Aleph

“My agreement when Benchmark, as Peter Fenton has so famously said, decided to get out of the imperial era of venture capital and focus locally, the partners at Benchmark were super supportive and went out on my own, so to speak, found a partner, Eden Shohat, a…”

“And the reason you need to stay small and focused is your most precious commodity is not your money. It's your time.”

“We are a single stage, basically C to A fund. We're not doing the big, big fund with the multi-stage thing where I think you have a lot more risks around reserves and around signaling risk when times go get bad.”

“The last seven investments I've made are all in stealth.”

“But it turns out that the best time to invest is when it busts. And so you need to maintain a constant investment pace, no matter what the external circumstances are around the bust in early stage venture capital.”

“We have a company in the travel space that was Slaughtered by COVID. We got a pile of money reserved for it. We plowed in. We think this is going to come back, and when everyone else was not there, we are. And I think that's enabled us to be nimble. A company …”

“It's a thirteen million dollar seed round. We put six and a half in the term sheet.”

“Our motto at Olive is different is better than better. Everything we do should be different, not better. Everything our companies should do should be different and not better.”

“In the venture business, I think about it as shots on goal, which is a portfolio should have somewhere between 15 and 25, call it, shots on goal.”

“One of these about the equal partnership is you're not worried about your economics or even negotiating them subconsciously. And that makes the partnership more of a safe space and more of a collaborative space. And I think it's one of the really powerful thin…”

“So what we're doing is even if we have to pay more, we're optimizing for ownership and we'll continue to do that.”

“What we often don't pay attention to is if you've got the largest war chest at the table, you've got a shot to overwhelm the cap table in a down market. Meaning, if I'm Tiger and, you know, I'm taking a large round from Tiger at a company, then the company nee…”

“So what we're doing is even if we have to pay more, we're optimizing for ownership and we'll continue to do that.”

“There's an investment that I've been working on for a long time. The closing's tomorrow, and we bet we're going to issue a capital call. The CEO is in reserves. He's one of the first people called up. And I called him up, and I called his two co-founders. I sp…”

“Of the last 17 investments we made at Aleph, one was a SaaS company.”

“We wrote this giant check to a company called Dream Security, which is AI infrastructure for protecting critical assets in countries. It was the biggest check we wrote.”

“When we first invested in Lemonade, I called a bunch of fintech investors and said, who's the insurance guy? I said, nobody. That's the beauty. So none of them would invest.”

“Over the last three or four weeks, we've decided to do a little experiment. We reach out to them now. We used to ignore them. But now it's interesting because, like, you discover there are actual buyers there. There aren't, ok? There are not actual buyers ther…”

“One of them was not selling a hundred percent of one or two positions when the prices were high.”

“I've stopped sourcing. I get all my deals right now through referrals of 30 years of being in this business. And so I actually don't do proactive sourcing anymore.”

“We've raised an incredible amount of foreign money into our company since October seventh, an insane amount of money. It's wide open for business right now. Investors are on the ground every day.”

“We just backed a AI to synthetic biology and chemistry rocket fuel company”

“We took lemonade public with sixty million of revenue.”

“Or another example is Syed Ali at Aleph. You know, I think we did that also at, like, 35 post. And Syed had come off of a company just sold for six billion dollars.”