Last week, Play Bigger’s Dave Peterson engaged in a lively category design zoom discussion with Jumpspeed Ventures, one of the top early stage VC’s in the Startup Nation of Israel. Managing partner Ben Wiener co-hosted the session with a group of early-stage startups founded in Jerusalem. Israel's VC micro-economy is of special interest to Dave, as he spent many formative years as VP of Marketing for Israeli enterprise software company, Mercury Interactive Corp.
Ben explained that VC in Israel can be very targeted regionally, with investment ultimately destined for one of the three main centers -- Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. He added that investment rarely, if ever, gets spent evenly across the competing cities. This regionality creates its own set of challenges for startups looking to design and dominate their own category.
During the chat, Dave and the crew hit on many key fundamentals for category work in early stage companies, the challenges and benefits of the dynamic Israeli technology industry, and conducted some on the spot category design reviews. Ben's team provided some challenging, user-case scenarios for Dave in a spontaneous, Shark Tank-like environment!
This session is the latest installment of Play Bigger’s Category Design Insights series. Look out for more from Dave and Ben’s Jumpspeed conversation in the coming days and weeks...
