An Open Letter to Employees of Snaptu: Please Stay In Israel!

Dear Snaptu Employees,

Firstly, I would like to congratulate you and the founders of Snaptu on the sale of the Company to Facebook. The sale of the Company is both a personal milestone for all of you and a milestone for Israel. It is clear that you executed well on your mission to bring mobile apps to the tens of millions still living on feature phones. Mabrook!

Second, I would like to plead with you: Israel needs talented and successful engineers like you to fuel our continued growth as Start Up Nation. Reaching the milestone of delivering product into the complex mobile ecosystem, creating a user experience that is popular in Asia, and scaling that product and service to tens of millions of customers is a rare skill set in Start up Nation. We need to keep your important skills in Israel if we are ever going to become Grown Up Nation. All of Snaptu employees and talents are critical for the future success of Israel's tech industry. As an industry, we need to recycle and redeploy your considerable talents to other Israeli companies so we can scale companies to big sizes here in Israel. I am certain that growing companies like Conduit, Wix, Contendo, Face.com and MyHeritage, as well as countless mobile start ups, would be interested in your immense talents. If you need help getting to them, I invite you to email me to Michael at Benchmark dot com. I will be happy to help you find challenging employment at great companies growing here in Israel.

We are all extremely proud of what you accomplished and it is certainly your זכות to choose to go wherever you want to use the skills you have built, Palo Alto or wherever. However, I hope you will choose your אחריות and ציונות and stay here in Israel to build the the next Facebook right here in Start up Nation!

Thank you from all of us

ME