I know better than anyone that there’s a version of Startup Nation that the world is perfectly happy to celebrate. The record exits, the Wiz acquisition - $15.6 billion raised in 2025, with exits totalling $74 billion. Those stories write themselves. I know that because I spent five years doing it, too. But the other story, the one about what it actually takes to keep a company’s messaging intact in wartime, is harder to tell, and rarer to find someone willing to tell it honestly. So I spoke to Alona Stein, co-CEO of ReBlonde, one of Tel Aviv’s more influential tech PR agencies. She has spent 13 years managing the gap between what Israeli founders want the world to know and what the world is prepared to hear. Since October 7, 2023, that gap has never been wider. “There’s an axis,” she told me, “between showing resilience and chasing ambulances.” It sure sounds like a line from a crisis comms handbook, but the way she says it, it’s more like a warning. The question of how to position an Israeli company is becoming existential. Do you lean into the Israeli identity, or quietly let the Delaware incorporation do the talking? In my journalism days, I lost count of the number of founders who told me: "Don’t write that we’re Israeli - we’re a ‘Delaware’ company. During recent recordings of this podcast, we had a standing protocol for missile alerts. I would ask my guests if they wanted their run to the shelter included in the final episode in the event we were interrupted. The split was about 50/50: Half wanted to show Israeli pride, and the other half didn’t want to spook overseas investors or customers. Alona knows that conversation well. “Do we move forward with the fact that we’re Israeli-based and Israeli-formed? Do we just talk about that headquarters somewhere else? It really depends on the kind of personality they have as a founder, but also the kind of business that they run and the kind of clients they sell to,” she told me. One example that came up, as it often does, is Wiz. The company went out to the world openly Israeli, and it never hurt them. But Wiz is Wiz. For companies with global client bases in sensitive markets, the calculation is different. She describes one client (a German company returning after several previous engagements) who pulled out at the last minute when their CFO discovered the agency was Israeli. “Everything was already set. Even the kickoff date was scheduled. And then the guy said, ‘Listen, I’m so sorry, but our CFO was not aware that you’re Israelis and we have a policy that we can’t work with Israelis.’” That's what ground-up narrative collapse looks like in practice: when public sentiment, left unmanaged for long enough, works its way into boardrooms. Alona traces the mechanics of it back to what happened after October 7, when she joined a pro bono initiative called Words of Iron, working to flag false information spreading on X about Israel. “I understood that this is where the narrative starts. It’s driven [by] the people, it’s driven from the masses. And then it affects so high up, to the point where VCs pull back, clients pull back, because the public sentiment is so bad.” The Iran conflict has added new layers to this. Nearly half of Israeli tech firms reported struggling with worker shortages during the conflict, and the ongoing conflict made it more difficult for entrepreneurs to secure funding in the short term, with global investors adopting a more conservative approach until the situation stabilised. For PR agencies navigating this, the question isn’t only what to say, but it’s whether to say anything at all. “If the coverage is mostly around what is happening in the war and your story can’t contribute to what is happening right now, there’s no room for that.” What makes her perspective useful is that she’s been here before. COVID, the post-October 7 period, now this. Each crisis has required a recalibration of the same fundamental question: what is your company actually contributing, and to whom? “You can provide good value. You can talk about the product without throwing names for the sake of throwing names, especially for such explosive matters.” During the lead-up to and throughout the campaign against Iran last year, 31 funding rounds took place — evidence that entrepreneurs kept building and investors kept writing cheques. But whether the narratives around those companies held are a different question. When we speak, there isn’t a clean resolution. What Alona has is 13 years of knowing where the line is between resilience and so-called ambulance-chasing, and the professional discipline to hold it even when founders don’t want to. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe
