Oren Zeev: How I Raised $1 BILLION in 12 Months | 20VC #888

(reversing beeps) Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Oren, this is such a joy for me to do. As we chatted about before, third time guest. This is, uh, very, very rare. But there's always so many things that I bluntly learn from our conversations, so thank you so much for joining me today.

My pleasure, yeah.

I would love to start, Oren, for those that missed our prior episodes, uh, first off, like one to two minutes, how did you make your way into the world of venture before we dive in?

So I started as a EE engineer, started as a research fellow at, um... and then I was just staff member at IBM. Got a business degree, got back to Israel. I, I didn't say, I was born and raised in Israel. It was 1994 and the whole venture industry literally started overnight and the whole industry was 10 people. And I was lucky enough to be hired by, uh, to, uh, to be hired by, uh, Apex who wanted to open, uh, operations in Israel, one of two people. That's how I got into venture. I spent 12 years in... with Apex, the first seven years in Israel, and then they asked me to move t- to the US and strengthen the, uh, US operation, which I did. I moved to the Silicon Valley 20 years ago, 2002, and I, uh, for about five years I was heading their tech practice and then, and then I retired and, or got fired, and then I really started the, uh, you know, the interesting, uh, part of my career which is the, you know, go- doing it my way on my own.

I totally get you and what a journey it has been doing it your way on your own. And I mean this question respectfully, Oren, but you're a little bit more seasoned than me, you've seen a few more crashes than me. When we look at where we are today, what's different and what's the same about the current crash? I'm fascinated given, you know, you've seen 2008, you've seen the dot-com, how's this different? How's it the same?

Well, it's very different from the dot-com which was like really nuclear because back then it's not just the valuations collapsed, it... and really collapsed, not 50%, 95%. But it's also that the businesses collapsed. There was no business, you know. You could be selling to a certain segment, you know, of the market and overnight all your customers basically go out of business, for example. So, um, that was something that I think is one in a hundred years hopefully. I, I, I hope I never see anything like that again. 2008 was, uh, not as, m- nuclear and b- big in terms of, uh, the tech, uh, industry. It was maybe bigger if you look at the overall maybe effect, uh, because it wasn't specific to tech. Unlike 2001, it was specific to tech. 2008 was much more general. So in many aspects the worst, but in tech it was not, uh, it was not as bad. Uh, but still, e- there was a lot of real pain. I think that today valuations were cut by 50% in the public markets, uh, on average, but most of the businesses are still f- going very strong. You know, most of my companies we don't see necessarily any weakening of demand. And, uh, some companies decide to grow a little bit slower because they wanna maybe reserve a little bit more cash, uh, but the fundamentals are there, the fundamental demands... If that, if, if there was a healthy business before it's a healthy business now. So, I don't equate, uh, the current crisis to those two big ones.