Avi Eyal on Why Great Founders Still Matter Most in the Age of AI

**Avi Eyal** (0:00)
Very difficult to replace human ingenuity. It's very easy to have a system come up with all the permutations.
It's much harder for a system to decide which permutation is appropriate. And it's almost impossible for your AI to have the human ingenuity of the invention.

**Peter High** (0:22)
Welcome to Technoventure. I'm Peter High, President of Metis Strategy. My guest today is Avi Eyal.
Avi is the co-founder and managing partner of Entrée Capital, a global venture capital firm that manages approximately one and a half billion dollars in assets and has backed more than 100 companies across enterprise software, fintech, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, digital health and consumer technology. Since its founding in 2009, Entrée has built an impressive track record of identifying and category defining companies early, including investments in monday.com, Stripe, Coupang, Riskified and Deliveroo. Avi leads the firm's investment strategy, works closely with founders in the earliest stages through global expansion and serves on the boards of several portfolio companies. Before launching Entrée Capital, he was a technology entrepreneur having co-founded Cura Software, Insight Technologies and Zenprop, giving him firsthand experience building companies before advising and investing in dozens of others.
His work has earned repeated recognition on the Forbes Midas list, including his ranking of 43 in the 2026 list. In our conversation today, we'll explore what distinguishes exceptional founders, how artificial intelligence is reshaping both startups and enterprise technology, why effective boards can become a competitive advantage, and how Avi sees the next generation of innovation unfolding from AI infrastructure to quantum computing and beyond. Avi, welcome to Technoventure. It's great to speak with you today.

**Avi Eyal** (1:43)
Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me on.

**Peter High** (1:46)
It's a great pleasure. I've been looking forward to this conversation.
Avi, maybe we begin with Entrée Capital. For those who may be less familiar with it, can you talk a bit about the firm you co-founded and how you describe its points of differentiation relative to others in the venture capital yield?

**Avi Eyal** (2:01)
Yes. We were very fortunate to start Entrée Capital quite a few years ago with a partner of mine who we've been best friends since we were almost six years old. So the partnership extends many more years than the firm itself, and we were lucky enough to be partners in one or two companies that we started prior to Entrée Capital. So when we started Entrée Capital, we were really best mates and best partners and continue to be so to this day. I have a lot to thank for that. Entrée Capital, we have a tagline that we say that we back the exceptional to build the impossible.
We truly believe that we're trying to play a game where we are focusing on moonshots, on opportunities that ordinarily wouldn't be the businesses that are one of many that many VCs back. That I think has set us up for success over the past years and has given us our own edge and our own moat in an extremely competitive world where, frankly speaking, the big funds are far better capitalized and funded to invest in companies. We've managed to hold our own and we've done that because we've been a bit more generic in what we invest in, investing in people. We have a formula where we call it the Four Ts where the first thing is team, followed by timing, followed by technology and TAM.
We've tried to really look for the outsiders, look for the ones that find it hard to raise sometimes, but are great CEOs, great teams around them and make it a success.

**Peter High** (4:18)
Great description. Thank you so much for that, Avi. Talk a little bit about what led you to found it in 9 I mentioned in the introduction you were a multi-time entrepreneur. 2009, this is right after and still probably in somewhat the aftermath of the financial crisis, so a dire time, certainly the worst economic times of your life, of mine as well.
What was the inspiration to do so then?

**Avi Eyal** (4:45)
Around 2009, I had sold my last business, and we found ourselves in a place where, and it was a bit of a start because the first two years were writing a few checks and figuring out what we wanted to do before we actually launched Entrée officially in 2011
But we really saw that the market was underserved.
I think when Buffett says, when the time goes out, you see he's wearing bathing shorts. We saw that there was a need to invest in early stage at a time where everyone was fearful. We were very lucky because we had in the middle of the GFC, the global financial crisis, we had exited our last business and we found ourselves in a place where we were sitting with a fairly sizable balance sheet and we could take bets on our own. Our first fund was primarily our own capital and we were backing ourselves. We approached it from a perspective of wanting to be entrepreneurs and seeing that if we were going to start a fund business in the venture space, we wanted to use our own capital, we wanted to risk our own capital and prove to ourselves that we could build a business. If we could build a business and if it could work, then we would open and take outside capital. For us, it was very important to get the basics right. We were lucky enough to be surrounded by a bunch of folks in the ecosystem who were also starting out, their first funds and were very receptive to working together and sharing the risk, but also sharing each other's advantages and kind of the ICP of each fund of what they could bring to the table. And so we found 2009 to about 2014 or 15, that a lot of deals were shared and that allowed us to build a name for ourselves and deploy our capital in a more measured way across a number of businesses and back people we believed in.