Startup Nation's Texas Thesis
Why the most interesting Israeli founders aren’t in Tel Aviv anymore, and what that means for all of us still here
I’ve been to Austin twice. Both times I loved it, and both times I came back to Israel slightly confused about why.
It isn’t the food, though the food is good. It isn’t the music, though, that’s good too. It’s something about its particular energy that sits somewhere between ambition and ease, between Silicon Valley seriousness and something more spacious.
I thought about this a lot while speaking with Erez Dror for an episode of The Spiro Circle. Erez is the co-founder of Genda, a construction workforce intelligence platform that was acquired by Buildots last year, and he has been living in Austin for nearly five years. He moved there before the hype, before Elon Musk, and before every Israeli WhatsApp group started trading notes about property taxes and school districts in Travis County.
He moved because he mapped where construction was happening, and Texas came out near the top. That, and the efforts new residents made to build a sense of community. It was something quintessentially Israeli, and you would understand if you found yourself moving to Tel Aviv from the US or the UK, as I did all those years ago.
“The hardest thing when you relocate is being away from your core family,” he told me. “So you kind of have to create your own. You choose your family here. And you can actually do that — because the people that move to Austin are all more or less the same age, all working in tech, all with kids the same age. You build very deep relationships. It’s something you don’t quite do in Israel, because in Israel, you’re bound to your actual family every Shabbat.”
He’s describing the Israeli community that has effectively reconstituted itself in a different country. Not out of any particular ideological or political motivation, but through an accumulation of individual decisions that each made rational sense on their own terms. Go where the market is, take your family, find your people, and build something.
Israel is landing in Texas
Israeli companies have now invested $3.2 billion in Texas and created more than 4,200 jobs, with two-way trade between Texas and Israel reaching $4 billion in 2024, according to figures from the Office of the Governor. These are, as one recent report noted, floor numbers. They don’t capture the informal networks, the WhatsApp communities, the Saturday morning runs along the Colorado River with other Tel Avivian expats who now own houses in Westlake.
There’s a version of this story that is easy to tell as a brain drain narrative — Israel’s best founders leaving for better markets, lower taxes, warmer regulatory climates. And there’s truth in that framing, particularly after the judicial overhaul crisis of 2023 and the seismic disruption of October 7.
The conditions that once made it possible to build a globally competitive company while staying physically rooted in Israel have become harder to take for granted.
