Start-up nation

If you haven’t read it or about it already, check out Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.

It came out last year, and led to interesting coverage in the New York Times here and by David Brooks here, and on The Atlantic’s blog by Jeffrey Goldberg here.

You should especially check it out if you are an expansion stage software company CEO or senior management team member, or, if like OpenView Venture Partners, you offer venture capital financing.

While the focus of the book (and the articles) is on what happened in Israel specifically, there are many insights in general about what kind of environment, people, and approaches help make start-ups successful, and these lessons are applicable anywhere.

For instance, take this bit on flat hierarchy and open culture from the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:
“The fact that when you’re being promoted in the Israeli military, your subordinates have input, or can have input, in those decisions. So it’s a very entrepreneurial, start-up military. There are very few bosses. The only way you can cultivate that culture and ethos is if you have very few bosses, because the moment you have a lot of bosses, you have a lot of people who need to justify their existence, and they justify their existence by giving commands.”

And this bit on “debriefs” (known in the Agile world as retrospectives!):
“I have a friend in New York who’s an executive of a major commercial real estate company, and they were involved in a potential transaction that was huge. And they lost it, they got outbid and outmaneuvered by a competitor, and my friend happened to be reading the galleys for our book when this happened, and he said to his colleagues, you know, let’s do something we’ve never done before, let’s actually do a debrief. It didn’t hit him until he read how many American companies, large and small, just don’t do that, sit down and be really critical, not for the purposes of having it documented, for deciding whose fault it was, but figuring out how to make it better.”

In writing about why Israeli companies have been successful, the authors are really writing about what makes any company successful, and so I recommend you read this book!