Oren Zeev
81 statements across 4 episodes · 27 bullish · 22 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Nov 6, 2017 by Oren Zeev · said 33 times in 10 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Oren Zeev's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (17), Nico Wittenborn (4), Fabrice Grinda (4), Rory O'Driscoll (3), Peter Lacaillade (2), Ariel Cohen (2), Mike Chalfen (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2023 9 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2022 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Fabrice Grinda: The First Person to Predict the Collapse of Credit Suisse? | 20VC #886 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture & Why Catastrophe is More Likely Than Ever and Switzerland Could Be a "H
- dLocal CEO Sebastian Kanovich: The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | 20VC #926 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mike Chalfen: How to Build Anti-Fragile Venture Portfolios Today | 20VC #904 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2020 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: TripActions CEO Ariel Cohen on The Future of Business and Personal Travel & Layoffs; How To Do Them The Right Way & Maintain Company Culture and Morale
- 20VC: The Implications of a Biden vs a Trump Administration on Venture and Startups, How The Rise of Rolling Funds, SPACs and Solo Capitalists Will Impact Venture & What We Can Do To Swing the Race Pendulum in VC with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Ligh
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
Everything said about Oren Zeev, oldest first
Nov 6, 2017 negative
Nov 6, 2017 neutral
Nov 6, 2017
Nov 6, 2017 neutral
Nov 6, 2017 bullish
Oren Zeev: Agreed to invest $2 million in Houzz within 24 hours
“And I told them right there and then, how much money do you want? They said, two million. I'll give you two million. And we agreed on terms. It was very easy, and I put them in touch with the lawyer, because they, you know, they literally, you know, they didn'…”
Nov 6, 2017 bullish
Nov 6, 2017 positive
Oren Zeev reveals he is Houzz's second-largest shareholder
“I happen to be the main early backer. I, even to this day, I'm the biggest shareholder other than Sequoia, who I brought to the table nine months after invested. So I'm the second, second larger investor to this day after they've raised, you know, after six hu…”
Nov 6, 2017 negative
Nov 6, 2017
Zeev: Winning founders are industry outsiders, but insiders to the pain
“The deals that I like, deals that I was the most successful with are, and the founders that were able to really transform an industry, at least in my case, they were always outsiders to the industry, but they were insiders to the pain.”
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Jun 29, 2020 negative
VC returns on follow-on reserves are lower than initial investments
“Because I think that, generally speaking, the returns, On the reserves are going to be lower than the first time you make an investment, and the reason is the first time you make an investment, you really scrutinize the investment.”
Jun 29, 2020 bearish
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Oren Zeev: Zeev Ventures relies on serendipity over proactive sourcing
“If I'm honest, it's more serendipity. I wish I was more proactive, but it's more serendipity. Again, I'm leveraging the fact that I've been doing venture for 25 years, so I leverage the fact that I Don't maybe need to create my own opportunities because I see …”
Jun 29, 2020 negative
Zeev: Thesis-based venture capital investing leads to groupthink and overfunded sectors
“It tends to lead you really to groupthink because at the end of the day, most of the VCs are basically very similar. So Obviously, these areas become overfunded, they become overly competitive, and yes, there will be some big winners out of this category of th…”
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Jun 29, 2020 negative
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Jun 29, 2020
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Zeev: Early startups must build strong technical DNA before sales and marketing
“I think that if you start with very strong technical people, then you have the best DNA from a technology standpoint, an engineering standpoint. And again, it's something that you cannot fix after the fact. And sales and marketing, you can build it three years…”
Jun 29, 2020 positive
Jun 29, 2020 positive
Jun 29, 2020 positive
Jun 29, 2020 positive
Jun 29, 2020 negative
Zeev: Deals requiring heavy due diligence are not obvious enough to back
“Sometimes LPs ask me, how do you do diligence, and I tell them I don't, and I exaggerate a little bit, because sometimes I make a few phone calls, but I'm not exaggerating by much, and usually there is, like, silence. They've never heard it before, and then I …”
Jun 29, 2020 positive
Zeev: Founder secondaries increase ambition by reducing personal financial pressure
“The fact that you let them Take money off the table actually brings better alignment. Even a significant amount, even if it's five or ten million, they're much more likely to try to hit for the fences and not take the first couple of hundred million dollar acq…”
Jun 29, 2020 negative
Jun 29, 2020
Jun 29, 2020
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Zeev: VCs should work for founders rather than act as equal partners
“Oftentimes, VCs talk about themselves as partners to the entrepreneurs, and I actually don't like the terminology, because a partner implies that I have a say, he has a say, or she has a say. No, I think I'm more than a partner. I work for them.”
