\u201cIsrael has historically had a phenomenal pipeline. But it looks different today, and not necessarily in a good way. Applying technology is a little harder for Israeli companies to think about,\u201d said Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director of global venture capital firm Insight Partners.<\/p>\n
Horing has invested in more than 250 companies worldwide and over 150 in Israel, including success stories like Monday.com, Wix, JFrog, and Wiz. With Insight Partners now the largest investor in Israeli high-tech, his advice to the room at Startup Nation Central\u2019s MNC Summit 2025 was that Israel\u2019s future performance in high tech will depend less on its inventions and more on its execution.<\/p>\n
In the early 2000s, he said, founders and investors often clashed over control and direction. \u201cWe could fight for weeks about who to hire,\u201d he recalled. \u201cIt was just a different approach, a bit more confrontational.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, that tension has largely given way to partnership. Founders are more collaborative and ambitious, Horing said, aiming to build global, independent companies rather than sell early.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first generation of entrepreneurship in Israel was about quick exits,\u201d he said. \u201cBut around 2010, founders started saying, \u2018No, I\u2019m going to run for the gold.\u2019 That created a very different type of exit environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of you are phenomenal inventors of new technology or pushing the envelope on new technology,\u201d Horing said as he spoke with Startup Nation Central CEO Avi Hasson in Tel Aviv. \u201cIn the area of cyber, it was second nature to you to think about the application of cyber in the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, he continued, what Israel\u2019s startups often lack is proximity to large-scale corporate users, like those found in the U.S. or Europe, creating a gap that limits understanding of real commercial challenges. \u201cIsrael has historically not had as tight a link to practitioners as other markets,\u201d Horing said.<\/p>\n
Thus, he continued, \u201cYou have to work doubly hard to make sure you get yourselves out there to understand what real-world problems look like. Because if you all try to solve the same intuitive problem, there\u2019ll be a lot of \u2018me-too\u2019 business plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe value,\u201d he added, \u201cis understanding how to apply technology to a business problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
That gap is one that Insight Partners now hopes to help close. \u201cWe\u2019ll have some answers maybe in the next two months to think about how we can help the ecosystem here get closer to some of the problems that we see in the U.S. that are unsolved,\u201d Horing revealed. \u201cI\u2019d love to help move a little bit more aggressively how founders think about business problems that are really sticky and transformative for big companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horing noted that the companies most likely to thrive will be those that truly understand their customers, highlighting a metric he believes is undervalued by most Israeli startups: gross retention. \u201cHow much of your business is predictable from year to year from your existing customers, versus how much do we have to do in terms of getting new customers,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf anybody\u2019s out there starting a business, and that number is less than 90%, I would rethink what you\u2019re doing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt may not be felt today. It will be felt in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the fireside discussion turned to whether software risks becoming a commodity amid the rise of chips, hardware, and other deep-tech fields, Horing refuted the claim. \u201cWe\u2019re not too concerned about software losing its magic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Horing conceptualizes the AI revolution as an extension of software: a force multiplier rather than its successor. \u201cAI is a form of software,\u201d he said. \u201cAI is just a phenomenal tool to solve new business problems. It could be five times the size of what cloud was, which was five times the size of what client-server was.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIsrael has historically had a phenomenal pipeline. But it looks different today, and not necessarily in a good…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[64,63,99,198],"class_list":{"0":"post-264165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-entrepreneurship"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}