[转帖] [2012.01.21] What next for the start-up nation?创业国度的未来如何？

showcraft

http://www.ecocn.org/thread-62734-1-1.html
Israeli technology companies
以色列科技企业

What next for the start-up nation?
创业国度的未来如何？

Even in Israel, it is hard to turn young companies into adults
即使在以色列，将年轻公司培育成熟也十分困难

Jan 21st 2012 | TEL AVIV | from the print edition


THE young must shout if they want to be heard. In a stone hangar in the old port of Jaffa, 30 entrepreneurs have five minutes each to present their start-up companies to a panel of digital luminaries and an audience that includes potential investors. Not everyone in the room is ready to shut up and listen, so the hopefuls must battle against the din. Feng-GUI explains how, by simulating human vision, it can tell advertisers and designers which areas of a web page are most likely to grab people’s attention. CopyV promises to send large files quickly and securely. With Fooducate, “a dietician in your pocket”, on your smartphone, you can scan bar codes in the supermarket and find out what’s really going into your trolley.
年轻人，如果想被人听到，请大声喊出来。在以色列古老的港口城市雅法，30位企业家聚集在一座由石头砌成的棚里，他们各自有5分钟时间，向由当今数码时代名人组成的专家组来介绍自己的创业公司，听众中还包括了许多潜在投资者。并不是在场的所有人都准备好闭上自己的嘴，认真听他们演说，因此这些满怀希望的企业家们必须努力应对喧闹的场面。Feng-GUI展示了如何通过模拟人类视觉来帮助广告商和设计师了解网页中最能吸引人们注意的部分。CopyV承诺可以快速而安全地发送大型文件。Fooducate的产品“口袋营养师”可以安装在智能手机中，你可以通过扫描超市中食品的条形码来判断它们是否应该放入购物车。
【Jaffa 以色列第二大城市特拉维夫的全称其实是特拉维夫-雅法，它是两个相邻的城市合并而成的。它是一个具有4000多年历史的港口城市，是世界上最古老的城市之一。】

Israel’s legions of young technology firms clamour for attention and money. Rapid-pitch events like this one, at DLD Tel Aviv, a two-day conference in November, are common. More than 300 firms applied for a slot at DLD; 100 turned up; the lucky 30 were chosen by raffle. Yossi Vardi, a technology entrepreneur who has invested in 75 start-ups since 1996, says that he receives between three and eight approaches every day.
以色列拥有大批迫切需要别人注意和投资的年轻科技公司。前文中提到的是于去年11月在特拉维夫Tel Aviv举办，为期二天的DLD大会，此类快速推介活动目前非常普遍。超过300家公司申请了此次DLD大会的展位，100家参展，其中又通过抽签方式选出那幸运的30家公司。科技企业家Yossi Vardi自1996年来已经投资了75家创业公司，他说他现在每天可以收到3至8份接洽请求。
【DLD大会的相关介绍：DLD (Digital - Life - Design) is a global conference network on innovation, digital media,  science and culture which connects business, creative and social leaders, opinion-formers and investors for crossover conversation and inspiration. http://www.dld-conference.com/】

Dan Senor and Saul Singer called Israel “The Start-Up Nation” in a book of that name in 2009. The label has stuck because it fits. Everybody and his brother-in-law seems to be starting a company—with old schoolmates or army colleagues, in a spare room or the parental home. Starting a business is easier than ever, thanks to advances in information technology. Budding designers of smartphone apps can rent space when they need it on a remote server rather than buying huge amounts of computing power. “The internet has democratised the right to innovate,” says Mr Vardi.
Dan Senor和Saul Singer在一本2009年出版的同名书籍中把以色列称为“创业国度”。这个标签跟随了以色列多年，因为确实很适合。在以色列，每个人和他的亲戚朋友似乎都在创立公司，他们和自己的同学或者战友一起，挤在一间空闲的房间或者父母的家中。如今，开创一项事业比起过去要容易得多，这归功于信息技术的飞跃。和过去不同，初露头角的智能手机应用设计师们不再需要购买大量的硬件设备，他们可以向远程服务商租用服务器。Mr Vardi说：“互联网已经带来了创新权利的民主化。”

