TechCrunch Tel Aviv 2018, held last week, was yet another thrilling exhibition of Israeli entrepreneurship. As one speaker described it – the ability to find a big problem and then to create a global solution.

I was particularly struck by the observations of Uri Levine, the founder of Waze . It is five years since he sold out to Google for over US$1 billion. Dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, he announced that he had arrived on a bicycle.

And Levine posed the question: If today Israel is a leader in automobile technology – just think how ironic that statement is, when you reflect on the Arab oil embargo of old – what is the next target industry? Construction maybe? That too would be ironic in light of the poor building safety standards in the Holy Land.

There are those who argue that not enough software engineers are produced by the local education system. Professor Eugene Kandel, CEO of Start-UP Nation Central, discussed in a newspaper article on Friday that only 7% of the workforce is employed in high-tech. That figure should double in order for the country to maintain its competitive advantage.

As if to prove the point, Amazon is opening a huge warehouse centre in Israel. In order to staff this operation, the company is stealing / enticing / bribing techies away from Intel and other r&d leaders in the country. And these companies are already considered amongst the top payers.

According to an article in the newspaper “Ha’aretz”, a software engineer costs an Israeli employer around US$130,000 per annum. This compares to US$35,000 for an Indian.

Interestingly, the cost of employing somebody from the Palestinian territories is about US$42,000. And it appears that this is one of the areas the Israelis are turning to. TechCrunch featured the cooperation with firms in Gaza. Mellanox, an Israeli company quoted on NASDAQ, employs over 100 Palestinians.

What next for the Start-Up Nation? Chemi Peres from Pitango believes that Israel has shown the way forward in AI, which connects IOT to with human intelligence. His portfolio already includes companies looking at flying cars.