Fantastic news for Israel was reported yesterday, Thursday:

US online property insurance company Hippo (NYSE: HIPO) is setting up a development center in Israel and will hire dozens of employees. Hippo was founded in 2015 by Israeli entrepreneurs Assaf Wand and Eyal Navon but its headquarters and development center are in Palo Alto, California. To date Hippo has had a minimal presence in Israel with a small handful of employees. But Hippo recently decided to significantly expand its operations in Israel by establishing its first development center outside of the US.

Hippo was founded by Israelis and has 600 hundred employees in the USA. But for all the celebration, there is one minor complication. Israel is desperately short of qualified techies!

OurCrowd has turned itself into one of the most active and successful investment houses in Israel. For several months now, it has been publishing a quarterly job vacancy index. To quote from the latest report:

The number of vacant positions advertised by startups in the OurCrowd portfolio rose dramatically from a peak of 836 in Q2 2020 to 2,628 at the end of Q2 2021. The number of companies in the portfolio reporting vacancies through the OurCrowd platform grew from 101 to 148; the number of vacancies posted on average by each company during this period more than doubled from 8.3 to 18.7.

Naturally, most of the vacancies revolve around positions for software engineers, who can very often work in a hybrid manner. That may save on office floor space, but it does not help with the rent?

There is now much anecdotal evidence that hightech offices are being forced to move their premises closer to residential areas. One of the conditions raised increasingly by these in-demand employees is that they do not want to travel too far (nor in traffic jams) if and when they are called into physical set ups. Such premises tend to cost more to operate!

Will any of this hold back the growth of Israel’s start-up nation concept? Not according to the evidence from 70 unicorns, continuing IPOs, like likes of Cisco, and much more.