Israel Archive

"I'm Sorry, Your Fingers Are Too Sleepy to Finish this Post..."

I’m sitting on the oldest plane ever somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I think the Wright Brothers might have carved their name in the bathroom, before they moved on to a newer, more commercial model. I should be nodding off soon: It’s a sure sign the Ambian is kicking in when I can’t type. You’ll probably read this once I’ve edited it in the morning, but right now it looks a bit lishksjent thiewbbs. I’m also sitting in the very back of coach with a longshoreman in front of me who is reclined so far back in his seat, I might as well make his flight a little nicer by massaging his temples. He actually asked the flight attendant why it wouldn't recline more. Um, those would be MY LEGS.

I’m coming back from two weeks in Tel Aviv, as you know if you've been following me on Twitter or TechCrunch. I’m exhausted, sad, happy, and inspired because I can see  parts of the book coming together already. But mostly I just can’t wait to see my husband. (see his cuteness, below)

Since I’m getting Ambian-heavy-typing-fingers, I started watching the movie “Marley & Me,” thinking it would help the pill, wine and a noise reduction headset push me into a sleepy world where I can dream of flying first class. Instead, I’ve found myself actually watching it. Perhaps, as a cat person, I’m missing the point, but it seems to be a movie about a reporter who is so tethered by family life, he can never follow his dreams. He watches sadly as his buddy travels all over the world writing about drug cartels, which is sort of like traveling all over the world and writing about entrepreneurs.

It’s pretty hard to watch this and not miss my husband even more. There are very few men who would be cool with me flying off for weeks on end, coming home exhausted and emotionally-spent with even more work to do.

This book is really hard to do on a ton of levels. But I can handle the flights, the jet lag, the exhaustion, the mindless hours organizing logistics, and the frustration that comes with only knowing five words in someone’s language when you’re trying to learn his or her deepest hopes, secrets and fears. I can handle it all because I also get the joy and excitement when it comes together. But Mr. Lacy only gets an exhausted wife he sees more on Skype than in real life. Either he secretly hates me or he’s a pretty amazing guy.

Health Tips, Anyone?

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I came down with a minor but annoying cold in Israel. So much for my first international trip in more than a year without getting sick.

Honestly, WTF? I am young(ish), work out several times a week, eat organically, don't smoke or do drugs, and for a blogger, I sleep pretty well. Yes, I take Emergency and Airborne on flights. I feel like I live pretty healthy, so why do I keep getting sick? I will give the Blueprint Cleanse credit for keeping me well leading up to the trip and through the flight. So maybe I just need more fruits and vegetables?

I'm open to any and all suggestions here, because I can't get sick everytime I fly this far. Given I've got about a trip per month planned for the next 18 months.

Speaking of, here's my lastest post on TechCrunch. It's on MyHeritage, an unconventional but, I think, underrated Israeli Web company. To my surprise, a lot of people in Israel didn't even know much about them.

What Israel Does Well (Beyond Tech)

Yossi Vardi-- the famous Israeli investor and entrepreneur (see right)-- insists that people give positive encouragement to start-ups. I plan to blog about the risks and benefits of this for TechCrunch, but as  people feel free to flame me ALL THE TIME, I can certainly see the merits! Also, Yossi is one of those guys like Roger McNamee: He may have crazy hair, (or in the case of this picture, a crazy hat) but I'd never question his general wisdom on a host of subjects.

So, Yossi, consider this post my homage to you: A list of things I've found that Israelis do incredibly well over the last two weeks of my visit that aren't in the tech category.

1. Wines. One of the best things about being a reporter is when I travel, part of my job is a ton of dinners, parties and lunches, and I have ordered only Israeli wines at each of them. I don't remember all the names (usually I let someone else pick) but I do remember Flam and The Cave. (Made a Plato joke when we ordered the latter a few nights ago that only my corny philosopher father would have laughed at.) According to a Twitter friend, Israeli Wine Direct is a great resource for Americans buying Israeli wines, and he's hosting an event in San Francisco in April!! I'll be attending if I'm in town. And, um, invited.

