Jeremy Weisz
Yeah. And Ben, I love you know, that’s a great lesson is like, give candid feedback, you know, to people, because you never know where it’s gonna go, in the very least it will just help them, you know, change and improve. And all feedback is good feedback.
Ben Wiener
Right? There’s a price dependent, like if you, you know, again, there are on the fringes, there are entrepreneurs who are, let’s say, you know, I want to be disrespectful of mental illness or whatever, but you have people that are unstable, or that have issues, and that maybe they’re maybe personality issues that you know, cause an investor not to invest in founder, I don’t think you want to look them in the eyes and say, guys, you know, I’m not investing in you because you’re unstable. Yeah, exactly want to find you don’t wanna be you want to be candid to that. You don’t have to tell them everything you’re thinking about, you have to give them some actionable feedback. That is, yeah, it’s real. And, and that’s why I published the criteria on the front page of the website, this is what I’m looking for. And usually when I you know, I have to say, No, you’re 99 98% of the time. So that enables me to just point to that and say, God is really seen really great. This is outside of the sweet spot. And what I’m looking for, here’s a couple reasons why. And in some cases, you know, that email, like I said, zamindars case, that was I call it my million dollar email open this email took me two minutes. And it changed the trajectory of my fun to change to change my life. You know, I’m privileged to be the first and one of the largest investors in the company. Yeah. So it’s, like I said, it has a lot, there are a lot of lessons wrapped up in that, but candid feedback is if we carefully if the treat it, like, sort of like a porcelain, you know, like a, like a piece of crystal, like, it’s very valuable, we have to treat it carefully. Yeah, you have to handle it, handle it with care. You have to use it, you have to handle it with care.
Jeremy Weisz
We’ll talk about Ben some other companies, and early on what that look like. But I want to talk about there’s probably one of you said no to that maybe was a really hard no for you that you toiled over. Like, you know, it’s on the fringe. Maybe it has, like, you know, maybe talk about what you’re looking we’ll talk about you’re looking for, but maybe it’s got like four of these criteria with missing one of them. And by the way, I think in book titles, and I know we’ll talk about you have this great post where you talked about the 75 books you read, so I suggest you’ll check that out. But I have your next book title, namely, you said it actually, potentially so I’m goosebumps, like something goosebumps and then a subhead, what I look for in high growth startups early stage or something. So there’s your next book title.
Ben Wiener
If I publish it, I’ll split the royalties.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, we haven’t. I’m recording. But I’m talking about a hard No. What what was a hard No, that maybe it fit, like almost all that, but just you couldn’t get that last thing?
Ben Wiener
Yeah, that’s a good, that’s really you Only
Jeremy Weisz
you only invest in when I was looking at it. Maybe one company year, maybe?
Ben Wiener
Well, I try to I try to invest in about 1% of what I see. I don’t do that purposefully. But that’s the benchmark. And that’s been pretty, pretty consistent. So I see, you know, in Tel Aviv, or in certainly in Silicon Valley, somebody like me would see thousands I see from the Jerusalem ecosystem, I see probably hundreds, like two to three to 400 a year. And I’ve consistently invested in between two and four companies a year. So 2020 companies over over six and a half years is Yeah, it’s about that number. Um, so I’ve had some busy years, I’ve had some slow years. But yeah, I’m pretty, pretty picky. So that means like one out of 100 is going to go all the way through the analysis. In those 99 out of 100, which ones were really tough knows a couple I don’t want to go into specific specific examples, but there were some tough ones. Were I’ll save a little bit differently. Most if you look at, you know, I want to belabor like the every investor has their own criteria, my criteria on the website, the first I found that because I like dynamic people, I found that I was falling in love with founders, you know, not not literally but like, a little bit founders and sort of glossing over some of the market issues, that if I had been more honest, you know, I would be, I would have, that would have stopped me. So I purposefully kind of hit the brakes after about a year or two, and we did the order of the, like a quarterback in football, you have your check downs, so my check down order switched. And I start in the order that the website, so I start with the