Lawrence Tepperman › U.S. market entry

The argument

Why Israeli companies stall in America — and why more money doesn't fix it

The thing I get asked about most, written out in full. If you are an Israeli B2B founder with a U.S. plan that has not delivered, this is the twenty-minute version of the conversation we would otherwise have.

Israeli companies do not fail in the United States because they underfunded it. They fail because they ran an Israeli motion against an American buying process — and spending more buys a more expensive version of the same result.

What actually breaks

In Israel you can meet the entire market. You know who matters, and a warm introduction reaches almost anyone worth reaching. It is one of the real advantages of building here, and it is precisely the instinct that fails in America — quietly, and usually for about a year before anyone names it.

Because America is not one market. A hospital system in Nashville, a regional bank in Charlotte and a software company in San Francisco share a language and almost nothing else: different procurement, different risk tolerance, different proof requirements, different sales cycles, different price expectations. Treating them as one market is the single most expensive assumption an Israeli company makes, and it is expensive in a specific way — more budget makes it worse rather than better, because it scales the wrong motion.

The three places it dies

  • The market was never chosen. “U.S. enterprises” is not a segment. Region, vertical, company size and channel each behave like a separate country, and winning one does not mean you can win the next.
  • The pitch is aimed at the wrong person. American enterprises separate the person who evaluates from the person who signs, and they are measured on different things. Selling to the evaluator produces enthusiasm and no contract.
  • There is no system. Strategy, deliverables, CRM and weekly numbers that are not connected, so effort accumulates instead of compounding — and when a deal dies, nobody can say at which step.

The most expensive sentence in Israeli tech

“We just need to hire the right American.”

It is not false. It is out of order. Year-one cash for a U.S. VP of Sales runs roughly $362,000 to $518,000 before equity, on a 106-day search plus a 6-to-9-month ramp — so nine to twelve months before you know anything. Roughly 70% of first-time VP Sales hires are gone inside twelve months, and annual turnover in that seat at seed and Series A runs 55–65%.

And the failure is usually structural rather than personal: you asked one individual to discover the motion and execute it at the same time. Those are two jobs. When the result disappoints you cannot tell which half broke, so the next decision gets made blind — and it is usually to hire someone else.

Hire when you can name the segment, the buyer's title, the trigger that starts a deal, the objections that kill one, and the conversion rate between each stage. Then you are recruiting into a machine, the job description writes itself, and strong candidates can see what they are joining. The full version of this argument, with every figure sourced, is on the GrowthMatters site.

What I do about it

Through GrowthMatters I work with two or three Israeli B2B companies at a time — not government, not consumer, and otherwise agnostic to industry and size. The engagement is a 13-week build of the U.S. growth engine followed by an operating-partner phase where I stay in and run the motion until the revenue is real. There is a defined stop at week six if the position that comes out of the work is not sharp and buyable.

Two or three at a time is a real constraint, not a marketing line: Berkeley is my day job and stays my first priority, and the person who built and sold the companies is the person in the weekly meeting.

A free instrument, whether or not we ever speak

The U.S. Attempt Post-Mortem asks the twelve questions I would ask in a first conversation and gives you the read on the spot — no email required. It separates the three things that look identical from the inside: a motion that was never found, a relationship channel that ran out, and a genuine timing problem.

Take the free post-mortem See how the engagement works

Nothing on this page is legal, tax, employment or investment advice. Figures cited are published third-party benchmarks for U.S. sales-leadership hiring, current as of 2026, and are ranges rather than quotes.