2. Flowers. They are stunning everywhere I go, and apparently Israel ships these flowers though out the world.

3. Cotton. Being from Memphis, Tenn. it seems weird to give Israel props for cotton, but I bought a beautiful cotton dress last time I was here, and I understand fashion designers here are known for designing with cotton. Unfortunately, I've been working too hard to go shopping, but I hope to remedy that before I leave town!

4. HOTEL SERVICE. Roi Carthy, the Israeli correspondent for TechCrunch, recommended the Hotel Montefiore, and I have absolutely blown away by everything about it. There are only about a dozen rooms, and each one is beautifully designed, with a full library of classics in English and Hebrew and art and design books. Everyone on the staff knows me by name, by my preferred wake up time, even by how I like my coffee. I've had some of the best meals in Tel Aviv here (which is saying something). The Wireless Internet is even pretty good. They've arranged cars for me everywhere at a moment's notice, and this morning, one guy even ran out and fetched a cappuccino for me because they don't have to go cups here, and I was running late. They look like they are going to cry if I lift my own bag. I can not say enough great things about this hotel, and I'm paying less here than I did for a hotel in Africa; FAR less than I've paid in New York, Paris or London for lesser experiences. It's so great, for such a great value, I worry they might go out of business! Please, if you come to Tel Aviv, do yourself a favor and go to the Montefiore and tell them I referred you because I plan on staying here every time I come to Israel and would like *even better* service, if possible.

And do yourself another favor: Order the crispy duck Vietnamese-style. The shrimp cocktail also makes a delectable snack even with the creepy eyes. (See left.) And by all means, if you have a cold or need comfort food, the Montefiore's club sandwich rivals any one I have ever had.  just polished one off in the lobby and a French woman walked across the restaurant and said "Sometimes you see someone eating so sweetly and enjoying it so much that it just moves you and you wish you were part of the experience." I'm not kidding. My last time in Tel Aviv, my hotel experience wasn't so great. But considering this post is an homage to Yossi, I won't name names.

5. Interior Design. I am not one of those architecture buffs that swoons at a Bauhaus building. So I don't particularly find the exterior of Tel Aviv compelling. But inside unassuming buildings you find a trove of stunning bars and restaurants that could rival any in Paris or Manhattan. (Below, a painting I found in a bar and wish I owned.)

6. Food and nightlife. Ok, so Tel Aviv actually gets huge cred for food and nightlife. But it's so rich, it bears another shout out.

7. Shedding Inhibition I think in the U.S. we're always concerned with "looking cool," even in Silicon Valley. This might be a KinnerNet thing, but everyone at the event felt safe to do absurd and wacky things and make complete fools of themselves without any fear of looking like a nerd. Ahem, photos of yours truly getting sucked up in just that below...

From TechCrunch: Has Israel Lost Its Mojo? (I Hope Not)

Here's the cross post of my first post as a permanent TechCrunch-er. It took me about five days, hours of looking through spreadsheets and about a dozen interviews to write. That's not going to scale if I'm doing several posts a week! In case it's not clear, I personally believe in Israel a great deal; I wouldn't be spending my own money to travel here if I didn't. But the numbers are pretty shocking and worth considering.

When I moved to Silicon Valley in early 2000, I quickly became fascinated with Israel. A very tight relationship had formed between the holy-land-for-all-things-tech and the actual Holy Land, bolstered by success of people like Yossi Vardi and Checkpoint’s Gil Schwed.

The rapid pace of liquidity in the late 1990s meant Valley investors couldn’t find enough start-ups to stuff their money into, and unlike dot com fluffiness that was roaming around San Francisco, Israelis were hard-core techies with a work ethic that seemed to defy basic human needs like sleeping and eating. Most of all, Israelis, particularly those in high-tech and cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, had a reputation for living like there was no tomorrow, because when you’re surrounded by hostile neighbors there may not be.

