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I'm Israeli, so I thought I'd share on how the Army has a huge positive impact on entrepreneurship. For a lot of Israelis who are smart, the army is a great experience that really helps them. For example, there is a very respected Programming Course in the Israeli army, which trains programmers for half a year. These programmers then go on to work on all the Armies' systems for the next 5 1/2 years. This course is called Mamram (I was in it). This means that programmers in Israel are not only trained in a very intensive course for half a year, but they then go on to work on real-world (and often critical) systems, for 5 1/2 years. Which means there are many Israeli programmers who, at age 24, have 6 years of professional experience working on big, important systems. Add to this that the Mamram course is very famous (most Israeli companies require programmers to either have a degree or be a graduate of Mamra). Also, serving 6 years in the army (and being in a course with 100 peers) means you get an incredible network of connections. I'm a good example - I'm working on my own startup with two people I served with in the army, and I know many people who either work at or run a lot of Israeli startups, just because I served with them at some point. I'm probably 2 hops from most startups in Israel, just because almost all of them hire programmers from the Mamram course. OK that came out long. I only focused on the Mamram course since that's what I know best, but there are a lot of other fields the army is great for that have nothing to do with programming. |
That's far better than the picture that has been painted in front of my eyes (South-East Asian context) with places like Singapore and Vietnam. With the former, it's 2 years of physical grunt work. With the latter, one of my friend's cousins had to serve in the Army for 2 years as a Private after having graduated with an Engineering degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia. =(