How does Israel—with fewer people than the state of New Jersey, no natural resources, and hostile all around—produce more tech companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and China combined? Israel has transformed the challenges it has faced into assets that form the key of its ‘culture of innovation’. Adversity of all kinds, have forced Israelis to be resourceful, to do more with less, to innovate and be global from day one. There are quite a few parallels we can draw between Israel and startups; passion, resourcefulness and persistence being the most important ones.

1. Passion – something you should feel as an entrepreneur, for the startup life, for your company, for your vision – is all-encompassing
2. Resourcefulness – know how to get information and results you want
3. Persistence – keep fighting till the end

Israel is an apt synonym for the global impact a startup business can make despite having “enemies” with massive resources. Senor and Singer from Start-Up Nation have written a book on lessons a business/startups can learn from Israel.

Throughout Nation, Israelis are a frank-speaking people who are willing to explore the world, to learn from those experiences, and to be persistent with implementing ideas in business. Managers at Intel Israel, for example, are credited for changing Intel’s strategic decision to no longer seek increased processor clock speed and instead create new processing paths.

Read the book summary and this itself will give you some good idea of what lies beneath (in the book)

photo credit: joeltelling

There is an ongoing debate about the age of entrepreneurs when it comes to establishing a new venture. What do Venture Capitalists actually prefer; the youth with fresh ideas and passion or the older serial entrepreneurs with market experience? If we have to believe the records, VCs flock to young entrepreneurs when it comes to setting up a startup. Why do VCs favor the young? So is this one of the reasons of high failure rates of startup ventures? All these questions are answered in an article written by an‘old guy’ himself:http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding-successful-startups-old-guys-rule/

I’ve got a message for all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists who think a CEO is over the hill after age 40. Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand.