This morning it was announced that Sony Semiconductor has agreed to acquire Altair Semiconductor for $212M, the first acquisition for the Japanese company in Israel. Altair was founded in 2005 to develop fourth generation mobile silicon and I had the pleasure of working with the team ever since the $12M Series A financing. Altair began at a time wh...

Here is a link to a blog I wrote for TechCrunch earlier this month together with my Bessemer colleague, Netanel Meir. Click through to read the piece or click on the landscape image below to enlarge. Subscribe to my blog

By default Google Maps still shows us the way to get from Tel Aviv to Istanbul is to drive through neighboring Syria and Iraq. Algorithms are ignorant of the grim geopolitical reality that restricts our travel options from Israel. But the peculiar case of the permanently delayed flight from TLV to SFO is neither the result of a computer glitch nor ...

Below is a link to the guest column I penned on TechCrunch.Subscribe to my blog

*This post was previously published at Fast Company When considering their next career move, aspiring entrepreneurs generally follow conventional wisdom and start a company. Similarly, most serial entrepreneurs who were unsuccessful in their first attempt to build a business or reach an exit also make the same decision. They simply pick up and s...

In response to popular demand, I am uploading the keynote presentation of my partner, Felda Hardymon, that was given at E&Y's Journey 2012 high tech conference. The presentation contains some fascinating observations on the state of venture capital. ...and some photos doyen of venture capital at the Journey event. Subscrib...

1. There is enough seed money to buy six-figure, five-letter vanity URLs 2. Entrepreneurs and Hollywood celebrities are invited to the same events 3. VCs invest in Angel rounds Angels invest in VC rounds 4. M&A is a bona fide hiring tool ("acquire-hire" is used in mainstream media) 5. Series B financing is the first of many liqui...

Three of my portfolio companies were included among the 10 most promising, young Internet start-ups in Israel, in an article by Guy Grimland in the TheMarker Magazine. In the photo above, you can see Raphael Ouzon, the CTO and co-founder of BillGuard, Ishay Green, the CTO and co-founder of Soluto, and Shai Wininger, the CTO and co-founder of Fiverr...

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Venture investors never like to lose money. But if we must, we prefer to lose it approximately 2-4 years after investing. Why? Losing money after more than 4 years is more painful and expensive because of the opportunity cost of our time and that of everyone else around the table. If a company fails after 4 years, it was either a sudden turn of eve...

Last month, we successfully exited our investment in Storwize through its sale to IBM. IBM had been working with Storwize for some time on technical validation and joint marketing initiatives, and gradually became convinced that Storwize was a critical enabling technology that could disrupt the entire storage segment and including their own product...

When your business depends on driving quality traffic to your website, embracing a paid acquisition strategy using SEM or display advertising can be both a luxury and a nuisance. It?s a luxury, because you can effectively manage your rate of growth via variable marketing dollars. With great precision, successful Internet companies know what kind of...

My fondness for early stage investments often prompts me to develop a new method with which to filter, evaluate and pursue deals. One of my current methods is to group interesting early stage companies into the following buckets: ?amazing,? ?smart? and ?crazy.? Many companies don?t quite meet the criteria I set to receive these labels, and occasion...

Last month my portfolio company, UK-based Axis Network Technology, was sold to Korea-based Ace Technologies for $35M. It was a great outcome for all involved as BVP was the only institutional investor (?3M), following several years of bootstrapping by the entrepreneurs, Simon Mellor and Steve Cooper. Unlike most of my investments over the past 2 ye...

A new High-Tech Committee headed by Ministry of Finance Director General, Haim Shani, presented several recommendations yesterday to revive and buttress the local high tech industry. Here they are with my commentary and star rating:1) Safety Net for Institutional Investors (**) ? The idea is to encourage local pension funds to invest in Israeli hi...

Two days after launching the beta version of their first product, Soluto was anointed the winner of the hyper competitive start-up battle at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday in New York. This is a prestigious accolade and an ideal launch pad especially for a company like Soluto which needs a large user base to perfect its product. To be clear, this was...

Israel is lauded for its impressive high tech achievements, but this is primarily for the development of technology, not its application or deployment. Actually, outside of the defense/security realm, Israel is often a laggard when it comes to the adoption of new technologies(I am excluding the Internet). Instead of the Israeli domestic market serv...

Along with a bunch of my fellow Israeli VCs, I was an unknowing subject in an experiment conducted by TheMarker(in Hebrew) over the past week. The idea was to send cold emails to 62 active Israeli venture capitalists and to test their ?response times.? They created a fictitious cloud infrastructure start-up called Shadowscale, complete with an Isra...

If recent headlines are even somewhat accurate concerning the pending sales of multiple Israeli start-ups, Israeli high tech should be feeling a great sense of relief. I know of at least 10 start-ups in advanced stages of concluding M&A transactions, with all but one at a loss or near loss to their investor base after many years of toiling in a...

The Netflix Prize reached its final stage last month almost three years after it began. For those unfamiliar with the competition, Netflix posed a challenge to the scientific community to develop an improved collaborative filter algorithm for use in determining Netflix customers? cinematic tastes. The challenge was to improve on the current Netflix...