Israelis innovate because they have to. The land is arid, so they excel at water and agricultural technology. They have little oil, so they furrow their brows to find alternatives. They are surrounded by enemies, so their military technology is superb and creates lucrative spin-offs, especially in communications. The relationships forged during military service foster frenetic networking in civilian life. A flood of immigrants in the 1990s gave national brainpower a mighty boost (see article). The results are the envy of almost everyone outside Silicon Valley.
以色列人必须创新。面对贫瘠的土地，他们掌握了先进的水资源利用和农业技术；由于不出产石油，他们紧锁着眉头努力寻找替代品；被敌对国家所包围，造就了一流的军事技术，并衍生许多获利丰厚的民用事业，尤其在通信领域。以色列的兵役制度使战友们在服役期间建立了稳固的关系，这极大促进他们普通生活中人际关系的发展。1990年代大量移民涌入极大提高了以色列的国家智慧，这引发了除硅谷外几乎其他所有人的羡慕。

Small country, big dreams
小国家，大梦想

But even in Israel turning tech start-ups into big companies is difficult. For all the comparisons with Silicon Valley, Israel has not begotten a Hewlett-Packard, an Intel or a Google. Its best companies are often bought by American giants while still in their infancy. The biggest home-grown technology company is Teva, a drugmaker which is listed on NASDAQ, an American tech-oriented stockmarket, with a market capitalisation of $43 billion. In information technology the biggest is Check Point, a security specialist founded by veterans of Unit 8200, an elite army-intelligence group. Also on NASDAQ, on which Israel has more companies than any foreign country bar China, it is valued at $11 billion—no minnow, but no whale.
但是，即便在以色列，将科技创业公司培养成为大公司也十分困难。对比美国硅谷，以色列并没有产生像惠普Hewlett-Packard，英特尔Intel或者谷歌Google那样的超级公司，他们最好的公司大部分在早期阶段就被美国的巨头们收购。以色列本土最大的科技公司是梯瓦Teva，一家在美国纳斯达克NASDAQ(主要由科技公司组成的证券市场)上市的制药公司，目前市值大约为430亿美元。信息技术领域，最大的以色列公司是致力于提供互联网安全解决方案的Check Point，它由以色列军方情报精英组Unit 8200的退伍军人们创立。Check Point也已在纳斯达克上市，目前市值约为110亿美元。纳斯达克市场上，以色列公司的数量仅次于中国，其中没有微不足道的小公司，也没有举足轻重的大公司。

Very young firms have a good deal of support, which is getting stronger. Accelerators, in which entrepreneurs can shape their ideas and meet advisers and investors, are springing up: this week, for example, UpWest Labs, which intends to bring five to ten Israeli start-ups to Silicon Valley for ten-week stints, began its first programme. As well as meeting helpful people, the hopeful entrepreneurs receive $20,000 in seed money.
那些非常年轻的公司并不缺乏支持，而且支持的力度越来越大。中，帮助创业者们逐渐完善想法，会见顾问和投资者的创业加速器数量正在迅速增长：比如，打算带5至10家以色列创业公司到硅谷进行为期十周考察的UpWest Labs，这周启动了它的第一期计划。这些有希望成功的创业者们除了可以见到有助于自己事业的人外，还可以获得20,000美元的种子基金。

“There’s a plethora of opportunities at a very early stage to raise $20,000 or $100,000 to get a minimum viable product out there,” says Liat Aaronson, the executive director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program, a scheme for final-year undergraduates at IDC Herzliya near Tel Aviv. The difficult bit is turning small firms into bigger ones.
Zell 创业者计划(Zell Entrepreneurship Program)位于特拉维夫附近的荷兹利亚IDC Herzliya，是一项针对即将毕业大学生的创业计划，其执行董事Liat Aaronson说：“对于那些处于非常早期的创业者来说，他们拥有大量的机会可以获得20,000美元或100,000美元资金将他们的想法最低程度上变为基本可行的产品。”然而，创业中最困难的是如何将小公司培养成为大公司。

