Symbol is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups, primarily focusing on teams with innovative ideas. The firm offers support in ideation, validation, co-founder matching, and initial team building, even before the first funding round.

Symbol

Symbol invests $500k to $3.5M in the first funding round of exceptional Israeli entrepreneurs from all backgrounds, building pre-consensus companies. We are a generalist, sector-agnostic fund, investing in B2B, consumer, and enterprise tech startups.

We’re excited about meeting founders as early as possible and accompanying them throughout ideation, validation, and team building. Post-investment, we strive to provide personalized support to help them get from zero to one. 

Yuval Ariav, Symbol’s founder and Managing Partner, is an early investor in companies like Fundguard, NextSilicon, Assured Allies, Sightful and Approve (acquired by Tipalty). Priorly, he was co-founder and CTO at Fundbox and led Product at Onavo (acquired by Meta).

Which industry makes up the biggest chunk of Israeli unicorns?

(Hint: It isn’t cybersecurity…)

Turns out, it’s fintech and financial services.

Here’s my theory as to why:

Israelis are fundamentally very good at building products and systems that:

- Measure risk
- Analyze risk
- Manage risk

I believe these factors give Israeli founders an unfair advantage building these products and systems:

1. Risk exposure

Living in the Middle East comes with unique opportunities and threats. 

Israelis absorb the need to think in risks from a very young age —

Which later informs their approach to business problems.

2. Leadership experience

No matter your military assignment, taking a command role forces you to adopt risk thinking.

Formal command training emphasizes this kind of thinking.

Managing people, shoestring budgets, and high degrees of uncertainty in a military environment develops it.

3. Military and civilian intelligence 

Many (though not most) Israeli founders spent their army service in military or civilian intelligence.

Intelligence is an exercise in risk management — in terms of thinking, methodologies, and system building. 

Enough said.

4. Professional tradition 

From the beginning, Israeli tech has birthed companies dealing with risk management. 

Companies directly specializing in risk, such as Fraud Sciences, have been around since the early 2000s. 

That means hundreds of product professionals, software engineers, and others have been on the risk path for years.

In 2024, the Israeli talent pool is uniquely suited to start and scale companies that specialize in risk and risk management. 

Agree or disagree with my prediction? Let me know in the comments.

Another one from Buildcon, that’s just too good not to share…

About how sometimes watching the Golden Girls is the right way to deepen your familiarity with your customers, and the balance between methodology and creativity in growth marketing

Sam Stern (ex-Lemonade) knows growth inside out. Here, she shares the stage with Daniel S., Yehiel Atias, Amihay S., and wizard moderator Tom Orbach, speaking about The Art of Hustling (link to the full session in the first comment)

At Buildcon, we got a behind-the-scenes look into Wiz’s early pivot: 


After 200+ customer discovery calls, their team discovered a harsh reality: 

1. They didn’t understand their own features and value props
2. The product was disconnected from customer needs

Instead of doubling down on a losing bet, the team courageously voiced their concerns to the founders, as Raaz Herzberg shared.

They took a hard look in the mirror and questioned whether they were pursuing the right path.

They decided to:

1. Abandon their initial idea
2. Dive into cloud security (though it was a crowded space)
3. Leverage their team’s expertise in security from their time at Microsoft

Although they didn’t have all the answers, they soon transitioned from theorizing to actually building.

They knew they were onto something when potential customers: 

- Showed genuine interest
- Asked detailed questions
- Showed willingness to test the product
- Shared concrete and actionable feedback

The lesson?

Create a culture of candor, transparency, and shared knowledge, where employees are:

- Encouraged to admit their shortcomings and knowledge gaps (even if they’re senior)
- Proactively updated on product context and insights (ex. through direct involvement in customer interactions and regular founder updates)

If Wiz's team had played it safe and kept quiet, they'd be a cautionary tale instead of a success story.

It’s better to embrace the tough conversations early — as they might just save your startup.

For a young startup, channel partnerships are one the hardest things to crack.
 
At Buildcon’s Testing Go-To-Market panel, Ryan Daniels, founding team member and GTM lead A.Team, beautifully described a methodical approach to thinking this through and making it work.

A link to the full session, with Ori Lavie, Adar Hay, Adi Foksheneanu Gov and Noa Urbach, is in the first comment

It’s quite common for second- (and third-) time founders to pursue ventures that can change the world for the better. But sometimes things can get… well, messy 💦

Amit Mittelman, previously Co-founder and COO of Approve.com (A Tipalti company), went down that road exactly - he learned about the environmental damage of untreated wastewater, and wanted to find a way to better treat it.

His idea was to build a machine that turns wastewater into clean water that is good enough for most agricultural uses. Quickly, he discovered this idea was a tricky one to implement. 

You can read his full story here: https://lnkd.in/dQQm-PNf

״בתקופה הראשונה הרבה דברים הם לטווח רחוק הרי גורל, בלייב זה לא תמיד מרגיש ככה. אבל הרבה החלטות שמקבלים בשלב מוקדם יש להם השפעות נורא נורא ארוכות״.

רז הרצברג משתפת אותנו בימיה הראשונים של Wiz, שדאז קראו לה ביונדנטוורקס, נותנת לנו הצצה כנה ואמיתית לימים הראשונים כשהחברה ההכי מדוברת היום בתעשיה הגדירה לעצמה מי היא, ומזכירה לנו כמה חשוב להעיז ולשאול את השאלות הקשות. 

תודה רז!

Raaz Herzberg, Symbol, Yuval Ariav, Lia Levin, Itamar Eliash, Maayan Gottlieb

Jiga is hiring a full-stack engineer.
This is a fully remote position. 
The JD is in the comments, but Yonatan Wolowelsky describes it best.

It's easy to romanticize the early days of a startup that took a long time to take off before becoming a massive success.

At Buildcon, Ben Lang, one of the early employees at Notion, shared tangible examples of the truly unique ways in which Notion’s founder, Ivan Zhao, was building the company.

Here are two examples that have stuck with Ben years later: what customer obsession looks like in practice, and what hiring discipline looks like in practice.

The link to Builcon’s full opening panel, with Raaz Herzberg (Wiz), Ronny Maate (Mesh Payments) and gifted moderator Reem Sherman (Geekonomy, StreamElements), is in the first comment.

What does hustling in B2B sales mean? 🐈

Sometimes, it’s bringing your cat to a Zoom call with Unity’s CISO.

I got to watch Daniel S. from the sidelines when he was leading sales for anecdotes. He had not only a knife but a machete between his teeth.

Or in his words: “We emerged out of stealth after a $5M seed, and then a direct competitor emerged out of stealth with a $50M seed raised from Sequoia… and another one emerged with $100M in funding. So we had to be creative.”

Thanks, Daniel for sharing your insights in Buildcon’s panel The Art of Hustling: Getting Maximum Impact with Limited Resources, with the wonderful Tom Orbach Amihay S. Sam Stern Yehiel Atias.
The link to the full session is in the first comment.

Symbol Google Cloud Naama Yanko

"Get intimately familiar with your ICP, and by intimate I don’t mean demographics [...] but you got to think about the nuances.”

Jiga’s Go-To-Market journey is textbook material.

In Buildcon’s Testing GTM Strategies in Early Stage Companies session, Adar Hay, the Co-founder and CEO, shared some of his learnings about selling to an unconventional industry. Like understanding that they should target prospects who already use their competitors, and what it means for them to hire from inside the industry.

Adar is a rising star, and this is only the beginning.

A link to the full panel, with Ryan Daniels, Ori Lavie, Adi Foksheneanu Gov, and the seasoned moderator Noa Urbach, is in the first comment.

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