Which Israeli founders does UpWest tend to identify before the broader US venture ecosystem sees them?
Looking back at 15 years of investing, I see an interesting pattern in how we source and identify founders. A significant percentage come through referrals from our portfolio founders, making that network one of our strongest sources of early relationships.
What have been your biggest learnings at Jet HR, Zipjet, Flash Ventures, JP Morgan, etc and how have you applied them to your role at Italian Founders Fund and portfolio companies?
Each chapter taught me something different. JP Morgan gave me rigour and financial fluency. Co-founding Zipjet with Rocket Internet taught me rapid and ambitious venture building but also how hard it is. Investing with GFC showed me the gap Italian founders faced at pre-seed. Jet HR, IFF’s first deal, confirmed the rest: back exceptional founders early, then be useful and very community driven. At IFF, that means disciplined tickets and founders helping founders.
1. What have been your biggest learnings at Antler,Houghton Street Ventures, Scalable Capital and Goldman Sachs and how have you applied them to your roles at Portfolio companies?
Goldman taught me markets are humbling. You’re never as clever as a good year makes you feel. Scalable taught me distribution beats a beautiful product, every time. And investing at day zero taught me the idea barely matters at the start. The founder is everything. So I push our founders on two things relentlessly: get in front of customers embarrassingly early, and only hire people who’d run through walls.
1. You were a founder before starting investing. How did you decide to switch sides?
I don’t really think of it as switching sides. I loved building companies, but I realized that the part I was most drawn to was the very beginning – when something is still slightly crazy, there are dozens of reasons it shouldn’t work, and you’re trying to figure out whether this person is seeing something everyone else is missing.
For start-ups and scale-ups in the tech sector, having the right team in place is critical. Product development, market penetration and securing investment all depend on having the right people, and so businesses in this sector generally act swiftly when the fit isn’t right or performance isn’t hitting the mark.
What have been your biggest learnings at Dawn Capital and HV Capital and how have you applied them to your roles at Portfolio companies such as Exein, LeanIX, Fonoa and Templafy?
Where to start… The biggest two are related. Number one, most of the big problems and eureka moments in a scaling company can fundamentally be traced down to people. It sounds so obvious, but it’s worth reiterating again. You either have great people in the right place in the organisation and things move forward or you have the right people in the wrong place or the wrong people altogether. What makes this hard is that this picture – who and where is “right” – can change rapidly as the company grows. Managing this while doing everything else that a founder needs to do is challenging and, also, many founders hate it or maybe don’t see the value until something has gone very wrong and needs urgent fixing.
Every serious business runs on financial data. It shapes pricing, investment, procurement and risk. Over the next decade, another dataset will start influencing those decisions just as directly: carbon data. For years, emissions reporting was treated as an annual compliance exercise, collected by sustainability teams and filed away for regulators, investors or customers. That model is quickly becoming outdated.
Q: What makes you lean forward in the first five minutes of a B2B SaaS pitch?
Clarity of problem and founder depth. Early on, I want to feel that this person has lived the problem and that they’ve spent time in the weeds with customers and can articulate not just what’s broken, but why it’s stayed broken. The second thing is depth: does the founder have a point of view on where their sector is going, not just where it is today? In my experience, founders who build things customers actually need do so by combining deep domain expertise with technical depth. In my opinion, that combination is hard to fake, and it is usually apparent early in discussions if founders lack in either area.
An introduction to Co-Founder Agreements
Starting a business with co-founders is exhilarating, but it can also be a leap into the unknown. When co-founders are aligned, things run smoothly. But what happens when opinions clash, someone wants out, or life throws a curveball? Without a clear agreement upfront, these moments can lead to costly disputes, potentially threatening the future of your venture. That’s where a co-founder agreement comes in.