One commonly cited problem is a lack of early-stage venture capital: sums of $1m-2m or so. Ms Aaronson agrees that this step is “trickier”, though some firms emerging from the Zell programme have attracted such amounts. People on the course founded the Gifts Project, acquired by eBay in September, which allows people to club together to buy presents online for their friends, and Wibiya, a web-design company that was bought by Conduit, a biggish Israeli firm, for $45m in July. Alumni set up LabPixies, a developer of web and smartphone apps that was spirited away by Google for $25m in April 2010.
创业中最常被提到的一个问题是缺乏金额介于100万至200万美元之间的早期风险投资资本。尽管Zell 计划培养出来的一些公司已经吸引了这种程度的投资，但是Ms Aaronson也同意这一阶段的创业公司更加“复杂”。Zell 计划中有人创立了Gifts Project，这是一家帮助人们在网络上组团替朋友购买礼物的公司，随后被eBay于去年9月收购，而网站设计公司Wibiya于去年7月被一家大型以色列企业Conduit收入囊中，价格为4500万美元。另外，由毕业生们创立的LabPixies，一家互联网及智能手机应用开发商，也于2010年4月被谷歌收购。

Israel attracts far more venture capital per person than any other country—$170 in 2010 to America’s $75 (see chart 1). Yet there does not seem to be enough early-stage money to go around. One reason is that there are simply an awful lot of young companies fighting for a share of the pot.
以色列人均吸引风险投资的金额根据2010年的数据为170美元，位居世界首位，而美国为75美元(见图1)。但是目前看来，以色列公司依然面临初期投资不足的窘境。其中一个原因很简单，这个阶段的公司太多，为了有限的资源进行激烈竞争。

Another is that venture-capital firms in Israel, just as in other countries, have had a lean few years. That could be changing: investment is climbing back towards its pre-crisis peak (see chart 2).
另外一个原因是以色列的风险投资公司像其他国家的风险投资公司一样，近几年由于受金融危机影响而近况不佳。但是，这种状况正在改变：以色列风险投资额正逐渐恢复到金融危机前的高峰水平(见下图)。

But some funds based in Israel, several of which were created with public money in the 1990s, are still having difficulty raising money and are hesitant about deploying what they do have. They are likelier than big international brands to deal in smaller amounts. According to the Israel Venture Capital Research Centre, Israeli funds now account for only a quarter of the amount raised by the country’s high-tech companies, down from two-fifths a few years ago. Whether the brand is Israeli or foreign, says Adam Fisher of Bessemer Venture Partners, an international group, the money comes from abroad.
但是一些以色列的风险投资基金，包括许多在1990年代使用公共资金创立的，现在依然面临资金筹集的难题，因此他们并不愿意像过去那样将资金投入企业。比起国际知名风险投资基金，以色列的风投更愿意进行小额投资。根据以色列风险资本研究中心(Israel Venture Capital Research Centre)研究，以色列国内高科技企业吸引的投资金额中本国部分仅占四分之一，比起几年前的40%有了明显下降。来自国际风投Bessemer Venture Partners的Adam Fisher说，即使那些表面上看来是来自以色列的风险投资，实际上资金都来自国外。

Building a business requires more than money and technology. Companies need customers, and in a country of 7.6m people there are not very many. So Israeli firms are often global virtually from the start. For example, BillGuard, which alerts its users to errors and fraud on their credit and debit cards, has an office in New York, staffed by Yaron Samid, its chief executive and one of its founders, and the head of business development and sales, and keeps a 15-strong product-development team in Herzliya.
创立一项事业除了需要资金和技术外还需要客户，而对于一个人口仅为760万的国家来说，客户实在是太少了。因此以色列公司事实上经常从一开始是全球化公司。例如BillGuard，一家为用户信用卡错误和欺诈情况提供报警服务，它在纽约拥有办事处，由它的创始人兼执行总裁Yaron Samid负责，而他同时也是商业发展和销售部的负责人。BillGuard目前在荷兹利亚仅保留了一个15人的产品研发小组。