The 1990s were a period of a lot of structural change in the venture business. It was no longer about families and private money investing—money came from big public pension funds and endowments, and more of it was coming online as the baby boomer retirement accounts swelled and the American stock market made everyone richer. That kind of scale forever changed the venture game. Meanwhile, the Internet enabled companies to be flipped in under two years—also unheard of before. Similarly, Israel represented one of the first times the cozy boutique Sand Hill Road firms ventured overseas and made money as a result. For a time, Israel had more Nasdaq-listed companies than any other country in the world.

Then the crash, happened here and there. Only Israel got a double whammy of the Second Intifada and a resurgence of violence starting around the same time. The talk was always that Israel would come back as a hub for brilliant, crazy, ballsy entrepreneurs, and the returns would come back too. Weren’t these things just cyclical? A positive sign was how many Israeli VC firms were opening their doors. For much of the last ten years, investments in Israeli companies by Israeli VC firms has roughly equaled foreign investment in Israel, according to stats from Ben Gurion University’s School of Management. That’s a huge strength, as Valley and Boston investors always like to invest with local partners, and a lot of developing economies don’t yet have that local infrastructure.

By 2004, an executive from Silicon Valley Bank was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle after leading a contingent of VCs back to the Holy Land saying Israel was poised to explode again. He crowed that the crash and violence aside, Israel was getting more venture money than anywhere other than Silicon Valley and Boston and it was only ramping up.

But it turned out, he was wrong.

Jerusalem

I'm a big believer that this book isn't just about following around entrepreneurs and asking them business questions. It's about absorbing the culture of the place they are from. So it seemed fitting to spend my first day in Israel touring old Jerusalem with Cathy Brooks. We did this last year with the "Traveling Geeks" group, and it was powerful both times, but it different ways. We spanned about 4,000 years of history and three major religions in one very packed day. Touring the several-thousand-year-old water system of the City of David, it was clear that Israelis were always innovating problem solvers! The whole experience was beautiful and intense.

Finally we made it back to a rainy Tel Aviv and realized we'd eaten nothing since breakfast. So we inhaled some delicious burgers.

Here's mine, topped with bacon and an egg. Delicious!

Then dessert came...

We cut open the cake and warm chocolate oozed out...

"OK, Cathy *one* bite..."

Ahem...

Today, my calves are aching and my mind is still spinning, so I'm holed up in my lovely hotel catching up on some work for Yahoo, TechCrunch and BusinessWeek. Gotta pay the bills!

Big News! Also, Yes, I Am Back at TechCrunch

As loyal readers know I’ve been spending quite a bit of the last few months quietly working on some pretty radical and exciting career changes. I’ve already blogged about my role shifting at Yahoo's TechTicker, and the fact that I’m cutting out almost all conferences this year. I'm finally able to talk about the last two pieces of news today, and you’ll see why it was crucial for me to make a little more time in my schedule. 

The first one is something I’ve been working towards since December 2007: I’ve finally closed my next book deal. Before I tell you about it, let me step back and say that the experience of writing “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” was probably the most exhilarating and challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life. I knew I wanted to do another book, but I was worried that anything would pale in comparison.

Business reporters are rarely in the middle of something that’s also a mass cultural movement, the way Web 2.0 was. And it’s even rarer to be the reporter in the middle of that trend early-on, with near-unfettered access. The book was also the culmination of ten years of covering startups and the Web, with so many of the themes of the book coming out of articles I’d written week-after-week and conversations at endless breakfasts, lunches and dinners with investors, coders and nearly everyone who makes up the Valley ecosystem. I worked hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time, and I didn’t think it was possible that I’d find another book that I could be that passionate about again.

Then, a month after finally turning it into my publishers in 2007, I was sitting on a beach in Mexico and my next idea hit me. (My husband may never take me on vacation again.)

