What Athens Reminded Me About Tel Aviv

The first founder I talked to at the Panathēnea conference in Athens was building for the shipping industry. He identified a narrow, specific gap - the kind of problem you only notice if you've lived close to it - and he was more disciplined about it than I'm used to seeing. No stories about the bigger platform it could become, no "and eventually we'll do everything." Just this one need, treated as a beachhead, with a clear sense of what he was deliberately not doing yet. I sat there thinking that I spend half my advising hours trying to move founders to exactly that place.

Then a Nordic founder building pet insurance, scaling like crazy, already operating well past her home market because that market was never going to be enough. Then a health-tech founder who told me his story in about ninety seconds - clean, no padding, knew precisely what he was and what he wasn't. Three founders, three unrelated industries, one afternoon. And somewhere in the third conversation I noticed the thing I hadn't gone there to notice: these were instincts I think of as "ours."

If you've spent any time in the Israeli tech world, you know what I mean. We think we're a little special. Startup Nation, the chutzpah, the way a twenty-six-year-old with no money and an unreasonable idea will pitch you like the global business already exists. I say that with affection, because I'm part of it and I like it. There's a real culture here, built over decades, and it produces something distinctive.

But "special" is a slippery word. It can mean "unusually good," and it can quietly mean "unlike anyone else." For a long time I think many of us have meant it the second way without examining it. Athens made me examine it.

Two instincts in particular kept surfacing while I was there. Both are things I'd have called distinctly "Israeli" if you'd asked me a month ago.

The first is doing more with less. Smaller rounds and lower valuations than the same company would raise in the US, smaller teams, far less spent on marketing than the playbook assumes you need. In a big market, that's a phase you grow out of. For most founders everywhere else, it isn't. Scarcity is just the condition you work in, and it forces a kind of resourcefulness that well-funded founders never have a reason to develop.

The clearest version of this isn't someone I met in Athens. It's a founder I'm working with out of Dubai, building in pet-tech. He bootstrapped. He built a small development team in a country where the cost structure made it possible. And he keeps learning the things he can't yet afford to hire - the technology, the marketing, the work most founders will hand to a specialist the moment there's budget for it. He just learns it himself. Constraint didn't only make him lean. It made him a generalist, more or less permanently, because there was never a point where specializing was the cheaper option.

Look, I'm not romanticizing being underfunded. I know generous funding can enable building big things. It can also pay for very expensive mistakes, the kind a tighter budget would have killed early. Scarcity isn't something to want - it just tends to produce good habits as a side effect.

The second instinct is thinking globally from day one. When your home market is small, there's no domestic version of success to settle into, so you aim outward immediately - there's nowhere else to aim. I heard it from the Greek founder and the Nordic one - the quiet assumption that of course the real market is somewhere else. It's worth noticing that founders in very large markets, the US most obviously, rarely think this way, and they don't need to. When you can build a serious business by focusing entirely at home, the impulse to go global never has to form. Neither way is better. It's just what the size of your home market does to how you think.

Those Athens conversations made me think of the founders I'm advising right now. They are based in Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Dubai, Baku. The same instincts keep turning up in places that don't share our history or our story about ourselves. These founders aren't imitating anyone. They've ended up working the way we do for the same reason we did - they had to.

What I kept recognizing across Athens, Dubai, Baku and Tel Aviv was never nationality. It was a culture built around constraint. And I think it jumped out at me because I've always been drawn to it. It's the same reason I gravitate to niche-market founders, the ones I'm regularly told are chasing something too small. I've written before about why those markets often aren't as small as they look. What I didn't see at the time is that it's the same shape. One of the founders I'm advising sits in San Francisco, the largest market in the world, but the slice she serves is narrow enough that it behaves like a small one. She stays lean, learns everything herself, and looks past her home market because the niche alone won't carry the business. Geographic smallness and niche smallness are different constraints, but they produce the same healthy instincts. Same adaptation, different cause.

None of this makes what Israel built any less remarkable. An ecosystem like ours, in a country this size, with our history, is close to a miracle, and I don't say that lightly. The traits we filed under "Israeli" are turning up in places that look nothing like us. Not because anyone copied us. Because the conditions that shaped us were never ours alone.

Which brings me back to the shipping industry founder. His market isn't small because a country or a niche made it that way. He chose it. He picked a narrow beachhead knowing it won't be enough on its own, which means winning it with real discipline now and finding the adjacent ground later. That's the version actually available to the rest of us. You can wait for a small market to hand you these instincts, or you can impose the constraint yourself and build them on purpose. The second is harder. It's also the only one you control.

I came home from this trip a little less certain that we were ever as singular as we like to believe. Athens didn't teach me that. It just reminded me.

I help founders navigate strategy and funding decisions when the path isn't clear. If you're there, let's talk.