market. And this is based on lots of reading, you know, if you read like Marc Andreessen has this seminal important piece where he writes, you know, in 2007, as he’s becoming an investor, you know, in a classic increasing style, he writes, the only thing that matters, like, this is like the most important article that you could ever read as an investor. And he basically orders you know, market product team, and he puts team last, which is very controversial, because most VCs at the time even say, you know, say, we invest in teams, we invest in teams. And Andreessen says, you know, give me a, you know, four Nobel Prize Laureates, building a piece of garbage, and you know, it’s not gonna work, like the market has to be. And the corollary is also true, you can have, you know, a bunch of 19 year olds who’ve never done anything, but if they hit that magic, you know, Facebook, or whatever that thing is going to take off. And even if they had no background whatsoever, and maybe poor interpersonal skills, the company could still succeed. So you want to start with market and then go to product, and then go to team. And that has been a great safeguard for me, because that has prevented me from door, there were some amazing founders, I can think of a few in the last couple years, just people that you want to bring home and introduced to your wife and kids. They’re just so great, great people committed hungry. But the market wasn’t the right market for me. And that enabled me my checkout enabled me to say, you know what, I really liked you a lot. You’re fantastic. I’m rooting for you. But this is still not the company that you know, that I want to bank. So there were a bunch of those that started that way work. I loved the people, but just the market and the product weren’t right for me. And then you just give them this heartfelt you know, no, you say, like, legitimately, I really, really like you, I’m really rooting for you. And there are a few founders today, they still don’t understand it, I don’t think completely. They’re a bunch of founders in the ecosystem that I’m storing behind the scenes, trying to help. I’m introducing them to VCs and other investors. And I said no to them, I didn’t invest in them. And they say to me, like, Ben, we understand, like, why are you doing this? You know, and I say to them, I like you, I want you to succeed, I just, you know, didn’t fit my thing personal. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not It’s nothing personal. That the opposite, like I really like you, and I want you to succeed. But I, you know, have my criteria I have, you know, 70 or 60 investors that gave me their money, I promised them that I’m looking for these things, this is not that I’m still gonna, you know, try to help you. So there were a bunch like that, where I really liked the person. But for whatever reason, the market wasn’t a good fit for my limited, you know, experience and expertise. And I had to say, you know, what, we like you a lot, not for me,
Jeremy Weisz
I’m Ben you know, when I look at what you’re looking for, is the order to start with paradigm shift is a paradigm shift, and then pain,
Ben Wiener
I would say pain for it’s like, okay, you know, I want to I want to rule out things that are, you know, maybe great opportunities, but I’m solving a painful problem, I recognize that that’s gonna rule out a bunch that would have ruled out. If I would have sat with Zuckerberg, if he had been from Jerusalem, you know, I would have said no like, and I would never read it afterwards, even if you don’t became one of the world’s most valuable companies. Because for every one of those, there would have been 1000 that were just like it. And the point is, I’m not good. It’s not about what I believe in. It’s about what I understand about myself. I’m one I’m a solo GP, I have my own set of limitations. I am not good at evaluating opportunities that are Greenfield super interesting, but don’t solve the problem. My brain works better when you can frame it for me in terms of a problem that is now or in the near term. And that for some reason. Number two, the current solutions are grossly inadequate, like for some reason, there’s this Miss I love mismatches. You can hear that throughout what I say, I love the mismatch in Jerusalem. I love the mismatch of gender that women don’t get their fair shake. I’ve been privileged to back a whole bunch of women founders, I love these mismatches that are unfair, or that are logical. So get back to the criteria. This is huge pain number one, number two, current solutions are grossly inadequate for some reason, then 700 billion, despite I’ve not figured out even close the adequate solution for this problem, because it’s new, because the technology is available, because just nobody realized it. Um, and that is going to filter out probably 85% of startup pitches