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Hear what drives MizMaa's success in early-stage venture in deep tech companies in Israel and the US
Key Takeaways
- MizMaa Ventures invests in early-stage deep tech companies in Israel and Silicon Valley
- The benefits of investing in Israel (which is not covered by many other institutional investors), are lower technology risk - as everyone is trained by the Israeli army - and a global focus
- MizMaa is well positioned to help investors because of their network. Their primary focus is on people and connecting them to the network they need, be it other companies or investors
- People drive the success of the firm. For MizMaa finding the right entrepreneurs to work with them ultimately drives the success of the firm
Transcript
My name is Yitz Applebaum and I'm from San Francisco and I'm in the venture capital business. I invest in early stage deep tech companies in Israel and Silicon Valley. So I spent the whole early part of my career just getting involved with early stage companies, as it were back then, and started my first company in 1995 and was blessed to have sold it to Bank of America NationsBank in 1999. I spent a couple of years there running a corporate venture capital group and that is how I started in this great career as a venture capitalist.
The business that we're really in venture capital is about understanding what the future is going to be. Now, how do you get as close as possible to understanding what are the trends? Where will the world be in five, 10 years from today? It's about people. It's about people who have experienced people who have tech, deep tech understanding, people who understand how to transition businesses from the old world to the new world. And so what I really feel I do for a living, first and foremost, is I find the right people to work with, the right people to invest in the right teams.
We have a number of unique attributes to our fund in particular. But I think this is true for every every great VC. First of all, we focus predominantly on Israel, Israel being an environment where there are so many companies that are to what we talked about before, are looking to the future. Many of them come out of the military, many of them come out of the great universities. And so you have a little less risk. And then the third thing is you have a much more global approach because the Israeli market is a smaller market. Israeli companies start from scratch looking to the U.S. and Europe and we help our companies go to Asia, Our company Miz Maa means East West. So I'd say that that's an extremely unique aspect of our fund.
And I'd also say that we're usually hands on. I've spent the vast majority of my career sort of being a networker, beating people, understanding what interests people. I am chairman of the Western World Heritage Foundation, which is the catacombs under the Old City. So I have the privilege of taking many high profile investors and people to on that tour and to that place. And so I'm a connector. And I think one of the things that we do in many venture funds need to do more of is actually help the entrepreneurs meet new customers, meet thought leaders, put them in an environment where they're not used to because they used to either coding or just selling. And business development and relationship management is something that we do exceptionally well. And I think our LPs and our investors really like that about us.
I'll give you an example. So we actually co-founded - it's a build for us - a company called Orka in the remote shipping space where actually it's autonomous shipping. You have huge issues coming into port and even in the in the wide open ocean where ships collide both with themselves and other objects. And this is a company that's taking data, satellite data, whether data ship data path, a boat path data to figure out how to do collision avoidance. And we started that company with the largest commercial shipping company in the world. So we seeded that, found a number of outstanding entrepreneurs actually from the Israeli navy. We understood the pain point came from shipping companies and we put the three together, the entrepreneur ourselves and the customer. And this company is a rocket ship, mostly because we understood where we were going, we found the best technology people in the country to do it and added our secret sauce. And if you can do that over and over again, what you're doing is you're creating huge value for yourself, your LP, for your entrepreneurs, and, by the way, for society.
I'm looking to create companies. I'm looking to hopefully create industries. We're looking to solve problems over the short and long term. And that's always going to be based around people and people's visions.
Important disclosures
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