Dear Entrepreneurs

Aleph is about you. We, at Aleph, are here to serve and service you. Our singular mission is to help you build big, meaningful, lasting and transformational companies.

As Aleph’s one year anniversary approaches, we wanted to publicly revisit our commitment to our limited partners and entrepreneurs. Our five core values continue to be:

• Extraordinary and thoughtful service to entrepreneurs
• An activist work ethic on behalf of our investors and entrepreneurs
• Belief that different is better than better
• Complete transparency
• Candid mutual respect

Our goal remains the same. We insist on providing Silicon Valley level service, networks, access and advice to Israeli entrepreneurs to help them build massive, global and transformative companies. We focus on investing in true Series A rounds in Israeli companies and collaborating with Israel’s vibrant early stage investment ecosystem.

We expect learning, iteration and growth from ourselves — just like the entrepreneurs we work with. We believe in the ability of feedback from entrepreneurs to make us better and influence our visions of different and better venture capital. Many of you are taking us up on our open door policy, while others have enriched us through interactions at our rooftop events, at Aleph Bet and via direct emails. web page alert . We are listening and looking for ways to implement feedback ever more.

Since closing the fund in July 2013, we’ve seen that our equal partnership model is working. We provide direct and honest feedback to each other and we believe entrepreneurs are recognizing the benefits. These include the speed with which we can close a deal and give feedback, our ability to work independently but with extreme trust, and our willingness to take risks in unusual groundbreaking opportunities such as Windward, Freightos and YEVVO.

We continue to invest heavily in proprietary software platforms such as Ampliphy People, Recruit and our mobile app, Karma. In many ways, Aleph is also a startup and we are constantly iterating and tweaking to find investor/entrepreneur fit and gain 100% referencability from you, our partners.

In our first year, we have also confirmed that mutual education is fundamental to growing significant Israeli companies. Further, we believe mutual teaching and learning, as well as bridging to the best minds Silicon Valley has to offer, is critical to expanding the depth, breadth and longevity of Israel’s entrepreneurial community.

We believe the partnerships and trust we’ve experienced in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and with our portfolio results from our commitment to transparency and sharing. From our open office space to our communications, it is visible that an open environment is core to our culture. Everyone on our team is “in the arena”. We are trying to do the same on our blog, sharing both our thoughts and experiences openly with the community.

We believe in rolling up our sleeves on an individual and team level. We do not want to be the critic or the advisor. We want to be with our entrepreneurs, the true heroes, in “the arena”. In this regard, President Theodore Roosevelt provides a timeless statement:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

This is true of the great entrepreneurs of the world and, we would argue, Israel. We look forward to learning and growing alongside you, while providing extraordinary and thoughtful partnership and service.