because most of them frankly, even they even themselves can honestly say that they They think that current social diversity adequate, they’ll say, yeah, we’re an optimization, we’re better than the rest. But for me, and I might be fine, and those companies would be very successful for me, I need to something that’s a Trump’s number three, which is a paradigm shift, Game Changing order of magnitude, jump, to solve all those problems conclusively, and in a way that nobody’s even come close. And that, that is so narrow, that I’m going to begin to get to the team. If I, you know, if I can’t get to those things, and and then we get to the team and the passion and the people. And you know that the human element of the of the company. So that would be the order that I look at things. I’m pretty disciplined about it, I write it up, I write, I write down a memo, I make sure that I’m checking my homework that I’m not skipping steps. And, you know, people you could, like, you could look at some of the companies I’ve invested in and say, Ben, I don’t see it. I don’t know what you’re thinking you’re like, this is not a paradigm shift, or, you know, but at least I believe that the time that it fit that criteria,
Jeremy Weisz
you mentioned Ben also, okay, you saw, you know, Ran and you’re like, we don’t do consumer apps. Okay, I’m paid consumer apps, what’s, what’s another one of those, I found, this is not, this is not a fit for you. Just
Ben Wiener
hardware devices, medical devices, any kind of hardware, gun, drones. Not that I don’t believe in those things, I believe a lot, but I just don’t believe that I’m good at picking those backing them. So pharmaceuticals, anything that requires FDA approval, anything that’s a physical device. I have invested in a company that pivoted towards a physical device. And I wonder, you know, if I had seen them, if I knew, when I invested that they were gonna incorporate a physical device, I wonder if I would have invested? I’m happy that I did. I think it’s gonna work out great. But I wonder, you know, it would have come in the door with that, as part of the plan, I wonder if I would have bent about far enough to include it or not. Um, so these are not, I wouldn’t say these are completely inviolable. Like, you know, I don’t have a legal boundary. But these are, you know, heavy, heavy, heavy, strong boundaries or preferences? I would say. Never, Never say never. But I’ve never seriously looked at a medical device. So I don’t think I ever would. Yeah, but I have looked at some things that involve like, genetic a plus has a whole bunch of people in white coats, growing synthetic human brains in your refrigerator, in Jerusalem. So I don’t I don’t know if I would have, you know, actively look for something like that. But it was pretty fascinating when I saw it. So I’m glad I did.
Jeremy Weisz
Let’s talk about some of the companies and what you saw early on, but and maybe just give a brief like Genetika for instance, maybe talk for a second what do they do? And then what did what was it like when they you talk to them early on?
Ben Wiener
Genetika was a great one Talia Cohen Solal. Dr. Talia Cohen Solal is just an incredible world really, like World Class neuroscientist, trained at Oxford undergrad, UCL PhD at Columbia University in New York postdoc means a woman who like is an expert in her field of neuroscience. And we’ve seen Israel and has this idea to sort of extend the research that she did in the lab to solve a very specific problem. The problem is that unfortunately, and this is tragic, and it’s only getting worse through COVID. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are diagnosed or will be shortly diagnosed with severe clinical depression. And the problem is, that’s the problem in and of itself. The next problem is that there are 50 to 70 medications already approved on the market for for clinical depression. And psychiatrists do not know when they don’t have a conclusive way to know when they meet the patient and diagnose them. Which of those drugs will match that patient’s physiology, neuropsychology, whatever. And so it’s trial and error. We live in 2000 2020. And these watery doctors are, let’s try this for a couple weeks, see if it works. And I don’t mean to tell you how tragic some of these results aren’t. We’ve had no people that know, children, the people that we know, just terrible, terrible outcomes of people under treatment, where the treatment isn’t working. And so probably it comes and says, Well, we know what the brain looks like, when the drug works. The problem is that nobody is going to submit to letting us cut their brain open and test the look inside and see if the drugs working. But what if we can grow a copy of the brain Well, in a petri dish of that person, so they could take 10 years, then they could put
Jeremy Weisz
it on the mantel?