The new book is about global entrepreneurship. What I don’t mean by that is globalization or social entrepreneurship. It’s the story of real, ambitious, risk-taking entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the world who are taking advantage of the turmoil all around them to build huge businesses, the Western venture capital money that’s trying to invest in them, and the cultural chasm the two are, so far, having a hard time crossing. To tell this story right, I’m going to spend between 30-40 weeks on the ground in Israel, China, India, Africa and Mexico/South America over the next year and a half. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I've actually already started. It works out to roughly 2-3 weeks at a time overseas, followed by 2-3 weeks here, and a few months with no travel here and there for sanity. My publisher is John Wiley & Sons and, yes, I was border-line insane to try to sell a book in this market. Huge thanks to them for believing in the project so much, and my agent, Daniel Greenberg, for pulling off the impossible once again.

I’ll still keep a foot firmly planted in Silicon Valley—after all, it’s an integral part of this story, too. And I’ll still write my Valley Girl column for BusinessWeek and do three-to-four interviews per month plus my daily Valley Buzz post for TechTicker. I’ll also still appear on NBC’s Press:Here during the weeks that I’m in town.

So, to sum up, we've got a column, I'm hosting one show, commuting an hour to be a regular guest on another and traveling around the world to write a book…is that enough to keep me busy? Hardly. That’s why I’m also announcing that I’ll have an ongoing gig with TechCrunch. Actually, Michael Arrington already did. Given my other responsibilities, I won't be there everyday, but I’ll be writing two-to-five posts per week, likely a lot on the weekends, a lot on airplanes and a lot from the road. You're better off sending announcements about your latest product launch wherever it is you send them now, because I’ll be focusing on analysis of the business of Silicon Valley, emerging markets and the collision between them.

While I've been working on pulling the book together for more than a year, no one is more surprised than I am at the TechCrunch announcement. You should have seen the Cheshire cat "I won" grin on Michael Arrington's face when we finished negotiating it all. He and I have had an ongoing Abbot-and-Costello routine about how I'd never write there because I was too busy and liked writing on this site too much.

But when I filled in for him in February, my thoughts changed. Trolls aside, I was blown away by the level of engagement and love for that blog among entrepreneurs around the world. It's not just a blog about Silicon Valley and Web 2.0. Subscribing to newspapers or business magazines doesn't really mean you read them. (Ask the tall plastic-wrapped stack in my hallway.) But TechCrunch readers read every single thing on that site, chew it up, digest it, spit it out and talk to their friends about it. It seemed the perfect place to write about what I was seeing on the road as the book unfolds, because I'm well aware I can't write this book alone. It needs a community. After all, a world of entrepreneurs is a pretty big topic.

I'm not killing SarahLacy.com. I'll be cross-posting my TechCrunch stuff here, linking to BusinessWeek and Yahoo stuff, and writing more personal posts about my experiences on the road as I travel. And yes, we'll have FlipCam footage.

I said in an interview late last year that my next book would be "stupidly ambitious" and I think I've delivered on that promise. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I know I will.

Me in Israel!

This is a video interview that JD Lasica shot with me on the beach in Tel Aviv last April, just before the book came out. The fact that I look human and sound coherent is a testament to blush, the beach, JD's skills as a videographer and interviewer and the very concentrated pina colada I was drinking. At this moment my bronchitis was turning into pneumonia and I would collapse just a few hours later and be told I was too sick to even fly home! Even still watching it made me want to go back to Israel!

Poor Valley Girl!

In a busy day for tech news-- with CNET getting bought, Carl Ichan is causing more troubles for Yahoo, and OF COURSE my book coming out officially-- I hope someone will check out my latest Valley Girl column on BusinessWeek about Israel's startup scene. As you know, if you read this blog, I spent a week in Israel in April and was a frustrating and enlightening experience. Sounds contradictory? Than it was an Israeli experience.

This was an incredibly hard column to write, because Israel is such a complex and contradictory place. At the heart of the column are a few questions for the tiny but very entrepreneurial country, which I think is at a bit of a crossroads: Will Israel always be Silicon Valley's farm team or emerge as a tech hub independent of the Valley? Should it aspire to that? Can Israeli entrepreneurs make great Web entrepreneurs?

Take a look! Give my column some love!