Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Cities Summit Tel Aviv, in a session moderated by Mr Yossi Vardi. The topic was the "Innovative code" of cities. My talk focused on London and its ability to become a startup center in Europe. In a nutshell, London has all the components it needs to succeed.
Remember the ad for the "Best job in the world" campaign in 2009? That was for an environmental job in Hamilton Island... now comes the tech equivalent for an Intern if you ask me. The team is called the "Google Five", a select group of interns with a very special mission. Here's a flavor of what a previous batch did.
As every month, VC Cafe is re-posting the “Invest in Israel” Newsletter, published by the investment promotion center of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, which offers many helpful tools for prospecting investors. For the Invest in Israel archive, click here. With the news on the 33% in Q3 decline of Israeli venture capital, we hear about the announcement of Sequoia dedicating $200 million and ICQ Ventures allocating $150 million for investments in Israel. Will the startup nation weather its funding "Sandy" storm? See the headlines below.
Over the last few months many people have asked me for advice regarding their ideas and if they should go ahead and do anything with them. After hearing their ideas I always repeat the same answer (regardless of the quality of the idea). "There are lots of good ideas, however, the gap between a good idea and making it into a business, is huge. If you don't feel like it's the only thing you want to do and the only way you can live your life, my advice to you is “Don't do it".
Globes ranked the top 10 Israeli startups for 2012, and social marketplace Fiverr has taken the top spot. Fiverr has not only created a new marketplace, but also established a whole category, which attracted quite a lot of copycats (make Purple cows people!). Some of these include: Smalljob, 20s, and Gigim as well as Fourerr, Sixerr, and Eighterr...
Last week PWC released its quarterly moneytree report on the state of the venture capital industry in Israel. The top line figures indicate a 33% decline in VC investments in Q3, reaching $171 million compared to $255 million in the previous year. The main reason stated is the decline in availability of local VC funding. Overall in the first 3 quarters of 2012, Israeli companies raised $591 million, compared to $904 million in the equivalent period in 2011.
Remember ICQ? The poster-child of Israeli startups which was sold to AOL in 1998 for $287 million (ancient link!) and later on to DST for $187 million in 2010, Yuri Milner's holding corp, is now operating under Mail.ru, Russia's primary email provider. ICQ is making a slight change in tac, as the company announced it will allocate $150 million to invest and acquire Israeli startups.
Felda Hardymon is a highly successful venture capitalist and popular Harvard Business School professor, where he teaches “Venture Capital and Private Equity”. Sharing research and examples from the 2012 edition of his textbook, Hardymon spoke at last week’s Journey conference in Tel Aviv about “Venture Investment- Trends, Cycles and Opportunities”.
Want to get better at presenting your idea and/or your startup pitch? Wish to gain some real world feedback from experts? Wish you could be 'famous' in 5min? If you had one 'Yes!' then please fill up this form and you might be part of a new episode of Google Developer Live IL, taking place this Monday.
Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, oversees technology strategy for Amazon Web Services- the world’s largest provider of web-delivered infrastructure services to developers. In Tel Aviv for this week’s AWS Summit (http://aws.amazon.com/aws-summit-2012/Telaviv), Werner shares his approach to innovation, biggest strategic mistake and how AWS strives to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company”.
I came across a very useful free Executive Summary Template, and I thought I’d share it with you. It gives entrepreneurs a pre-formatted template and step-by-step guide to writing an clear Executive Summary in English. The template was created by Israeli startup ebrain, a new online English editing service.
In a world of increasingly growing choice, consumers face a continuous need to make decisions. With limited resources (time, money, attention span), the decision to register/buy/vote/comment on your online store/website or blog, takes seconds at best. That is why, I suppose, creating differentiation for your product can make the difference between failure and success.
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