Journey Conference I
written by David A. Broadwin
Last week we had the opportunity to travel to Israel to attend the so-called Journey conference and visit with various VCs and entrepreneurs. The
Journey conference is put on annually by Ernst & Young and is one of the two big tech industry events in Israel. It has been a big year for tech in Israel -- despite the war. Not counting huge acquisitions by Buffet and HP, there were over $4 billion in exits for investors in Israeli related companies and the outlook for next year continues to be strong. Life science, greentech and water tech are increasingly significant areas for new technologies coming out of Israel. Also, it appears that Israeli tech companies are going global earlier in their life cycles than in the past. I think this trend is being driven by the availability of capital, the opening of new markets in China and India as well as some perceived competition from China and India. Remember, Israel is a very small place with a very limited market for its own products. As a result, these entrepreneurs need to be very aggressive to succeed. Although I am not aware of any statistics, Israeli entrepreneurs tend to think of Silicon Valley before Boston (except for life science companies, where the reverse is true). Boston comes after Silicon Valley and then the rest of the country follows. We met companies that opened offices or headquarters in Atlanta, Chicago and Boulder. There should be great investment and acquisition opportunities coming of Israel in the next few years.