The importance of picking a niche and finding your first customers
The importance of picking a niche and finding your first customers
Israeli startup BlazeMeter, a load testing in the cloud compatible with open source Apache Jmeter, has recently raised an undisclosed round from Yoav Leitersdorf’s YL Ventures. I’ve contacted Blazemeter’s CEO Alon Girmonsky, to learn more about the product and the load-testing market. VC Cafe: In very simple terms, what is BlazeMeter and what do you enable …
Continue reading “CEO Interview with BlazeMeter, Self-Served Load Testing in the Cloud”
Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur at the moment, and resources such as WorkInStartups, Founder2Be and Enternships have sprung up to help people locate co-founders and create or work in startups. Strikingly the vast majority of startup positions advertised are for technical co-founders such as CTO or Developer…
Apap.tv, an Israeli startup headquartered in San Mateo, and Digiday, partnered on a report that summarizes the Internet’s Digital Video advertising market. Over 600 agencies, publishers, advertisers and online video tech providers provided their input on the poll back in September 2011.
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. See the June 2011 edition after the jump. For previous editions, click here.
Tokbox raised $12 million after going through a significant pivot. The company essentially stopped developing its consumer facing product, and instead focused on Open Tok, its video chat API, as its core business. We had a chance to conduct a short interview with Ian Small, CEO of TokBox to find out the pivot decision was made.
Last week I attended a Bloomberg event in London on “The Israeli Economy”. The keynote was given by Zvi Eckstein, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Israel, on “Israel present and future”. Zvi is impressive. The mainly British audience felt like they were in a classroom at Tel Aviv University, and that the Bank of Israel was in good hands (thinking that Zvi and Stanley Fischer together formed an Israeli central banking dream team). The talk covered: (1) Israeli macro-economic indicators, (2) Monetary Policy and (3) Israeli industry.
joint report by IVC Israel and KPMG, summarizes 2010 in Israeli venture capital. Israeli high-tech capital raising in 2010 reached $1.26 billion, 13 percent above 2009 level but the Israeli VC Fund investment share continues to decline.
All the above points of view emphasize how important it is for Israeli startups to establish their presence in foreign markets. But, with the rise in the importance of Asian markets, particularly the mammoth market of China, the question becomes: what ticket do startups need to buy first – New York or Shanghai?