Start-up Nation by Dan Senor

software. And China’s third-largest social-networking Web site, which services twenty-five million of the country’s
     young Web surfers, is actually an Israeli start-up called Koolanoo, which means “all of us” in Hebrew. It was founded by an
     Israeli whose family emigrated from Iraq.
    In the ultimate demonstration of nimbleness, the Israeli venture capitalists who invested in Koolanoo when it was a Jewish
     social-networking site have utterly transformed its identity, moving all of its management to China, where young Israeli and
     Chinese executives work side by side.
    Gil Kerbs, an Israeli alumnus of Unit 8200, also spends a lot of time in China. When he left the IDF , he picked up and moved to Beijing to study Chinese intensively, working one-on-one with a local instructor—for five hours
     each day for a full year—while also holding a job at a Chinese company, so he could build a business network there. Today
     he is a venture capitalist in Israel, specializing in the Chinese market. One of his Israeli companies is providing voice-biometric
     technology to China’s largest retail bank. He told us that Israelis actually have an easier time doing business in China than
     in Europe. “For one, we were in China before the ‘tourists’ arrived,” he says, referring to those who have only in recent
     years identified China as an emerging market. “Second, in China there is no legacy of hostility to Jews. So it’s actually
     a more welcoming environment for us.” 7
    Israelis are far ahead of their global competitors in penetrating such markets, in part because they had to leapfrog the Middle
     East and search for new opportunities. The connection between the young Israeli backpackers dispersed around the globe and
     Israeli technology entrepreneurs’ penetration of foreign markets is clear. By the time they are out of their twenties, not
     only are most Israelis tested in discovering exotic opportunities abroad, but they aren’t afraid to enter unfamiliar environments
     and engage with cultures very different from their own. Indeed, military historian Edward Luttwak estimates that many postarmy
     Israelis have visited over a dozen countries by age thirty-five. 8 Israelis thrive in new economies and uncharted territory in part because they have been out in the world, often in pursuit
     of the Book.
    One example of this avid internationalism is Netafim, an Israeli company that has become the largest provider of drip irrigation
     systems in the world. Founded in 1965, Netafim is a rare example of a company that bridges Israel’s low-tech, agricultural
     past to the current boom in cleantech.
    Netafim was created by Simcha Blass, the architect of one of the largest infrastructure projects undertaken in the early years
     of the state. Born in Poland, he was active in the Jewish self-defense units organized in Warsaw during World War I. Soon
     after arriving in Israel in the 1930s, he became chief engineer for Mekorot, the national water company, and planned the pipeline
     and canal that would bring water from the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee to the arid Negev.
    Blass got the idea for drip irrigation from a tree growing in a neighbor’s backyard, seemingly “without water.” The giant
     tree, it turns out, was being nourished by a slow leak in an underground water pipe. When modern plastics became available
     in the 1950s, Blass realized that drip irrigation was technically feasible. He patented his invention and made a deal with
     a cooperative settlement located in the Negev Desert, Kibbutz Hatzerim, to produce the new technology.
    Netafim was pioneering not just because it developed an innovative way to increase crop yields by up to 50 percent while using
     40 percent less water, but because it was one of the first kibbutz-based industries. Until then the kibbutzim—collective communities—were
     agriculture-based. The idea of a kibbutz factory that exported to the world was a novelty.
    But Netafim’s