{"id":10670,"date":"2019-02-18T13:35:02","date_gmt":"2019-02-18T10:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/2019\/02\/18\/failure-the-surprising-fuel-in-israels-startup-engine"},"modified":"2019-02-18T13:36:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T10:36:33","slug":"failure-the-surprising-fuel-in-israels-startup-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/2019\/02\/18\/failure-the-surprising-fuel-in-israels-startup-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Failure: The Surprising Fuel in Israel\u2019s Startup Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"
In this article<\/a> from ISRAEL21c, Abigail Klein Leichman shows how the attitude of Israel’s Start-Up industry toward failure contributes to its ultimate success. Interviews with some of Israel’s most successful entrepreneurs reveal how they were able to grow from massive failures and how the acceptance of this fact has trickled down into the very fabric of the tech community.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Failure: the surprising fuel in Israel\u2019s startup engine<\/h2>\n<\/header>\n
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Dov Moran, the Israeli responsible for DiskOnKey and DiskOnChip, poured millions into developing the world\u2019s smallest smartphone in 2007 \u2013 the same year Apple introduced iPhone and permanently reset the bar for phone size to \u201clarge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet Moran considers this colossal flop as a positive turning point in his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt made me stop being afraid of failure. When you don\u2019t fail, you fear it. Once it hits big, you are released,\u201d he told\u00a0ISRAEL21c<\/a>. \u201cThis freed me up to go wild with ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Understandably, most entrepreneurs dread failure. The Israeli startup culture, however, spins failure as a helpful \u2014 maybe even necessary \u2014 building block to success.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery failure brings you to the next stage,\u201d says business development manager Efrat Judovits, 34, founder-CEO of InCeku, a white-label mobile wallet for hotels.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see my failures as points that provided me with the knowledge and experience to do what I do now. The only failure is not achieving your dreams,\u201d Judovits said at a recent meeting of\u00a0F***up Nights Tel Aviv<\/a>, part of a global movement whose motto is \u201cSuccess is never final, failure is never fatal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learn to fail or fail to learn<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The rising popularity of F***up Nights indicates that entrepreneurs everywhere are starting to grasp what Israelis have long understood.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn general, Israelis are good at accepting failure, learning from it, seeing it as a natural part of life. It\u2019s one of the key ingredients to our success in business in general and entrepreneurship in particular,\u201d says \u201cHappiness Professor\u201d and serial entrepreneur\u00a0Tal Ben-Shahar<\/a>, who has taught at Harvard and IDC Herzliya and lectures worldwide.<\/p>\n

He tells ISRAEL21c: \u201cOne of the mantras that I repeat to myself and my students is \u2018Learn to fail or fail to learn.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSuccessful people, whether in the arts, in business, or in sports recognize that there is no other way to improve, to learn \u2014 that failure is the other side of success,\u201d continues Ben-Shahar.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one likes to fail, but if we understand that it\u2019s part of the journey, then we\u2019re more willing to try, to risk, to explore. As a result, we\u2019re more likely to succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israeli serial entrepreneur Amir Orad, 41, has taken that lesson to heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a professional mistake maker,\u201d jokes Orad, who spent six years heading an IDF technological R&D unit and went on to leading roles in startups including Cyota (acquired by RSA), BillGuard (acquired by Prosper) and Actimize (acquired by NICE Systems). He\u2019s now CEO of\u00a0Sisense<\/a>, a big-data and analytics software company in New York and Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a big believer that the only way to avoid mistakes is not making decisions. In some cultures and companies, you\u2019re not allowed to make mistakes. You get fired or try to hide or defend the mistake, and that\u2019s the worst because you won\u2019t learn from it,\u201d Orad tells ISRAEL21c. \u201cYou need to quickly acknowledge and embrace mistakes, learn from them and move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orad speaks from experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt Cyota, we built a new technology that we thought could solve security online by giving people credit cards that evaporate after one use. We did a survey and consumers loved it. We spent two years building the product and another year deploying it in the market, only to learn that people are too lazy to spend the 10 extra seconds to use it. This cost millions of dollars and three years of my life,\u201d Orad says.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of the insight we gained from our mistake, we knew we had to balance security with convenience. We came up with a technology called \u2018risk-based authentication,\u2019 which basically means that when you log in from home to pay a bill you will not go through cumbersome security, but if you log in from Russia to move millions of dollars you\u2019ll get cumbersome security.<\/p>\n

\u201cIndustry experts told us this was a stupid idea, and a Wharton MBA class we hired for their opinion also said it was a stupid idea. Yet we decided to try it and take the risk; worst-case scenario was it wouldn\u2019t succeed and we\u2019d move on,\u201d continues Orad.<\/p>\n

It succeeded big time. Millions of people use risk-based authentication millions of times a day on sites including Google and Facebook.<\/p>\n

Ben Wiener, managing partner of micro-VC\u00a0Jumpspeed Ventures\u00a0<\/a>in Jerusalem, relates that recently a startup founder seeking funding was embarrassed to tell him that her first venture had failed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI yelled, \u2018Great!\u2019\u201d recalls Wiener.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an investor, you try to pick winners,\u201d he tells ISRAEL21c. \u201cSo when you hear that someone already experienced failure, at the very least you know they\u2019re not likely to make those same mistakes on your nickel. It doesn\u2019t mean they failed as a person but that the particular venture failed, and that makes them a better founder going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this article from ISRAEL21c, Abigail Klein Leichman shows how the attitude of Israel’s Start-Up industry toward failure contributes to its ultimate success. Interviews with some of Israel’s most successful entrepreneurs reveal how they were able to grow from massive failures and how the acceptance of this fact has trickled down into the very fabric […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":10671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2694],"tags":[2661,2409,2665,2695,2696],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10670\/"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post\/"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80\/"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments\/?post=10670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10670\/revisions\/"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10671\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/?parent=10670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/?post=10670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kol-ami.kulam.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags\/?post=10670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}