Jun 29, 2020 positive
Oren Zeev: Market-leading startups develop quietly in unhyped spaces before competition notices
“It's much more likely to happen when it's kind of like a space that nobody thinks much about, and the company has an opportunity to Develop quietly for a year or two or three and build real moats and real advantages. And once everyone understands that it's an …”
Jun 29, 2020 negative
Jun 29, 2020
Oren Zeev invested personal capital leading startup rounds for eight years
“And for a bunch of years, like seven or eight years, I invested my own money, but behaved as a VC. So I had a very unique model of investing my own money, but in significant amounts and leading rounds and behaving like a VC, taking board seats, et cetera.”
Jun 29, 2020
Zeev: Takes 20 seconds reviewing pitch decks to filter deals
“If I filter meetings that I'm going to take, it takes me 20 seconds to look at a deck and decide whether there is a chance more than five percent that I would want to pursue it or not. If it's less than five percent or three percent, I just don't think.”
May 24, 2022 negative
May 24, 2022
Zeev: I banned an LP who complained about rapid fund deployment
“I had a, an LP who joined in the third fund, and four months later, I tell him that you know, I'm raising our fine for, I finished, I'm raising, and he totally freaked out, and he started lecturing me on, he didn't call it what you called it, he called it vint…”
May 24, 2022 positive
May 24, 2022
May 24, 2022
Zeev: Preempting and leading rounds is the only way to increase ownership
“At the end of the day, first of all, the end of the day, the only effective way to increase ownership is to preempt and lead the round. If you sit and wait for someone else to lead it, then at best you're gonna get your program.”
May 24, 2022 bullish
Zeev: LPs achieve vintage diversification simply by re-upping in annual funds
“If I raise a fund every year and they just are in every fund, they do get the you know, even if one fund is not what he called vintage diversified, they would be vintage diversified if they care about it. I don't care about it, but if they do, you know, they c…”
May 24, 2022 negative
Zeev: Follow-on investments should never be about protecting ownership percentages
“So I think that's another idea that to me, it's never about protecting the ownership. You know, if I put my money in a company again, It doesn't matter if it's a full on or new. It's because I want to put new money, not because I put something in the past and …”
May 24, 2022 positive
May 24, 2022 bullish
May 24, 2022 neutral
Zeev: VCs with high hit rates only need 5 to 8 companies
“I do think that the number of course, some absolute number, I think that the higher the Probability of success of the underlying, of each individual underlying investment is the less diversification you need. If you believe that every deal that you do has 50% …”
May 24, 2022
May 24, 2022 bullish
May 24, 2022 negative
Zeev: I never want to have venture partners again
“The conclusion from these two instances, especially from the second one was that I never want to have partners again. Okay. So that was my takeaway that I don't want to have partners that I, you know, I want to own my own mistakes and own, I don't want to suff…”
May 24, 2022
Zeev: The entire Israeli venture industry was just 10 people in 1994
“It was 1994, and the whole venture industry literally started overnight, and the whole industry was 10 people, and I was lucky enough to be hired by, ah, to be hired by, ah, Apex, who wanted to open operations in Israel, one of two people.”
May 24, 2022 positive
Zeev: I bought a 3% stake in Uber Freight from Anthony Levandowski
“I had an opportunity when Uber Freight spun out of Uber. I had a very unique opportunity to get ownership and the ownership that I, to buy ownership from actually from the from Anthony Lindowski, the guy who allegedly or not allegedly actually, because it was …”
May 24, 2022 positive
Zeev: VCs should not be price sensitive on high-growth companies
“In general, I don't think one should be overly price sensitive. Obviously, you know, you have to have some discipline, but the reality is that if you're dealing with companies that are growing at over a hundred percent per year, and you believe it's sustainabl…”
May 24, 2022
May 24, 2022
May 24, 2022 neutral
May 24, 2022 negative
Zeev: LPs are wildly over-diversified with 20 to 40 GP relationships
“I would say that on the LP side, I think they're way over-diversified because most of them have 20, 30, 40 relationships. That's crazy because each of their underlying investments or funds is also very diversified. It's not very likely to lose money. So each, …”
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Zeev: A 50% VC hit rate is great given 100x upside asymmetry
“In my, in 50% of the time I'm right and 50% I'm wrong, that's actually a great result because a winner is so much more important than the loser. Because you know, as you know, if we lose something, we only lose one X our money. If we win, it could be a hundred…”
Feb 2, 2026 bearish
Zeev: Pass on AI-neutral companies, only invest in AI beneficiaries
“The one thing maybe you could argue that change, I don't know if it's 24 months or 36 months, is that every investment I have to ask myself, is this company a likely beneficiary of AI or not? The answer is not. Well, if the answer is that they're a victim of A…”
