The Journey from Startup Entrepreneur to Venture Capitalist with Avi Eyal (Entrée Capital)

**Evan Chesser** (0:03)
This is Evan Chesser, your host. I'm joined today with our general partner, Abe Finkelstein, and a very special guest, Avi Eyal. Avi is the managing partner and co-founder at Entrée Capital. Abe is a GP here at Vintage.
Avi has 20 plus years of experience in the technology ecosystems, and whether it's in investing or technology companies, originally South African, is that the accent?

**Avi Eyal** (0:32)
Originally from Israel.

**Evan Chesser** (0:34)
Really?

**Avi Eyal** (0:35)
But grew up in South Africa, lived in America, the UK.

**Abe Finkelstein** (0:39)
The story is already getting interesting.

**Evan Chesser** (0:42)
Anyways, you have a number of companies that successfully exited to private equity or acquires or IPO'd. I see you're on the board or seed investor at over 15 companies. You know, Monday, Stripe, Riskified, Funbox, many more stashed. So I will turn it over to Abe.
Yeah, sure.

**Abe Finkelstein** (1:03)
So like, first of all, thank you very much, Avi. I'm excited to talk to you on our first GP podcast.

**Avi Eyal** (1:09)
Wonderful to be here with you.

**Abe Finkelstein** (1:11)
Thank you. So for me, Avi is really a part of what I would call, or we at Vintage call the changing of the guard of VC in Israel. So what we've really seen over the last five plus years or so, there's a lot of new funds, new fund managers coming into Israel after the last recession. When it got down to maybe a dozen to 20 active fund managers, we're now been ramping up, and Avi has been a big part of that. But I'd like to kind of step back and just ask Avi simply, tell us about your background. You mentioned being born here, growing up in South Africa.
It would be great to hear about that from the personal side, and then on the business side, how you got into investing into startups.

**Avi Eyal** (1:55)
So I was born in Haifa in Israel, to a very modest family. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and my father was in the Israeli Air Force. My mother was a teacher.
And in 1976, I was born in 1970, in 1976, we left to go to South Africa.

**Abe Finkelstein** (2:20)
Just out of curiosity, anything you remember from kind of those first six years being in Israel back then?

**Avi Eyal** (2:25)
Yeah, so...

**Abe Finkelstein** (2:26)
It's an interesting time to be here, particularly with the... I don't know, maybe you're too young for 73, but...

**Avi Eyal** (2:30)
Yeah, so the two distinct memories I have of, well, three distinct memories I have of Israel at the time. One was in 1973, in October. I was three years old, and I distinctly remember to this day exactly how the staircase looked when the air raid sirens went off during the Yom Kippur War, and running down to the basement of the apartment block that we lived in. And to this day, that image is etched.
Our second memory I have is of being, I think it was at Telnorf Air Base, where my father was stationed at the time, sitting in the cockpit of an F-4 Phantom and saying to myself, I think I must have been four or five, and this was my dream. I was going to be a pilot no matter what, coming out of high water.
And the third thing I remember was just kind of the simplicity of growing up. Just no complexity involved. Just like a kid running around, going to the preschool. And just like a very innocent memory, I suppose. Did you get in contrast to the other two maybe?

**Abe Finkelstein** (3:46)
So what took you to South Africa?

**Avi Eyal** (3:49)
Well, my parents took me. So I was in Durban until the early 90s, probably when I was about 22, 23 OK.
My parents told me that like a good Jewish boy, I have to go to university and I can be a doctor or I can be an engineer.
Dot dot dot. And by the way, I have to pay for it. And that's kind of where my career started because I went to university. I won a scholarship from Atlas Aircraft Industries, which was at the time the military in South Africa, similar to IAI in Israel, the aerospace industries in South Africa. And I used that scholarship money to open a business, my first company, which was doing software development, building products. This is kind of in the days of Dbase 3 and Clipper 87 and things like that.

**Abe Finkelstein** (4:44)
Just where did that come from?

**Avi Eyal** (4:47)
My father was always entrepreneurial.
OK, so it was always trying new ideas and inventing new things. And I think that some of it came from that. And I think that growing up in the Jewish community in Durban, many of the folks there were entrepreneurs. And I think it kind of rubbed off a bit.