Ben Wiener
No, it’s it’s insane. So we have a refrigerator in Jerusalem. That right now has no petri dishes, actual, not the whole brain, not the goofy big thing. But like neurons, but actual neurons grown from blood samples of actual human beings. And those neurons, we believe, mimic the actual activity of the actual personal brain. And therefore, in the lab, you can test all the different drugs on copies of those neurons after a short period of time, days, weeks, maybe even days, maybe one day, even hours. See if the neuron reacts the right way to the drug. And bingo, you found your match. And then you call, you know, Mr. Smith and say, Hey, good news, I found the drug that should work. Let’s try this one. First, let’s let’s move this one up the chain. And that could be game changing, life changing. Health care costs go down by billions, lives lost go down by millions just have an incredible dynamic, you know, results on humankind, right? So you ask me like how I felt when I heard that pitch was that the original pitch was that the original idea, the original pitch, the original pitch was a one minute pitch, there was a program here in Jerusalem. And there were 65 to 55 participants. And it was about an hour long, each one had 160 seconds on the clock. And Talia I have never met her before. She clocked in at like, you know, 50 everybody kind of ran over on the bank, they’re gone. She banged out this Pitch Perfect, you know, British English, at like, 59 point, you know, 46, like, clearly to your practice. I did not understand really what I was. But I was like, again, goosebumps. Like, I don’t know what you just said, but there’s something there. So I went over to her afterwards and said, you know, that wasn’t enough time Can we meet? You know, can I hear the whole pitch and the rest is history, like, you know, in an hour meeting, you’re trying to explain the problem and the solution. And while I might not be that I met her, I mean, she, she is just not incredible. And I get that excited about most if not all of the founders in my portfolio, like they just get you to that goosebump level where, you know, if you can just get the story across, right? The listener will often say, wow, you know, maybe they won’t invest, or maybe they won’t go away. But they may say, Wow, that is a really incredible thing. I did not know that. I was not aware of that. Or you realize you could solve the problem that way. And I want to get to that level when I might put even the first couple hundred thousand dollars into it.
Jeremy Weisz
B ut you are. What did you What was it but it was 60 seconds, and you knew that it was something? What would you remember anything about what he said?
Ben Wiener
If you look up Talia on the web, like as opposed to me, she has a bunch of she’s won a bunch of awards. She’s spoken a bunch of times. I mean, she’s just so articulate. She’s so knowledgeable about her space. And you can, like, you know, if you hear scientists talking about a field that you don’t necessarily know, you can still often tell if they’re BSE, or if they really have a handle on their material. She’s in that latter category. Like, it’s just obvious that she knows what she’s talking about. So I didn’t understand all the details, but I knew that there was enough there that I wanted to, you know, dig deeper and find out more, was that in the original idea of kind of creating this artificial brain to test medication, or was that early on? She wanted to I think in the 60 seconds, she didn’t go to that level of detail. But I think at one point, when we first met, or the second meeting, I think I said to her, you’re growing like brains in a dish. And she said, Yeah, I guess not the whole brain. You know, it’s just like, Wow, that is that is incredible.
Jeremy Weisz
That’s amazing.
Ben Wiener
Yeah, so we have gone to visit the brains we have. We’ve made some field trips to the fridge. We call it like the nursery. You know, we asked the mother growing up. I didn’t want to give them names because they’re like millions of them. But I asked her if she could name one after me.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, nice. Um, what about autoline star? What was the early conversation like for that with that?
Ben Wiener
AutoLeadStar was very different. AutoLeadStar was one of my first investments in 2014. So I just launched the fund, I was by my only mission, much less discipline. And AutoLeadStar was an outlier. In many ways. The one of all the people that I backed Aharon was the only one who I knew before. So I started the fund in let’s say, November 2013, by January 2014. I was meeting with companies. And I had heard I had known him from his prior work as a nonprofit leader. I’d actually volunteered for him when he ran a nonprofit called PresenTense. So I’ve gotten to know him and I knew he was just an amazing I’ll tell you sort of a funny PostScript to the story. I knew that he was an amazing person, just a very dynamic leader. And I reached out to him and said, Hey, I know you remember me but I have a fund. And I hear you have a startup, you know, like your peanut butter and my chocolate like let’s get together and and see if it’s of interest. And it was not called AutoLeadStar. It was called 40 nuggets. And it was just a generic platform for website traffic management had nothing to do with car dealerships. And I didn’t have as much of a discipline. I really liked him. And I kind of just made a bet on him and his team. And again, I’m happy that I did. Because when they ultimately pivoted into the auto dealership vertical as an exclusive focus, that was probably two years after I’d invested, and I was monitoring that decision along the way, I was definitely in favor, again. Can I take credit for having seen that market? Absolutely not. I was fortunate to be in the company. Before they pivoted. They pivoted, it’s working out for them on and then it turned out. So I’ve known Aharon for, I don’t know, probably 15 years between his nonprofit activity in the last seven years as an investor. And to make again, a very, very funny long story short, I know that our own sister is married to this person who lives in Jerusalem, and my cousin. My only other relative in the country was like here for a little bit. Had they got pregnant, had a baby, my teenage son went to the hospital to take my aunt who’s visiting And anyway, my, my, my son sees my cousin hugging this very tall guy, former basketball player. And my son recognizes the guy and says to my cousin, hey, that’s, you know, so and so. And they had never, they each had a baby that morning, he had a baby boy, my cousin and this guy, and they come back to the house and like, tell me the story. And my grandmother was visiting. She was 91 years old. She was visiting, she happened to be in our house. She’s listening to the story. She has that basketball player. He’s related to us. I’m like, Well, what are you talking about? She was no he’s not his wife isa Horowitz from Cleveland. I’m like, that’sAharon Horowitz’s sister. So I’m gonna explain what you’re talking about. After a minute, it turns out that what she’s saying is that Aharon Horowitz and I are fourth cousins, we had the same great, great grandfather, which I we had no idea for 15 years.
