Roundtable Recap: September 8 – A View Into Israeli Start-ups
At today’s roundtable, we had a jam-packed pitch session with five Israeli start-ups.
Israel Startup Network (ISN), led by Arlene Marom, one of our affiliate partners, organized the event with us. Both the audience and the presenters had a significant representation from that extraordinary start-up nation.
In fact, Saul Singer, author of Start-up Nation had also helped us promote the event, resulting in a massive turnout that offered us a very interesting view into the early-stage Israeli start-up scene.
New Global Markets
First up, David Nordell from Kfar Ya’avetz, Israel, pitched New Global Markets, a solution for making it easier for banks to offer their customers global banking facilities. For example, say, Barclays has a customer in the UK who also wants a bank account in India. Barclays may want to have a partnership with State Bank of India and offer the customer an easy, seamless process to open the second account.
Easy as it may sound, this is a very complex process, fraught with regulatory issues. David is talking to major banks to validate his assumptions. I advised him to get a couple of banks to finance the development of his solution as service projects, with the understanding that he will build a product out of them. Intellectual property rights need to be negotiated accordingly. This will achieve both customer intimacy and bootstrap funding from customers.
TicTacDo
Next, Yossi Dan from Raanana, Israel, presented TicTacDo, which consists of an engine that can mine data from various professional networks and find high value business opportunities for users. For example, say, you run an alumni network, and you would like to create value for your alumni members. Yossi can, conceivably, help you achieve that.
The product, however, is complex to build, and Yossi currently has a few beta customers to test the effectiveness of what he has built so far. I advised him to run several networks through the engine and see what kind of value he is able to create. I would be able to advise further after we have some of the use cases and data from those experiments.
tapTank
Then Alisha Outridge from New York City, discussed tapTank, which she pitched as a B-to-C social media app for setting, tracking and achieving personal goals (health, career, financial, family, etc.). As I discussed her value proposition, it struck me that the business she is building is, in reality, a B-to-B advertising agency business, such that brands (example, Weight Watchers) would use her software and services to build and market a social app with specific goals (example, losing weight).
This observation, I believe, would require that Alisha rethink how to build this business. There is no need to build a consumer business here at all. It is a much lower risk and conceivably far more lucrative, B-to-B opportunity.
Sleeve
Ido Volff from Tel-Aviv, Israel, pitched Sleeve, a framework for social learning that he is testing at three Israeli colleges and universities. Sleeve has a digital notebook app that runs on multiple platforms, as well as marketplace, collaboration, and other features so that students working on a certain subject can learn with and from one another. They can summarize notes, sell them at a marketplace, etc.
Ido asked a critical question: How does a firm like Blackboard feature in this market? My assessment: If Sleeve is nothing more than a feature extension of Blackboard, then it will neither survive nor succeed as an independent company. Ido needs to rethink whether this is the best idea upon which to stake three, five or seven years of his life.
Timest
Up last, Noam Band from Jerusalem, Israel, presented Timest, an enterprise software product for testing which software applications are being used, how, what features are not being used, and then helping Training to teach the users how to better use the software. So far, Noam has tried to sell this to IT, although he feels that the better place may be to sell this to Training. The real beneficiary of the value proposition is a Business function or unit.
I agree with his observation, and advised him to go sell his solution to the VP of Sales, and help him identify how the sales force is using various unique and exciting CRM and sales force automation tools. The VP of Sales pays tremendous attention to sales training, has a defined budget and can easily pay for this if he sees value.
I asked Noam to go test this on 50 VPs of Sales, and then come back and discuss the feedback with me.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. Israel has a long tradition of entrepreneurial activity, and it was a real pleasure to hear from so many entrepreneurs. In fact, we had a completely sold out session today and will try to accommodate entrepreneurs who tried to get a pitch slot today to get scheduled in follow-on roundtables.
As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PDT on the following dates:
Thursday, September 15, Register Here.
Thursday, September 22, Register Here.
Thursday, September 29, Register Here.
We will be holding our 100th roundtable on Thursday, October 6 and are planning a special event for that day. You can register to attend here.
And if you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. You can also take the 1M/1M self-assessment test here. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note, that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships