Lgilab

2007: a year of internet seed investment in Israel

TheCoils has a good post (in hebrew) that gives an overview on what happened in Israel regarding internet seed investments. 2007 was a very active year. Way more than 2006. I expect 2008 to be also an active one but many of those early investment will have to prove (including for our own portfolio companies) that a sustainable model is in place.

The interesting part of 2007 was that different models of investment were established in Israel and as TheCoils say, there is no Israeli VC that has not (tried to) put in place a special seed program to address correctly the internet companies.

If you can't read Hebrew there is a great table recapitulating the investment operations made over 2007 (click above to enlarge). The Internet Lab proves out to be one of the most active internet seed programs there. We are working very hard to make it also efficient and 2008 will be important for us in that respect.

Another trend i notices is that appetite from foreign investors (with no representation in Israel) for israeli startups: Mayfield, Spark, Mangrove (Zlio), Accel but also power angels Peter Thiel. And probably soon more (i heard about a deal or two coming up)

An important thing to spot is that many startups did not receive funding and probably won't. This is not necessarily a bad news: you do not always need VC money to succeed and you can build a very nice company without that (for example with angel money only). You can find some of those startups here

Finally 2007 was quiet in terms of M&A activity in Israel: all the attention was of course on Quigo (disclosure we invested in the new company of the founder of Quigo, Outbrain) that sold to AOL for 300+ m USD. Yedda was also acquired by AOL.

TheCoils should probably add also dPolls that was acquired by Toluna. 

2008 will reserve many opportunities for M&A as many startups will hit some nice milestones and some won't be able to pursue but still offer some nice assets to be acquired. The question will remain: Are we able to build giant internet players in Israel? I am not sure we will have the answer in 2008. Actually i think we won't. We'll need more patience for that.

2007 was a good year for the Israeli internet ecosystem and i think we are on a good learning curve. I am a bit concerned by the lack of developers and good wed design guys. But i am sure this will change soon. Really look forward for 2008

Technorati Tags: thecoils, internet, vc, startups, seed, investment

LgiLab / CRV comparison in Red Herring

A couple of weeks ago Charles River announced a seed programm called “QuickStart” in many ways similar to what we do at LGiLab (with a few differences). RED HERRING picked the comparison and published it in a good article. The only thing the article is not precising is that we starting 6 months before CRV.

 

 

Lightspeed Gemini Internet Lab’s Blog: day 1

That’s it! We decided to open our own blog. When we started thinking about it, we wanted to find a better way to explain what we do and share with whoever could be interested in our experiences, views and thoughts on the internet industry.  

A blog was a natural solution to this question. Blogs are a perfect format to establish an ongoing communication process too. Communication with those interested in what we do, Communication with those interested with what we think, Communication with those who share our passion. 

The new internet is a complex environment and as we found ourself, like most players in the industry, in a learning process we wanted to be closer to this new ecosystem made of entrepreneurs, ideas, companies, products, investors, thinkers ….A blog is helping us in doing that. 

Many VCs have already chosen a blog format to share and express themselves. Some of them are remarkably well written (like Union Square, First Round Capital…). In Israel too this starts also to be the case, but this is still a shy trend. 

This blog is the voice of several persons contributing to Lgilab activities and now also to this blog. We hope it will help our readers understand better what we do and how we work. We believe it will also be useful for entrepreneurs that are intending to contact us and meet with us. I realized that most people were reading my blog before joining a meeting. We think LgiLab Blog will be a better addition. We also think this blog could be useful for us and we look forward to your comments and reactions along with our posts.  

So what will we talk about here? We will discover it with you on the way, but expect posts about internet, web2.0 (we prefer the expression “new web”), startups, venture capital, Israel high tech and of course news about LgiLab. For information the pictures you see on the right of this blog are a selection composed of our own LGiLab photos and a random web2.0 tag from flickr. 

Hope you’ll enjoy.