Jeremy Weisz
That’s true Jewish geography. So
Ben Wiener
yes, I called around like, hey, congratulations on your nephew. He’s like, how do you know that I had a nephew. I’m like, dude, you’re my fourth cousin, your, your great grandfather was was David, you know, we come from like Poland. He’s like, What are you talking about? I said, Get over here, meet my grandma. And so he was over, like that night. And we have this whole like family reunion with pictures. We had no idea. We were well, close, close friends, investor in the company. And it turns out that were forgotten. So I told him that I have to disclose all my investors that you know, I’m violating like nepotism rules. Family, but so it’s a very small world. And it turns out that you always have to be nice to people, because you may end up being
Jeremy Weisz
the exact love it. How did you go Ben, from lawyer to investor? Because I don’t know if people know you or your professional career as a corporate lawyer in New York. And in Israel, you as a clerk on the Israel supreme court?
Ben Wiener
Yeah. So I’ll do it really briefly. Um, and honestly, so I graduated Columbia Law School in 9696, got a job at a law firm in New York that everybody else wanted to move to Israel. At some point later in my life, I wasn’t sure when, thankfully, my wife was, you know, also interested, even maybe even more than me. And we decided that we would sort of have a trial year, the firm and I got a job that was very, you know, very supportive of people deferring and taking clerkships. And so I applied to the Israel Supreme Court and said, Hey, we can live in Israel for a year. And I got accepted by actually, I got offers from three different justices on the court. And I picked mine and we came to Israel for the year after graduation, I pushed off my job in New York. And that was nearly 9697. We loved it. We lived in Jerusalem, it was amazing. And I said, we said to each other, like midway through the year, oh, my God, we have to accelerate our plans. Like we have a 10 year plan. It’s not like a one year plan. Hmm. So I went back to New York. And I was obligated to like practice for this firm for a little while. But the minute I hit the ground in New York, I was back on the phone, like talking to people that I knew back in Israel. And within about a year and a half, I had lined up a job offer and we moved back to Jerusalem, full time. Only calm everybody one way ticket to another country. It’s It’s terrifying, but it’s very cool. So we loaded the kids onto a plane to Jerusalem. thousand 87 sorry, 98. And by 99, I left law completely. I was practicing law in Tel Aviv. And I met a young guy who had an idea for a startup and Jerusalem at the time was very vibrant. Like this sort of gets into the second part of your story of how did you get into venture capital. I never thought I was going to be an investor. I never had any money. And I never thought anybody would want to trust me with their money to invest. But in 9899 I joined this other person we started with started into reselling was a great time to be in startups in Jerusalem. There was money. Like rolling through the streets. There were wealthy investors, both Israeli and ex Pat like American British I’m telling you, you can walk into a coffee shop in Jerusalem in 1999. This is you know, .com craze, right? That you just see people strewn out across the coffee shop, usually your young person sitting with a laptop sitting across from like a silver haired person, you know, pitching your Glee, and people were just writing checks. And we we got funded.
