Waze CEO: Israel will have many more billion dollar exits

November 8, 2013 Leave a comment

Waze CEO: Israel will have many more billion dollar exits

Noam Bardin: The combination of strong products workers and high tech in Israel will make it possible to achieve more unicorn companies.

6 November 13 16:14, Tzahi Hoffman

“In the past ten years, 39 companies joined the unicorn club (companies that achieved an exit of over $1 billion). Only one Israeli company belongs to this club, and it is Waze,” Waze CEO Noam Bardin told a meeting of Tmura – The Israeli Public Service Venture Fund. Waze was acquired by Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) for $1 billion earlier this year.“Although Israel has a great many start-ups, the numbers are not proportionate. In the past ten years, 6,000 start-ups were founded in Israel, but there was only one unicorn,” said Bardin. “Part of the historical reason for this is the lack of skill in allocating products. But Israel now has better skilled people in products in the industry, as well as programmers and engineers.

“The combination of strong products workers and high tech in Israel will make it possible to achieve more unicorns, and the management of these companies will not have to fear going to the US at a point at which this can help their companies succeed.

“Israeli cynicism is a key element. For example, the concept of Instagram, which is to take pictures of food, would never have succeeded in Israel. Cynicism creates a high threshold for a reasonable business model. In addition, the average age of managers at unicorn companies in the past ten years has been 34, not 19 or 20 as many people think. This means that experience is the important factor that creates change in the high-tech industry. Israeli cynicism, combined with a practical approach and management experience, and above this the creativity and technical experience, makes Israel fertile ground for technology that people really want.”

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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