very general advice that I found to be valuable in my life. And if you feel that's something that I said is total bullshit, you're probably right. And you should do the complete opposite. Okay. Yeah. I just want to make that clear disclaimer. Yeah. Because because really I there's somebody sitting and he's giving you a lecture about how to be great in life. And how you be there. Come on. Like Big Lebowski said, it's like your opinion, man. Well, so Doron is, if you guys speak Hebrew, then check out his podcast. It's called economy. You can find them on Facebook, economy, like geek and economy together. Also, economy.net. It's their website. So check them out. We are also on iTunes, like us on Facebook, shirtless episode. If you liked it, Doron, thank you so much for coming. You are welcome. And we were three nice Jewish boys. Yes. (upbeat music)