And then I did that again, the following year, go into second startup that didn’t work out, immediately joined a second startup. Again, these were not my ideas. These were I was a young person, and I was the the deal person or the investor person within the company. And it was great. I thought, Okay, this is what I’m gonna do for my life. I’ll be the number two person in Israeli startup company, helping them you know, get back over the ocean, to the business deals, raise the money, use my professional expertise to do that. And everything hit a brick wall in 2002. So everything was going fine. 2002 the .com, bubble, crash, no reverberation hitting Israel, you have the Second Intifada breaking out. And in my opinion, there was like a double or triple whammy that crushed the young Jerusalem scene. Whereas the BBC was already big enough and self sustaining enough to sort of survive and thrive. The joke is that moyses company, Mobileye was already in existence at that point, and nobody knew about it. But there was this little company called Mobileye in Jerusalem, that was founded was able to be born before the Jerusalem crash of 2001 2002. And it was lucky enough to survive all the way to the 2000 10s, when autonomous driving became a thing, and then Intel ultimately buys them for $15.2 billion. So you have this joke of a complete Wipeout of the Jerusalem startup scene from about 2002, to about 2013. All that while hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of startups getting funded an hour away and call these all the investors moving to Tel Aviv in the Toby area to focus their Mobileye quietly becoming the largest exit ever Israeli history. Back in Jerusalem. It was this crazy mismatch of like, you can’t build a big company, Jerusalem, but yet Jerusalem was building actually, by 2014. By 2017, Jerusalem had built the two largest exits in Israeli history, both from Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. It was mobilized at 15.2 and NDS at about 5 billion to Cisco in 2014. So by 2017, we could say to people, 95% of the startups and probably 95% of the capitals in Colombia, the two largest exits in Israeli history, are actually in Jerusalem, because they were fortunate to get born before getting crushed. And that’s what led to me starting Trump’s tweet. So again, I don’t want to belabor the whole story, but basically from two to about 2013. I was, you know, without a cause, you know, I moved to this country to be the number two guy in startups and there were no more startups in Jerusalem. I worked for a couple other I worked for the public traded company doing corporate that day, I went to Tel Aviv a lot like other companies to try to get jobs. But to be perfectly honest, I really bounced around a lot in the prime years of my career, right. And then 2013, I was 43, with seven kids, seven kids, wow, seven kids, three born in America for born here, getting older, getting hungry or wanting to do things in their lives. And my last job, like you know, kind of finished or fall apart or whatever you want to say. And I’d like to do, and that’s a really bad place to be in Jerusalem or nothing had happened in like over 10 years. And I’m not, I’m not overdramatizing. This, like, I at that point, in the summer of 2013. I had an idea for my own startup. And it was actually a consumer app, which is probably why I’m so allergic to consumer apps. Stupid, stupid idea.
And it was the only thing I could hang on to, and I needed, you know, maybe 25 or $50,000, to pay a couple of college kids to like build this app and just put it up on the App Store and see if it works. And I could not find 50,000. And then I could not find 25,000 there was just nobody to talk to, you could raise millions for my first two startups in Jerusalem 15 years before, and now there was nobody to talk to. And then I would go to Tel Aviv and get very little audience with anybody because al is from Jerusalem. B was a consumer app, C and D and E and F. It was just, I was striking out. And there was one other person in Jerusalem as far as I knew, I was introduced by a neighbor to another guy who had his own idea for a startup. He also was looking for about 50,000. And I thought we were the only two wackos in Jerusalem. They were trying to start startups and the deal was whoever raised the 50 k First, we would do that idea. And that’s how bad things were. And in the middle of that summer, I get invited on Facebook to a group I’ll never forget this. I love telling the story. But it’s true happened exactly this way. I get invited to a group called Jerusalem startup founders group, which I thought was somebody making, like a vulgar joke. There weren’t interesting startup founders. So When the group just to see what the joke was. And the next thing I know, I’m invited to something called pitch night, no comm pitcher startup at some bar downtown on King George Street on like a Tuesday night. Like people are founded investor like because why else would you have a pitch night and there must be other people so I say to my wife, listen, is it okay honey, if I go to this bar bars, I’m married, I’m 43 with seven kids. She’s like, Listen, we got to get to this thing, go for it. So I go down to this bar. In the back of the bar. They’re like over 40 kids, they were all half my age, for sure. And there’s a young guy