Viola Ventures' Danny Cohen on the Israel's exponential growth as a tech hub, building decision frameworks for picking, and managing a firm in a rapidly changing market

Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

This week we have Venture Unlocked’s first international manager with Danny Cohen from Israel-based Viola Ventures. Originally founded under the name Carmel Ventures in 2000, Viola currently has over $4B in total assets under management. It’s focused on early-stage companies in the fields of enterprise infrastructure and applications, frontier and deep technologies (automotive, IOT, AR/VR, drones), software, software as a service, financial technology, Internet, media, communications, semiconductors, and consumer electronics.

Danny joined the firm as a GP in 2013 after 11 years at Gemini Ventures.

It was great to have an insider’s perspective given how much growth we’ve seen in the Israeli ecosystem over the last five years—which includes a 6X growth in funding of startups!

About Daniel Cohen:Daniel Cohen is a General Partner at Viola Ventures. He has been at the fund since 2013 and invested in everything B2C, including Consumer Internet, e-Commerce, DTC, Games, and Digital Media.

He currently serves on the board of EX.CO, Puls, Splacer, Deep, Lightricks, Maapilim, and Ruti He was also on the board of Tapingo (acquired by Grubhub for $150M) and Origami Logic (acquired by Intuit).

In the past 15+ years worked closely with many of the best Israeli startups and personally lead investments in companies like Playbuzz, Puls, Lightricks, Tapingo, Adap.tv, Outbrain, Watchdox, Eyeview, Minute Media, and others.

Prior to Viola, Daniel was GP at Gemini Israel Ventures. He did his undergrad at Tel Aviv University and got his MBA from INSEAD.

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In this episode we discuss:

03:14 Danny's journey to becoming a full-time investor06:11 What is driving the growth in Israeli startups?10:44 Why Danny spends his time focusing on early-stage investments and how he finds edge in getting deals12:27 The Viola advantage in helping founders16:18 What Viola does to maintain synergy through their many distinct fund products17:44 Challenges around branching out into different sectors and stages21:22 Inflection points in Viola’s growth23:52 How Viola has handled generational change and fostered a growth culture25:29 The importance of transparency within the partnership28:38 What makes a good Venture Capital firm?31:13 The importance of power law in returns and what makes a great team and a great market33:11 Why picking companies has the edge over deal sourcing and winning when building a firm35:31 The most impactful career advice he’s received

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Danny. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.

Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com