somebody posted today on secret (referring to my & Alephs investment into yevvo) : תסתכל על זה אחרת, שמתי 100k מהכסף הפרטי שלי הסיד עומד להגמר והחברה עומדת לפני שוקת שבורה, אומר אף אחד לא רוצה להשקיע בהם, במצב כזה לעשות דיפ מהקרן זה קצת בעייתי i think secret is pretty amazing in how it facilitates open discussions about some topics, like what Yaniv recently did when he asked for feedback about lool. super smart of him. the one problem is that some threads get out of control, and some people post things that can be long-term damaging. unless secret finds a way around that, i suspect the value of open discussion will not be enough. also, there is a bug in usability here - even though i went ahead and reinstalled (after removing some 3 weeks back), i cant find that message and so cant respond. so ill do it here, in the open. in my mind, as an investor, there is nothing more important than ethics. as a founder, you want to know that your investor will be straight with you, pre / during / post investment. so i want to clear things up re: yevvo. i made the initial investment as an angel after they were at the junction and genesis passed on the deal. IIRC, i invested $25K. at the point when aleph invested $3M (more than a year later), yevvo had a competing term sheet at $1M higher valuation than what we offered, and had enough money in the bank account to have a good chunk of runway. moreover, to avoid any conflict what-so-ever, we have a holier-than-thou policy at Aleph. a partner that invests in a company where he has any shares (for any reason), is required to sell the shares to aleph at the cost he had in buying them. so even though obviously the valuation that aleph investment in was higher than the one i bought the shares at, i basically parked my money at a zero interest investment. as far as i know, there isnt any other fund with this policy in israel. we have actually acted this way a second time recently in another company. as for yevvo itself - there is a shitload of growth & other things to prove yet. their engagement stats are off the charts though. i did put my money where my mouth is. btw1, a major major part of agonizing before leaving genesis was the impact it could have on my portfolio companies. i am glad to say that other than 3dsoles (which was a $100K investment that i told Nimrod Rotem i wiped the day i gave him the money) they all either raised followup rounds or doing really well towards that. i stayed on boards and kept working with the founders. still, i know that being an orphan company is hard and i can only feel sorry for that. btw2, if i come out arrogant in refusing meetings, its because i dont think that meeting for the sake of meeting is the right thing to do when serving entrepreneurs. so, if any friend is on that thread, would appreciate if you posted it back there. also happy to answer (publicly, here, under my own name...) any questions. opening up the communication channel.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 17:55:51 +0000
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