This is part 4 of a series of wild stories about how trust shapes entrepreneurship in faraway places. Part 1 covered Russia, part 2 covered a country that shall remain nameless, part 3 focused on Colombia.
In the middle of a conversation about what market they should pursue, two cofounders hit a disagreement. The discussion became more and more heated until they were screaming at each other in a full-on argument, about to come to blows. I tensed, ready to shove myself between them and break up the fight. Still screaming, one of them shouted his justification for why they should go B2B instead of B2C. His cofounder’s face paused, considered the argument…and started nodding along. That’s a good point, he said, I hadn’t considered that. The tension broke. They went back to work as if the fight never happened. My heart was pumping, my nervous system firing. They, on the other hand, were unbothered. They might as well have just wrapped up a meditation session.
I had never seen founders like this before, but this was my first time in Israel. I was running a startup bootcamp in Tel Aviv, helping people start companies. The most memorable thing up to that point was a restaurant that had twenty-eight different types of hummus. That’s impressive.
Also impressive: Israel produces roughly one startup for every 1,400 people and has more companies listed on NASDAQ than the rest of Europe combined. I was hyped to experience it firsthand. Every entrepreneur I met was whip smart. They moved fast, and they moved fast as a unit. Two years of military service is mandatory in Israel, and this is the leading theory as to how the country produces such winning startups. A stint in the army makes everyone learn how to execute a plan, operate in uncertainty, and most importantly, work in a team. The military-unit-to-startup-team pipeline is a real thing.
After a decade of running entrepreneurship programs, most of the cofounders I see tend to aggregate around two different archetypes: a builder and a business person. This is a common cofounder pairing. It’s why you have Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. What surprised me about the Israeli founders was that the technical ones seemed really good at business and the business ones seemed really good at technical stuff. They were like ambidextrous soccer players, it didn’t matter which foot they kicked with, they put the ball where they wanted to. How did they get this way? I don’t know (if you have a theory, reply. I’m curious).
In the nameless country I wrote about earlier in this series, conflict ended partnerships. Here it made the partnership better, because both guys trusted each other enough to hear the better argument and let it win.
Those two cofounders who almost came to blows? I saw no traces of discomfort or unease in how they worked with each other the rest of the program. When they pitched at the end of the program, they were the strongest team.
P.S. One more story from Tel Aviv: My host invited me out one night. We rode an Uber to a strip mall at a dentist’s office at one in the morning. My host, the guy who I had entrusted with my safety, smiled mischievously every time I asked him where exactly we were going. We lined up alongside a velvet rope and the doorman let people in one at a time. We entered the office, walking past four dentist chairs that looked exactly like every dentist office in the world. What was not normal was the doorway in the back. A set of stairs led down to something I couldn’t see, but I could hear bass thumping. We descended into an underworld. Techno music blaring, people dancing, go-go girls on tops of columns as tall as a man. Everybody was good looking because this was a club for cool young people, and the two years of mandatory military service makes everyone super fit. Way too many people wore sunglasses for my taste, but I’m in a disco in the basement of a dental office. We’re through the looking glass at this point. So what do I know.
Thanks to readers of early drafts: Cansafis Foote, Jamie Nicholson, Coco Liu