Re:Ask HN: Best Startup City - Outside the USA?
by orp on Sunday August 01, 2010 @05:03PM
(#1566100)
Most Israelis get drafted at age 18. They get out of the army at ages 20/21 or so. People out of top quality computer related military units have a lot of experience both as hackers and managers. There's really no being 'whisked away by the military' once you've served your term (Other than reserve duty, but that's relatively minor).
* Good programming talent.
* Access to capital. (Yossi Vardi alone funds a lot of startups.)
* Great English skills.
And some downsides:
* Young tech people can be whisked away by the military in a heartbeat. (And the draft can go up to 40 years old I hear.)
* Not as cheap as it used to be. Talented people make only a bit less than they would in the US.
* The culture tends to be more argumentative than the US. You can find yourself spending too much time arguing about minor details and not building product.
* Design talent can be atrocious. They aren't as focused on aesthetics as Western Europe or the US.
* Ethnicity based immigration policies.
* Flying there is a nightmare for non-Jews (sorry to put it bluntly, but it's true, I know from first-hand experience). And if you hire a young male Arab in the US, they will probably refuse to go back after visiting the airport once.