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I finally managed to finish Dan Senor’s and Saul Singer’s Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. It is truly an outstanding book, I have to say. I wrote about it before in my blog and I knew back then it was good, but boy was it good. It was based on over 100 interviews (disclosure: honored to be one of those among the interviewed) and shines with the amount of information it portrays.

Dan Senor and Saul Singer have managed to write the book in an extremely interesting manner. Despite the story going through various grapevines of Israel’s history it all comes together nicely in the end to create a complete, holistic story and a good understanding of the issues behind Israel’s current economic state.

I won’t spoil it for the rest of you, but strongly invite you to read the book. This is something I honestly hope was made a compulsory read for the Finnish people working with our so called “innovation system”. We have a lot of issues Israel is looking forward to, for example the high living standards among all of our population. However, despite the high number of patents and innovations created in our society – we have utterly failed to capitalise on them.

The unfortunate answer from the politicians seem to usually be the easy way out – increase funding for innovation activities, ie. throw more money on a system that clearly isn’t working. Dan Senor and Saul Singer have done an extraordinaire job in writing the book and giving a relatively detailed and complete view into the Israeli way of startups.

Five out of five stars (and I’d given that without my interview too – easily).

Back in January I helped a man called Saul Singer on some facts regarding Finnish entrepreneurship and the ecosystem we have. He told me he was writing a book about Israel and its startup ecosystem, thus I was glad to help the man in his project. Today I saw a tweet from Saul Singer that his book was #11 on New York Times Political Bestsellers list! Not only is the book doing well on NYT, but it’s also enjoying its third week on the Wall Street Journal business book list as well as on the Washington Post non-fiction/hardcover list. Well done!

Israel has been an inspiration to the Finnish startup ecosystem in a way that not many know. The current Vigo accelerators we have in this country are partly a result of the learnings from Israel and their ecosystem. The efforts being put across by our government are also a result of certain individuals hard work towards marketing growth entrepreneurship in Finland. So in summary, Israel has been somewhat of a benchmark for us Finns.

I managed to query the book with Amazon and in the end he did include a comment from me comparing Israeli and Finnish startup ecosystems. Mr Singer was kind enough to send me a copy of the book so I’m thrilled to read more about the reasons why Israel is doing so well compared to other parts of the world.

If you want your copy of the book, Amazon has Start-up Nation on sale for a mere $15.78 USD.

Al Jazeera, the Arabic media network, has created a Twitter account for the Gaza conflict. You can find it at Twitter.com/AJGaza. The conflict itself is very difficult and not likely to be quickly resolved. Nevertheless – I’m looking forwards to hearing the Arabic side of the story as well.