in the middle, and he’s clearly the ringleader. He’s got a rented speaker and a microphone. And everyone’s lined up behind him. And they’re pitching like, he’s in charge with a stopwatch, like lining them up. Everyone’s doing like three minute pitches, but to him. So I get online and I’m like, ready to pitch my stupid startup idea. I pull the shirt and the guy in front of me and say, Excuse me, you know where he goes? What do you mean? I said, Who’s the investor? There’s nobody here enough to drink a beer, let alone like rent check. He says, You idiot. This is Jerusalem. There are no investors. I’ll never forget it. He actually sent it to me. And I said, You’re right. I know. I know. You’re right. I’ve been trying. Who is this guy? So it turned out that it was this was like the beginning of the revolution. This was like, I came home. And I had, like, the craziest look on my face. Like really, like insane. And my wife said to me, wow, what happened? I said, It was unbelievable. Should you found an investor? I said, No, there were no investors there. She said, I’m having trouble understanding why this is so amazing. And I said, Honey, I remember I’ve said this out loud, I will swear that I said this out loud. I said, Honey, my startup is not my startup. My startup is my city, Jerusalem is starting up again. And nobody knows it. Nobody sees it, because they won’t give it up on this place. Like 10 years ago, I knew who the people were, I knew they wouldn’t know about this group forming these bars. It was so bohemian, it was so rugged. But it was so pure and raw. And so clearly, I spent the rest of that night not pitching my service. And I was like working the crowd, like who are you wearing from what I’m working on. And they were students and postdocs, and, and entrepreneurs. And I would say about half of them had ideas that sounded legit. So again, to make a really, really long story short, that became just that night I got home in the summer, probably june july of 2013. Put my startup to the side and started to work on a thesis of Jerusalem only early stage investment. A is their critical mass because I knew that the you know, the ratio was like one to 100 of success. So were there at least 100 early stage startups information B, where were they? And could I as a quiet person, kind of introverted? can I possibly find all hundred before anybody else did see? Can I develop a methodology for picking because I’ve never really invested before. And then they, where the heck was I gonna get the money to do this like it was I couldn’t even get a red nickel for my stupid startup. And you can imagine how funny the pitches were. I pitched I find anybody that I don’t budget to travel. So I couldn’t travel to America to like, pitch wealthy people. I had to find that money in Jerusalem, which was a nuclear wasteland of startups. I went to, I think probably the best story of that section was met with a friend of mine, a dear friend of mine, and I had coffee with him. I told him my idea. And his family, you know, it was a wealthy family. I figured just based on the relationship, they would throw me a couple bucks to get me started.
And he said to me, after like, a half an hour, he just looked terrible. He looked like he was going to cry. And he leaned over the coffee table in the coffee shop, he said, Ben, I have to cut you off. I really like you, you’re such a good guy. Please don’t do this. This is never gonna work. And you’re not going to find out right away that it’s not gonna work, it’s gonna, you’re gonna be chasing this for six months for a year, nobody’s gonna give you any money, you’re gonna waste a year of your life trying to get this off the ground. Just go do something else. And, and, you know, on the odds, he was probably right, like, it was insane. Nobody was gonna, you know, here’s my pitch. Hi, my name is Ben. I’ve never invested before. I’d like to and I would say this to people just to get to get the elephant out of the room. I would say Listen, my name is Ben. I’ve never been said before. I’d like you to give me some of your hard earned money. I’m going to invest it only in one city, that city being Jerusalem. We’re nothing good has happened over 10 years. And then they would laugh. And then I would and then I would say okay, now that we got that out of the way, the great person. Yeah. Now, let me show you the data. Let me show you what I found. Let me show you some examples. And let me show you my methodology. And let me show you some of the companies that are succeeding. And my thesis is that there’s this massive mismatch we can get into these companies for pennies on the dollar. And I was fortunate, lucky to find basically two really, really, you know, interesting people who backed me to get started And then the rest you know. So it is a very unusual story people ask me, How do you break into venture capital? Like, you do not want to know, you do not want to follow my path? It was insane.
Jeremy Weisz
And first of all, I have one last question and I appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge, your stories, it’s amazing and everyone should check out Jumpspeed.co and check it out, check out what they’re doing. If you have I mean, I guess if you’re in Jerusalem like what, what, um, before asked the last question, Who should be contacting you specifically?
