A year ago I transferred from BVP’s NY office to our Israeli one. Since then I often get asked to compare the New York and Israeli startup ecosystems. The ecosystems are so different that it is not easy to give a ‘good’ answer.
Recently Compass released the 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem Report which ranked NY 2nd and Tel-Aviv 5th. I therefore decided to take a more data driven approach to compare the two. The results are in the deck below:
I’d love to hear what you think!
Venturing Startup Nation 
Great post, love the comparison, but the data is a bit skewed.
Minor corrections: Varonis is an Israeli company, you wrote it is a NY company.
Also, You missed a few other known Israeli unicorns like Kaltura, Outbrain, Simplee and other that might change your end conclusion.
Also, NY is great on overall total money invested, but love to see a comparison of early stage to later stage investing, since I think that would kinda defuse another conclusion of yours about the future of NY 🙂
http://www.geektime.com/2015/07/28/has-the-startup-nation-become-the-scaleup-nation/
Thanks.. I think doing early vs. late stage comparison is an interesting analysis.
I added Varonis as both Israeli and NY-based. I agree it is more ‘Israeli” but it seemed unfair not to have it in NY since CEO and management team sits there. Same with Taboola.
Kaltura, Outbrain and Simplee haven’t announced $1B+ funding rounds yet so are not in the CBInsight Unicorn list which is pretty comprehensive. That’s why they are not there. There are other NY based startups that had rumors of $1B+ rounds but not yet raised or not announced yet- so they are not there either. This makes it more apples to apples comparison.
I tend to agree that in the long run Israel has a good chance of staying ahead of NY and would prefer to invest in Israel vs. NY if I was forced to chose. But I wanted this to be objective so added the Unicorn list which suggests NY might have a bright future…
Taking a step back, what is giving me goosebumps is the sheer scale of Israel’s achievement: the sheer depth, history and phenomenal concentration of capital on Wall St is almost beyond compare.
That a country whose modern form was reborn only 67 years ago and whose complete population is barely a third of greater NYC can be too close to call with New York is amazing.
And ahead of London.