Feb 2, 2026 neutral
Feb 2, 2026
Zeev lets go emotionally when portfolio founders mishandle crises
“If I have a company where maybe the founders are not doing the right things, and I'm, you know, and, ah, they're not reacting to a crisis in the way that I think they should, I don't get too worked up about it, and I, you know, at the end of the day, I just, a…”
Feb 2, 2026
Feb 2, 2026 bullish
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Zeev: PropTech investment failed after underestimating interest rate hike speed
“In hindsight, I overestimated the resilience of the business, and I underestimated the speed what I called the worst case scenario, what I modeled as the worst case scenario, was actually not as bad as the real the real scenario that happened. You know, the ri…”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Apax Partners rejected Zeev's early pitch to invest in Facebook
“I, now, now I do have misses from the Apex days where I saw something that I wanted to do, but I knew that there was no way I could get it approved, including Facebook, by the way, in the very early days, you know, I saw it, I could have done it. I brought it …”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Feb 2, 2026
Feb 2, 2026 neutral
Feb 2, 2026 bullish
Zeev: Adapting incumbent software companies will be huge AI beneficiaries
“Companies that on one hand are not, many companies are not easy to disrupt, and as long as they don't fall asleep on the wheel, and as long as they navigate, you know, they adapt they're going to be huge beneficiaries of AI.”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Apax rejected Zeev's attempt to take Audible private before Amazon sale
“I try to convince the partnership to buy, I made the investment in Audible was my first big home run, and then it went public, and it was a good, a great, we sold not all the shares, but enough to make it the home run and then the stock price dipped, and it wa…”
Feb 2, 2026 neutral
Zeev: AI does not change compounding startup growth math
“Because the math doesn't change. If you have if you have a company that can double every year for the next five years, it's gonna be 32 X what it is today, because two to the power of five was 32 before AI and after AI. That has not changed.”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Zeev: Made exception to invest $1.5M in AI startup Decart via capped SAFE
“I normally don't do safes at all, but in this case I said, you know what, I'll do it, but I needed to be capped and we capped it which Luckily, because otherwise, at least for the investors, it was lucky because, you know, the next one was at much, at a very h…”
Feb 2, 2026 bullish
Zeev: Venture liquidity could surge in 2026-2027 driven by mega-IPOs
“By the way, that might change in twenty-twenty-six, in big way, in a big way, because there are a host of a host of huge, unprecedented size IPOs in the works now. You know, companies like SpaceX, and Stripe, and Databricks, and, you know, and others. So there…”
Feb 2, 2026 bearish
Feb 2, 2026 bearish
Feb 2, 2026
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Zeev: Founders should accept preemptive rounds but maintain low burn
“My advice is take the money. But continue to behave as if you didn't. Don't spend money just because you have it. You know, companies can be overfunded, and, ah, it can lead to loss of focus, so if the founder's mature enough and strong enough to take the mone…”
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Feb 2, 2026 bullish
Zeev: Predictions that AI will kill software incumbents are provocative BS
“So the bottom line is, I think this notion that all the incumbents are going to die, you know, this notion that is being promoted by some People who I think whose main motivation is to make provocative statements, you know and get attention as thought leaders …”
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Zeev: LPs are excessively focusing on DPI while discounting paper marks
“Because of that, I think there is, I would say too much focus even, but understandably on DPI, and where, you know, people hardly talked about it three years ago, and now some LPs, oh, it's just DPI. It's just DPI. We don't believe anything.”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Zeev: Cut fund size by half following peak $500M+ funds
“And I think that I have two bubble sizes. Publicize funds. One of them is going to be okay, the other one is actually going to be good despite that, but I have two funds that were over five hundred million from 20 21 and 2022, but my 20 24 fund already, ah, cu…”
Feb 2, 2026 neutral
Zeev: Refuses to give LPs strategy promises to maintain investing flexibility
“And that's exactly why I don't tell LPs anything in terms of what I'm going to do, because I feel that if I tell LPs something, I would feel too committed to that specific strategy, which I may have thought it was the right strategy, but then there's a situati…”
Feb 2, 2026 bearish
Zeev: Only one in thousands of AI customer support startups will succeed
“One, you know, one of them is going to be successful, but there's a thousand or two, but there's a thousands that are not. So I'm not, at the very early stages, I don't trust my intuition enough to know which one of the thousand is going to be successful.”