December, 20218 Q. Can you kindly take us through your journey across several industry verticals? A: As a resident of Israel, I served in the Israeli Army for three years, and I established a military academy focused on training the next generation of R&D leaders for the various branches of the Israeli defense force (similar to West Point and the DARPA program). With this foundation, I joined R&D teams of various organizations, such as the Israeli Intelligence Corps, which is involved in developing various technologies in the army. And that was the backbone of the technical background I have in my career today. Later, I relocated to the U.S. in order to expand my knowledge and experience in the business world and worked as a warden for a business school in Philadelphia for two years. Following that, I joined Goldman Sachs in New York as an investment banker. My next step led me to join Cisco's corporate development team, which runs investment, acquisitions, and strategies for the company. Having spent a decade in that industry across different geographic locations, I migrated back to Israel to enter the venture-capital world and run all the investments and acquisitions for enterprises in Israel and parts of Europe. In this background, I decided to kickstart StageOne Ventures in 2013 to strictly focus on venture capital.Q: What would you say are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the enterprise startup space lately?A: We all have heard the mantrasurvival of the fittest and it really fits well with the world of startups. The current landscape has brought an opportunity for startups to establish a modern infrastructure, leaving obsolete systems for a much faster and efficient manner of developing solutions. However, Building the Startups of Tomorrow BY TAL SLOBODKIN, MANAGING PARTNER, STAGEONE VENTURESIN MYV EWTal Slobodkin is a Managing Partner at Stage One Ventures, where he specialises in seed and early-stage deep technology investments in B2B businesses. Previously, he was in charge of Cisco's corporate development (M&A/Investment) activities in Israel and Russia, as well as global corporate development for Connected Energy Networks (fka Smart Grid).Prior to joining Cisco, he worked on some of the company's data centre corporate development initiatives. He earned his MBA from Wharton in 2008. (Finance major).
< Page 7 | Page 9 >