Ben Wiener
Early stage founders who’s starting is either based in Jerusalem or is being formed in Jerusalem, not people who you know, I get people Oh, I studied in Jerusalem, I live in Jerusalem but I’m going to start the startup in Haifa are called you know, generally not interested, it’s got to be a product, somehow a product of the drizzle ecosystem either attack Hebrew you or it’s one of the accelerator programs where it’s just, you know, people working out of their apartments now in COVID on but it should be some Nexus, some legitimate connection to the Jerusalem ecosystem. I mean, I’m, I’m liberal about how I define that. But it has to have some legitimate claim to be a product of the Jerusalem ecosystem.
Jeremy Weisz
So if you know someone or you are someone in Jerusalem ecosystem, check out Jumpspeed.co check out what they’re doing. Last question, Ben. You know, I know you’re a big reader, and you released this awesome article about you the 70 books you read one year and I’m curious You know, there was there was books like Loon shots, secrets of Sand Hill Road range, why generalists triumph and specialist world and many more? What’s something this year that you suggest? Or urge maybe you’ll get an all time favorite? Maybe it’s this year? Maybe it’s not, that people should check out? That you’ve liked.
Ben Wiener
so hard? I mean, it really depends on what you’re looking for. I mean, yeah, you know, you know, I’m not a huge fan of business books. Even though I read a lot of them, a lot of them are, I feel, often you kind of feel like gypped like, they kind of reverse back ended their theories into a couple examples that they picked out of, you know, the sea of, of data to justify what to do. Um, but in terms of like, in our space in the venture capital space, I like basically force my portfolio company founders to read a very important book, short book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. I mean this is a book that is like a Bible among venture capitalists and, and very, very knowledgeable founders, Reed Hastings of Netflix, Reed Hoffman of LinkedIn, Daniel Eck of Spotify, basically say Patrick O’Shaughnessy, basically say, this is like one of the most important books I’ve ever read. So it’s a very important book about basically distilling. Really the only he claims really the only seven business strategies that lead to long term prolonged competitive advantage and growth in the technology industry. So, you know, that’s a pretty big plug for a book. I mean, if you can have a secret, seven secrets of success, and these are, you know, really proven by case studies, on a lot of economics in there. So I have become a big fan of that book, on the business side, on the non business side, and there’s so many inspirational things to read. You know, I would say, you can’t get better than the meaning of life. And I think, you know, Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s such a powerful book, you referenced your father, your father, grandfather, grandfather, grandfather, so Victor Frankl’s book, if you’re not familiar with it, yeah, Man’s Search for Meaning is literally like the meaning of life. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. And lest you think that this is like a depressing Holocaust book, this is one of the most positive, uplifting books that you could ever read in your life. And when you put it in the context of a guy who went through living hell, it is unbelievable to read. It’s like half his powerful account. And then half is, is the body of his psychoanalytic theory, which basically leads to the answer of like, literally, like, what’s the meaning of life. And if you like that book, there’s a book that’s very similar by a woman named Dr. Edith Eger, who actually met Frankl was very inspired by him she herself Holocaust survivor. And the book is written similar, like similar genre about her experiences, similar positive outcome and philosophical or psychological approach. I think her book is actually even better written, maybe even more compelling. There’s some incredible stories about her life. And you read that book, you just put it down, you’re like, wow, you know, game over this is, this is the only book I ever need to read in my life. You know, it can really give you a reset about your priorities and your thinking about good and evil battling the purpose of life. So I think I think anything after that is kind of like a step down. But I you know, it’s sort of like saying to somebody who runs a lot, you know, what’s the single best, you know, mile to run? No, you don’t run, just say mine. All over Oregon, it’s a workout of your brain and you should read lots of different things. You’re going to pick up different things from even the most random book. So I don’t think there’s only one thing that I would recommend but if I had to do on a desert island, you know, with one book, I would say maybe two or maybe take, Frankel’s. I have a good friend who said, If I was forced to be on a desert island with only one book, you know how to do the book.
Jeremy Weisz
That’s a good one. I like that. Yeah.
Ben Wiener
Very smart. You can pay you can pay me half royalties.
Jeremy Weisz
Then I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and your stories everyone check out Jumpspeed.co Thanks, everyone.
