Continuing our series of thought leader talks, today at Stanford Business School the TechAviv Silicon Valley branch is joined by one of our favorites, Eric Ries. Eric is founder, speaker and author of Startup Lessons Learned and organizer of its highly acclaimed conference. Eric’s experience as an entrepreneur and insight into the process of building “Lean Startups“, a methodogy he created and made popular, has ignited a new startup movement and made terms like “pivot” and “MVP” standard parts of our nomenclature. He’s doing a greater good for founders worldwide by sharing his unique vision of startup agility and metrics and we’re honored to have him. Eric joins us tonight to give a talk and lead an open town-hall style discussion with 100 members.
UPDATE: Event video above (sorry about the audio, headphones are recommended), event details and photos here, presentation deck below:
Each year the grad students of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the IDC Herzliya come to NYC to compete live in front of the TechAviv Founders Club New York to crown the year’s most promising Zell startup. Each year the crop of startups gets more and more impressive. This year was no exception. The four startups selected to compete on June 8th were:
Hobnob – accelerates realtime networking in business events. The mobile app makes it easy for people to seize business opportunities around them during conferences. (Runner Up)
The Gifts Project – social commerce platform that enables users to give and receive group gifts. *Winner*
Wibbitz – converts static website content (images, headlines and video clips) into interactive videos in realtime, giving users an engaging overview of the website.
Trip Angels – enables travelers to experience destinations like locals rather than tourists by connecting them with like-minded people (Angels) living in their desired destination that help customize their trip.
A panel judges from the TechAviv Founders Club NY commented on each of the 4 demos before the audience voted for the top startup via live SMS vote. The panelists were Avner Ronen (Founder, Boxee), Tal Chalozin (Founder, Innovid) and Charlie Federman (Founding Partner, Crossbar Capital). Here’s Charlie’s post on the event.
The much deserving winner of this year’s TechAviv NY Zell Startup Compeition was The Gifts Projectwith 62% of the audience vote.
Here’s a rough clip (sorry, still waiting on my iPhone 4) of co-founder Ron Gura’s winning demo:
Tel Aviv based The Gift’s Project was founded in November 2009 by Erez Dickman, Matan Bar, Ron Gura and Maya Gura with a little family money and a simple vision; to help people share special occasions with family and friends by actively participating in a group gift without stretching their budget. Yosi Vardi chipped in in Dec 2009 and the company was off to the races. While still in early beta, the current Facebook App boasts over 10,000 active users who’ve given nearly 300 gifts averaging $54 per gift. If that’s telling of things to come, these guys are sitting on something special. Continued …
We’ve officially got ourselves a trend, or in NBA terms, a dynasty. Israeli’s are dominating tech’s brightest global stage; TechCrunch. Adding to a prestigious list of past winners (below), Soluto, the anti-frustration service for your PC, has won the first ever TechCrunch Disrupt Cup. This is arguably the most coveted “Top Startup” prize in our industry, and it was won decisively by the Tel Aviv based team of 23 that recently secured additional $6.2M Series A financing led by BVP Israel. You can now add $50K to that total. Here’s BVP Israel partner and Soluto board member Adam Fisher’s post about them.
To Tomer, Ishay, Roee and the 20 other rock stars at Team Soluto, on behalf of all your fellow TechAviv founders, MABRUK. You’ve done Israel proud. Enjoy the much deserved attention and thanks for keeping the spotlight on the startup nation. It does all the young startups behind you a great service on many levels.
Israeli startups should particularly take note of the non-techie positioning; “anti-frustration software” and Roee’s polished presentation skills, always a major factor in these types of competitions:
Finally, a hat tip to the other Israeli startups and founders that have blazed the path at TechCrunch’s annual events, taking a top prize every year since its inception:
TechCrunch40 2007:
Kaltura - Audience Choice Award (DemoPit Winner). Founders: Ron Yekutiel, Shay David, Michal Tsur, Eran Etam
TechCrunch50 2008:
iamnews – Audience Choice Award (DemoPit Winner). Founder: Nir Ofir
Trollim - Best International Startup. Founders: Raz Alon, Arik Filstein
TechCrunch Disrupt 2010:
Soluto – Best in Show. Founders: Tomer Dvir, Ishay Green
You always have to take these competitions with a grain of salt, and remember that success lies in building a great company, but its good to take a moment to appreciate the recognition of Israel’s brightest innovators. Great job guys.
It’s Mobile Madness at this Tuesday’s TechAviv CA meetup, featuring three Israeli companies in the mobile space that run the gamut of pre-funding to out-of-the-park successful – Amobee, DudaMobile and Geotrio. USVP partner Jacques Benkoski will round out the demos with his perspective on venture investing in Israel and Israeli start-ups. The meetup will be held [...]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Lisa Damast of Israel Innovation 2.0. Follow Lisa @lisadamast.
Israel’s largest Internet conference, TheMarker COM.vention took place in Rishon Lezion yesterday and offered three tracks: digital marketing, mobile and technology. The technology track included panels on investing in Israel with members of different investment groups and different companies as [...]
TechAviv’s Silicon Valley and Boston Founders Club branches are both meeting tonight to showcase and discuss local Israeli startups on the rise and some established companies innovating like startups. First off at MIT Weblayers, Cyber-Ark and Akiban take the stage, then 3 hours later, literally at the other edge of the country, SayHired, Puzux and Giraffic [...]
This Sunday, March 21st, the TechAviv Founders Club in Israel is dedicating the stage to a topic near and dear to most true entrepreneurs. We’ve all dreamt up ways technology could make the world a better place, and these three stellar Israeli startups are shining examples of what can be accomplished when the most innovative [...]
This is a TechAviv first; A husband and wife demo and they’re not in the same startup. Eyal Gura, founder of PicApp and wife Maya Gura, founder of The Gifts Project demo their buzz-worthy products this Tuesday, March 2nd at Google HQ. While not a member of the Gura family, we’ll let Assaf Benjamin of [...]
Lot’s of Israeli VCs talk up the importance of early stage investing but how many first investments do they actually make in seed stage startups and which VCs lead the walk rather than the talk? The IVC Research Center has released the results (membership required) of their 2009 VC survey and we’ve got some good [...]
Continuing our series of thought leader talks, today at Stanford Business School the TechAviv Silicon Valley branch is joined by one of our favorites, Eric Ries. Eric is founder, speaker and author of Startup Lessons Learned and organizer of its highly acclaimed conference. Eric’s experience as an entrepreneur and insight into the process of building “Lean Startups“, a methodogy he created and made popular, has ignited a new startup movement and made terms like “pivot” and “MVP” standard parts of our nomenclature. He’s doing a greater good for founders worldwide by sharing his unique vision of startup agility and metrics and we’re honored to have him. Eric joins us tonight to give a talk and lead an open town-hall style discussion with 100 members. 