Now that young Israeli companies are applying their technical brilliance to consumer products as much as to designing semiconductors or developing computer-security software, broader skills matter more. In a blog post last July, Mr Fisher exhorted them to think about their entire business model, including product design and marketing, from the outset. Some start-ups, he wrote, had made this mental leap, but the “tech crutch”, a model of focusing on technology alone and then selling to foreign multinationals, was “increasingly unsustainable” in the face of competition from China, South Korea and Taiwan.
现在，年轻的以色列公司正逐渐加大消费产品领域的技术应用，希望能与半导体设计，计算机安全软件开发等并重，更广泛的技术意味着更多的产品。Mr Fisher于去年7月在其博客上发表了一篇文章，文章劝告创业者从一开始就应该好好思考他们的整个商业模式，包括产品设计和营销。他在文章中写道，一些创业公司从思维上已经完成了这样的跃升，但是只专注于技术然后将其出售给外国跨国公司的“技术支撑”模式，当面临来自中国内地、韩国和台湾的竞争时已“愈加不可持续”。

Building businesses also requires people who are willing to be, say, the 50th employee in someone else’s firm. But in a nation of start-ups a lot of people want to be their own bosses. Talent risks being thinly spread. Mr Samid’s theory is that after their stint in the army many young Israelis have had enough of being told what to do. He reckons that three-quarters of the members of TechAviv, a network of entrepreneurs that he set up, are start-ups with fewer than ten employees.
创立事业同样需要那些愿意在别人手下工作的员工。但是在一个创业国度里，许多人都想自己当老板，因此人才被严重稀释了。Mr Samid的理论认为以色列年轻人在军队已经受够了对上级命令的服从。在他建立企业家人际网(TechAviv)中，预计四分之三的员工数少于10人。

And making a business into something not merely big but enormous means resisting bigger companies’ blandishments of a few million dollars, or even a few hundred million. Given a certain payoff for selling and an uncertain future going it alone, it is not surprising that many people take the money. Several companies have rejected offers of hundreds of millions of dollars only to fail a few years later. So leaving the task of building a company to someone else may not be such a bad idea.
另外，如果事业不仅仅要做大，而且要做强，这意味着在创业某一阶段，你必须经受诱惑，因为一些更大的公司会试图用几百万美元甚至几亿美元来购买你的事业。相对于接受报价可以获得的确定收益，自己运营还要面临大量不确定的风险，因此许多人选择接受报价也并不奇怪。不少公司在拒绝了几亿美元的报价后却在几年内倒下了，看来，把公司发扬光大的任务交给别人去做也许并不见得是个坏主意。

Mr Vardi certainly thinks so. “We are developing intellectual property, not just companies,” he says. He reels off a list of American tech giants, from Intel to Google, with operations in Israel into which they have folded local firms. Several have been in Israel for decades. It is these multinationals, he says, that create “the 30th, 40th and 500th” jobs in Israeli start-ups. Intel employs more than 7,500 people in the country; HP too has several thousand staff; IBM has more than 2,000. This month Apple made its first Israeli acquisition, Anobit, a maker of parts for flash-memory drives, for a reported $390m. It is said to be setting up a research centre too.
Mr Vardi当然也不反对将公司出售。他说：“我们创造的是知识产权资产，而并不仅仅是公司。”他一口气列出许多美国科技业巨头，从英特尔到谷歌，这些公司都是通过收购本土企业而进入以色列市场，许多已经进来几十年了。Mr Vardi说，正是这些跨国公司，在创业公司里创造了“第30个，第40个和第500个”工作岗位。英特尔在以色列雇员人数超过7500人，惠普在这里也拥有数千名员工，IBM则超过2000名。这个月，苹果公司完成了它在以色列的首次并购，对象是一家名为Anobit的闪存设备技术商，并购价格据报导为3.9亿美元。另外，有消息称苹果还正在以色列建立一个研发中心。

Israel is not alone in agonising over the sale of its home-grown companies. In Britain, the sale of Autonomy, a software company, to HP for $11 billion last year caused a brief national lament. Some Israelis may wish their crops grew taller in the field before the harvest. Most countries would settle for sowing half as much seed.
并非只有以色列在为出售他们本土培养的公司而痛苦地。去年，Autonomy软件公司被以110亿美元的价格出售给惠普，这导致了英国国内民众的短暂悲伤。一些以色列人盼望庄稼能在收割前长得更高一些，而大多数国家都只满足于播散一半的种子。