Start-up Nation

2. Shai Agassi’s blog, “Tom Friedman’s Column,” July 26, 2008, http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/.

3. The information about Better Place is largely drawn from interviews with Shai Agassi.

4. Daniel Roth, “Driven: Shai Agassi’s Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road,” Wired, vol. 16, no. 9 (August 18, 2008).

5. Haim Handwerker, “U.S. Entrepreneur Makes Aliyah Seeking ‘Next Big Invention,’ ” Haaretz, August 28, 2008.

6. Israel Venture Capital Research Center, www.ivc-online.com.

7. Authors’ calculations based on venture capital data from Dow Jones, VentureSource.

8. Dow Jones, VentureSource.

9. Donna Rosenthal, The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. 111.

10. Standard of living comparative data from www.gapminder.com.

11. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1870), p. 488.

12. Interviews with Gidi Grinstein, founder and president, Reut Institute, May and August 2008.

13. Interview with Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, Google, June 2009; Maayan Cohen and Reuters, “Microsoft CEO, in Herzliya: Our Company Almost as Israeli as American,” Haaretz, May 21, 2008.

14. “The Global 2000,” Forbes.com, March 29, 2007; http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/18/biz_07forbes2000_The-Global-2000_Ind Name.html; and “Recent International Mergers and Acquisitions,” http://www.investinisrael.gov.il/NR/exeres/F0FA7315- 4D4A-4FD CA2FA-AE5BF294B3C2.htm; and Augusto Lopez-Claros and Irene Mia, “Israel: Factors in the Emergence of an ICT Powerhouse,” http://www.investinisrael.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/61BD95A0-898B-4F48-A795-5886 B1C4F08C/0/israelcompleteweb.pdf, p. 8. Among the top fifty software and technology companies of the two thousand largest public companies listed on Forbes, almost half have acquired Israeli companies or have opened an R&D center in Israel.

15. Paul Smith, senior vice president of Philips Medical, quoted in Invest in Israel, “Life Sciences in Israel: Inspiration, Invention, Innovation” (Israel Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, Investment Promotion Center, 2006).

16. Interviews with Gary Shainberg, vice president for technology and innovation, British Telecom, May and August 2008.

17. Interview with Jessica Schell, vice president, NBC Universal, Inc., April and June 2008.

18. David McWilliams, “We’re All Israelis Now,” April 25, 2004, http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2004/04/25/were-all-israelis-now.

19. Background interview with senior eBay executive.

20. Curtis R. Carlson, CEO of Stanford Research Institute International, in “We Are All Innovators Now,” Economist Intelligence Unit, October 17, 2007.

21. John Kao, Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters and What We Can Do to Get It Back (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 3.

22. Robert M. Solow, “Growth Theory and After,” Nobel Prize lecture, December 8, 1987, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1987/solow-lecture.html.

23. Interview with Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, March 2009.

24. Paths to Prosperity: Promoting Entrepreneurship in the Twenty-first Century, Monitor Company, January 2009.

25. Michael Mandel, “Can America Invent Its Way Back?” BusinessWeek, September 11, 2008.

CHAPTER 1

. Persistence

1. Information in the following section is taken from interviews with Scott Thompson, president, PayPal, October 2008 and January 2009; Meg Whitman, former president and CEO of eBay, September 2008; and Eli Barkat, chairman and cofounder, BRM Group, and seed investor in Fraud Sciences, January 2009.

2. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 5.

3. Loren Gary, “The Right Kind of Failure,” Harvard Management Update, January 1, 2002.

4. Background interview with Israeli Air Force trainer, May 2008.

5. Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David S. Scharfstein, “Skill vs. Luck in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: Evidence from Serial Entrepreneurs,” working paper 12592, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2006, http://imio.haas.berkley.edu/williamsonseminar/scharfstein041207.pdf.

6. Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World (New York: Twelve, 2008), p. 163.

7. Ian King, “How Israel Saved Intel,” Seattle Times, April 9, 2007.