For those of you not living the Shekel-Dollar drama of the past year, I wanted to give a quick update. Twice over the past year, the Israeli export economy (including all high tech), has been jolted by the rapid strengthening of the Israeli currency. Versus the Dollar, the Shekel gained almost 25%, then lost it, and was most recently showing worryi...

Readers of my blog should be familiar with my deepening preference for software companies, especially those that exhibit a low cost structure and high margin sales (not all software companies do). However, increasingly I prefer to characterize my investment focus less by sector, and more by the sales and go-to-market strategy. Specifically, I find ...

Israel is known for many great things, but its chivalrous driving is not one of them. Israel does have more roads per kilometer of road than any other country?but I would bet also fewer traffic cops per capita than most. Blame it on the hot weather, the tense political environment, old or young drivers, one of several minorities, the religious, the...

Just read a nice article by Steven Levy at Wired about Google?s economic model. None of it is particularly new, but it does a good job of highlighting innovations beyond search.Key Take-AwaysThe first major innovation was in auctioning off a slate of ad slots each time a search query was made, and billing advertisers based on clicks on the ad, rath...

Cloud computing is often associated with ?commodity? pricing and efficiencies of scale, which is why the transition to a world with cloud resources harks back to the emergence of public utilities and mass manufacturing. Cloud networks may provide a utility of sorts, but there was never an industry-wide transition from in-house electricity generatio...

It is no secret that the costs of launching an Internet or software company have come down dramatically in the past decade, due to new programming languages, open source software, and ever declining server and bandwidth costs. At Bessemer, we actually calculated that cost of launching a web site application declines 50% every 18 months? one key rea...

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With IT budgets frozen or shrinking, and most of what is left going to only the very largest vendors, software starts ups find themselves in a real quandary. However, a little observed trend in software usage and purchasing over the past few years has steadily opened a new set of doors to businesses accounts, effectively bypassing the punishing dec...

In my work with entrepreneurs, I come across three essential traits that define an entrepreneur: self-confidence, passion and perseverance. All three traits are a necessity for acting upon an idea, facing adversity and doubt, and ultimately bringing the idea to fruition. However, there are two more traits, which I have come across on rare occasions...

A recent TechCrunch post by Sarah Lacy raises some interesting questions about Israeli high tech, in particular why is Israel seems to be limited to small exits and why have venture capital returns been poor relative to the top US funds. One can?t compare venture markets at a given moment in time without taking into consideration the fact that Isra...

Yesterday, Forbes published its annual Midas List, which is a ranking of sorts for the most successful venture capitalists. I am extremely proud to write that no less than SIX partners from Bessemer Venture Partners appeared in this list of 100 investment professionals, including: Rob Stavis, Bob Goodman, Felda Hardymon, Ed Colloton, David Cowan an...

Maybe I am getting ahead of myself here, but I have always felt that Israel was fortunate to have never discovered serious quantities of oil or gas. This morning, a group of companies made an official announcement regarding conclusive results of tests indicating considerable natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean. While excited at the pr...

I constantly find myself trying to convince entrepreneurs of pre-revenue software and Internet start-ups to scale back their development plans and accelerate the introduction of their product. This has only intensified in the current economic environment, where hundreds of start-ups, caught fundraising during the R&D phase, look pretty unattrac...

Many of my peers would disagree with me, but I don?t buy the logic behind the recent ?zinook? plan that would have the Israeli government aiding venture capital funds directly. Similar to the original ?Yozma? program in the early ?90s, which seeded the Israeli venture capital industry by providing matching investments in funds that raised capital f...

In Israel, one hears about the sub-prime debacle, bank failures, the plummeting stock market, and now the pending collapse of the automotive industry; but aside from a battered local stock market, all of this sounds uniquely American. Some reason that since this is not a tech induced crisis, high tech in Israel should be relatively safe. Not so. I ...

If you haven't read these yet, here are some great in-depth articles and commentaries on the current economic crisis and how we reached this stage. I will add more as I come across them.The End of Wall Street's Boom by Michael LewisThe Great Consumer Crash of 2009 by James QuinnWhy Wall Street Always Blows It by Henry BlodgetInfectious Exuberance b...

As the title of my blog suggests, I have ventured to the Levant, searching for those savants that combine entrepreneurial zeal with original thought. Indeed, it is my belief that the strength of Israeli high-tech rests on the high concentration of entrepreneurial and technical savants. By this, I mean super-geniuses that dwarf even the brilliant pe...

BVP updated its web site today and for the first time, there is an Israel Practice page that describes a summary of our views on the Israel opportunity from a venture perspective. Some of you may note the divergence between our sectors represented by our existing Israeli portfolio and my interests and directions going forward. BVP is firm with a lo...

My American readers may not be familiar with this term, but this the direct translation of the Hebrew term for ?venture capital.? Does this explain the relative riskiness of early stage, Israeli high tech companies? Probably not?but it certainly explains some of the indignant responses of entrepreneurs as I reject their venture on the basis of bein...

Welcome to "Savants in the Levant"... my cerebral atelier, where I will write my thoughts on venture capital and start-ups in Israel, technology and media trends, and most probably politics. While the purpose of this blog is foremost to provide me with an intellectual outlet, I also aim to communicate with the entrepreneurial high tech community. I...