Last night, I learned that PAH!, a new iPhone application built by Israel Roth, Eyal Shahar, and Yosi Taguri, had cracked the top five apps on the AppStore. The game allows users to control a stylized spacecraft by yelling loudly into their iPhone. It’s a brilliant bit of execution – and a brilliant joke in [...]
At this morning’s Seed Camp Tel Aviv, I was approached by a founder and found myself in a discussion of fundraising strategies. As we’ve all observed, there are some founders that seem to be able to raise money effortlessly and others that languish for months or even years before an investor finally decides to cut [...]
Pentalum, an innovative Israeli wind power company, just closed a $9M venture financing round from Cedar Fund, Evergreen Venture Partners, and an as-yet unnamed US fund. Pentalum is interesting both because it’s a great company with a really interesting technology and offering, and because it’s an interesting reminder that great VC cleantech opportunities can exist [...]
Tagged Cleantech, Israel, Pentalum, Wind EnergyTrench-vision is my term for the negative effects of a very positive thing. As someone who spends most of my waking hours meeting entrepreneurs, I can say there are few things as impressive as a company that has bootstrapped its way from idea to revenues. Companies that are able to bootstrap benefit from a number [...]
Tagged Venture CapitalI woke up this morning in San Francisco to news that SiSense’s financing round is now public – and so now I can offer a hearty public congratulations to the amazing team at SiSense (Elad Israeli, Eldad Farkash, and their outstanding dev team) as well as to Gary Gannot of Genesis and Dan Avida of [...]
In past years, I used to use the automotive industry as a case study to illustrate the dynamics of industries where VC financing didn’t make much sense. Why aren’t there lots of VC-backed companies, I would say, pioneering innovations in brakes, internal combustion engines, power steering, and tires? The auto industry is rife with innovation [...]
As a VC blogger, I have tried to avoid the inevitable blog post on “how to pitch.” First off, there have already been many wonderful posts on the topic including this one by my good friend Eric Wiesen over at RRE and this one by the always insightful Chris Dixon. Some of these were even [...]
Tagged PitchingRecently, I’ve found myself in a series of meetings in both the Silicon Valley and in Israel with technologists, media people, and venture capitalists – all of whom seem to be equally despondent about the state of the online advertising start-up. The online advertising industry is in the final stages of consolidation, they argue, technology [...]
Tagged Internet, Online AdvertisingA few days ago, a video from the always-entertaining Gary Vaynerchuk caught my eye. The video is of a talk Vaynerchuk gave back in October at The Booksmith, a San Francisco bookshop. The entire hour-long talk is worth watching, but the first twenty minutes are enough to get the point across. Vaynerchuk rose to fame [...]
Tagged Boxee, foxytunes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Internet, online musicIn July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced the launch of a new $300M venture capital fund, Andreessen Horowitz (AH). Between them, Andreessen and Horowitz are the guys behind NetScape, Opsware, Ning, and many other smaller but no less notable ventures. Anything they decide to do together is big news – and when that project [...]
Tagged Andreessen, Horowitz, Venture Capital