The Ledger, every show

“The fastest growing business inside of McKinsey is software.”

“And I think the consultants like Accenture and McKinsey are the leading edge of this. But I think it's going to come into software very, very quickly.”

“Palantir took 20 years to crack this code. Andrew will crack it much faster because of Palantir.”

“Some founders, or the great founders, are likely not taking SaaS investors' money. Because the SaaS playbook, as it's become called, doesn't apply to any of these harder technologies.”

“ZERP built out a huge amount of biological infrastructure. And so now you can just rent labs for cheap. And so I think we're moving to a labless model where you do kind of AI, you know, in your office, and then send out things for testing to labs and maybe eve…”

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

“If you didn't take money off the table during, you know, the ZERP era, there's something wrong. Let's just be clear about that.”

“I've come to the conclusion that with good preparation, most board meetings can be finished in 45 minutes. There's real governance that needs to go on there. There's core strategic issues that you need to kind of pound on. But most of them can be finished in 4…”

“Oh, net new naive. Net new naive. The fact that Shai and Daniel of Lemonade didn't know anything about insurance, like helped a ton.”

“People think Israelis know how to scale things, and for the most part, when you grow up in a small country, it's harder to think of scale, and so when you're a foreign investor, you need to help Israelis think in big scale.”

“Board members giving product advice.”

“You know, I don't ignore the data which says as you get older in this business, you don't do as well”

“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.”

“Yael Waldman's company Mellanox was purchased by NVIDIA, and that's really the backbone that enables NVIDIA to scale for AI.”

“This is going to become a Garden of Eden for technology and humanity and civic resilience, and how the world becomes a much better place. A Garden of Eden. That's what it's going to become, and it's going to be hard before it's better. I just want to say that.…”

“Of the tech leadership, of Satya Nadella, of Sundar at Google, of Zuck, has been astounding, and it's been correct and forceful in condemning, ah, the animalistic barbarian behavior of Hamas and the terror that they've wrought.”

“I have gotten incredible, but I mean incredible, support from people in the United Arab Emirates, Members of the Abraham Accords. People reaching out directly. I've gotten incredible support from Muslims in the tech community.”

“You'll notice, by the way, that all of the major sports leagues in America spoke up against this, but FIFA didn't, and that's where the World Cup was last time in Qatar.”

“You can't look the other way from atrocities, and we need to take people at the word. When they say, when Iran says they're coming to destroy Israel, Take them at the word. When Hamas says we're coming to destroy the Jewish people, we need to take them at thei…”

“By the way, that's a better, apropos college, that's a better lesson than any high school education will give you.”

“If I'm forced to pay the highest price, it means I'm not doing my job well. I'm not building a good enough relationship with the founder.”

“When you have junior people also deploying capital, it becomes even less of a safe space. And it really can affect board dynamics and good decision-making and Calm decision-making when things get rattled.”

“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.”

“Kind of traditional notions of portfolio diversification, which is where I think diversity comes from, are poorly applied in venture.”

“So a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. During this, like a lot of money. And some foundational companies and technologies will be built.”

“Perplexity is my favorite app. It's on the home screen of my phone”

“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.”

“It's generally a letter and not a presentation. It's rich in data, but it up front identifies these are my core one, two, or three strategic issues that I gotta get board input on. And, ah, you prep for it, you do calls beforehand, and then the conversation is…”

“You know, I didn't invest over Zoom. During, during the pandemic. I just, I met people out of a farm.”

“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.”

“Unfortunately, as you know, Harry, I lost a cousin of mine in battle on the first day when he went in to protect the town called Kfar Aza which is a border town where tens of people were massacred, and he was literally the first, ah, jeep in, and he was unfort…”

“If I could just jump in, Harry, also, it's important to know that there's well over a hundred Americans, Europeans, and Israelis in Hamas captivity. They were kidnapped from the music festival, and they're still being held hostage by ISIS, Hamas.”

“One of my founders, Ami Daniel, I kid you not, as soon as this happened on Saturday morning, he set up a forward command center. Quote, unquote, in which he literally directed the rescuers, literally directed them to where the people were. They've already, you…”

“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…”

“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.”

“It informs our investment strategy in general at Olive, which is a lot along the lines of benchmark, which is we like to work with partners. And that means we are a single stage, basically seed and a fund. We're not doing the big, big fund with the multi-stage…”

“Busts are psychologically impactful far more than they're financially impactful. It takes people a long time to realize you're in a bust, and then even longer time to come out the other side, and that's true of founders.”

“One of these is different between now and 20 plus years ago in particular is there's a lot more secondary going on, which means that founders are taking capital off the table in a lot of these rounds. And it's hard to know how they react. You know, if the goin…”

“Venture capital was decidedly a Silicon Valley and Israel, candidly, investment theme in the late nineties. You almost didn't see it anywhere else at the time. You know, New York wasn't a thing. London certainly wasn't a thing, and it wasn't China yet to the b…”

“People forget that there were two phases to the bubble coming undone. There was the.com, which has become famous because of the pets.com commercial, right? So that's what we all think.com.com. But there was a second one in fiber optic communications, which was…”

“One of the things that's different between now and 20 plus years ago in particular is there's a lot more secondary going on, which means that founders are taking capital off the table in a lot of these rounds.”

“These big industries, if you're trying to disrupt them in order to get the customers on board, they want to see a large balance sheet.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“So no one invested in insurance before and called it a tech investment, but lemonade has proven that insurance is really technology at the end of the day.”

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