What Does A Strong Partnership Between Two Early-Stage Investors Look Like?

Eze & Kevin have known each other from their days in the Zell program at the IDC, through working at  Wall Street, Google, a few more ventures & startups, and are now General Partners of an early-stage VC focusing on entertainment & consumers. Eze & Kevin are great friends and even better partners.

Kevin shares his entrepreneurial journey, including the day he had to let go of 30 employees, and chose to do the same for himself - the startup scaled up too quickly. That difficult day threw him back to 2008, when the big crisis hit Wall St. and from big dreams and fancy cocktails - he found his work as an investment banker was no longer meaningful enough and shortly after he was fired.

Eze always loved computers - even back in Argentina, where he was born and raised until the age of 8 years old. After moving to Israel - it was always important to him to help put Israel on the global map through tech and create global bridges, so he founded VC cafe back in 2005. This venture is ongoing, and recently Eze added the ‘Firgun’ thread - as part of his abundance point of view.

Kevin says his biggest strengths are optimism & inner drive, something that was also nurtured from his years as a tennis player. Eze describes Kevin as a self-starter, so their dynamic is that Kevin draws the first draft & concepts, and Eze does the fine-tuning & finalizes the details. That’s how they gain a complete and comprehensive understanding based on trust and respect.

Eze says that his strongest strength is his curiosity, that he is wired to see the matrix and connect the dots. Kevin says that Eze is amazing in the way he gives feedback & criticism, and that he has this inner ML algorithm that learns and develops all the time.

Kevin shares that every 3-4 years, he feels like he’s too much in his comfort zone - so he has to disrupt himself and learn something new or go through some kind of personal development. 

He recently graduated from the Hoffman-Kofman Conscious Leadership Program, where he gained a lot of experience and trained his listening & conflict resolution skills. Additionally, Kevin recently began  studying mindfulness and has since implemented various techniques into his day-to-day life.

A few of the mindfulness techniques include:

• Conscious breathing techniques - focusing on the inhale & exhale
• Body scan - focusing on various parts of the body and directing the breathing into those areas
• Focusing on the Here & Now, more being over doing in an unproductive way

Eze spoke about giving back to society & shared his experiences with Tech-Bikers, which is  a non-profit organization he established promoting long distance cycling challenges. The organization supports the establishment of new schools, libraries & scholarships in Nepal, Vietnam, Bangladesh and more. 

Eze & Kevin discussed the high cost and trade-offs of the entrepreneurial journey and how perspective is crucial to success. They also shared advice about the importance of cash flow and high margins and how as an entrepreneur, you should always have a plan B.