On resilience
Gil Dibner

While we strive to stay out of politics, it is impossible for us to ignore the fact that—as a venture capital fund focused on European and Israeli startups—many of the founders and teams we work with are based in Israel and, therefore, now find themselves yet again under a barrage of rocket fire. For decades, Israelis (and the Israeli tech community) have thrived under the unrelenting shadow of violence perpetuated, financed, and encouraged by an Iranian regime that spread its ideology of hatred and its tools of violence across the region and the world, including against its own people. Not only did this leave a trail of destruction, but it made it far more difficult for moderate forces in both Israel and Palestine to overcome extremism and achieve a peaceful, stable, and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. My sincerest prayer today is that the violence we are now witnessing will be a prelude to a better era: freedom for the long-suffering Iranian people, security for the Gulf states, independence and justice for the Palestinian people, and lasting security for Israelis from Iranian proxies, threats, and weapons.

For now, however, the conflict plays out on a human scale. A few of our Israeli founders are stranded in the US, unable to return to their families. Everyone is working from home. Schools are cancelled. Zoom calls are taken from shelters and safe rooms. One Iranian ballistic missile impacted about 200 meters from the HQ of one of our companies. Miraculously, there was no damage, but the cafe down the street was totally destroyed. Another company emailed us that two of their 10-person team were called up for reserve duty. A third had his home destroyed by an Iranian missile (the same one, I think). That CEO sent an update yesterday to his board: “We have already emailed (our) customers to inform them of the situation and assure them of our continued support. Technically, we can operate fully remotely, and the team has transitioned to working from home. [Major customer] go-live is currently expected to be delayed by one week from the original schedule. While we strive to maintain our roadmap, reduced capacity requires us to adjust our near-term targets. Unfortunately, we are accustomed to these situations... this too shall pass! Anyway, we are moving ahead with (almost) full force.”

To the Israeli founders and operators we are so lucky to work with: We are with you, we love you, we are proud of you, we are continually in awe of your resilience and strength, and, indeed, this too shall pass. When the skies clear and flights reopen (and they will), we will meet you in Tel Aviv for a hug and a hummus, and we’ll go back to building at full speed.

To our LPs: Don’t worry. While it may be hard (almost impossible) to believe the resilience Israeli people and companies are demonstrating—it is very real. Israeli founders see the success of their businesses as part of their duty to their country and their employees. We are taught from a young age not to surrender to those seeking to destroy us but, instead, to focus on our ability to survive, thrive, and rejoice despite the challenges. This resilience is exactly why we are so drawn to Israeli teams and why they have been so disproportionately successful over time.

I’ll close with a note from a Persian founder I worked closely with years ago in London. When the strikes on the Iranian regime were announced on Saturday, he pinged me from San Francisco: “Finally. Can we have that beer in Tehran soon?” Amen, my brother, amen.

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ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

AI Arms Race- In one of the largest private tech financings ever, OpenAI has secured a $110 billion funding round (At a reported $840 billion valuation), drawing massive strategic cheques from Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B) and SoftBank ($30B) ahead of an anticipated IPO. The scale isn’t just headline-grabbing — it reflects a profound shift in how frontier AI is being financed: capital isn’t just chasing models, it’s underwriting infrastructure, distribution, and platform leverage at scale.

Synthetic Trust- A recent HBR piece moves beyond productivity metrics and into something more fragile: trust. As generative AI tools increasingly draft emails, shape presentations, and even contribute to strategic thinking, the authors explore how perceptions of authenticity and competence shift inside teams. When colleagues suspect AI involvement, credibility can erode, even if the output improves. The article argues that transparency and intentionality, not just capability, will define healthy adoption.

‘While this might facilitate smoother interpersonal interactions, when we outsource the management of our interpersonal dynamics to AI, we may lose that important friction that often leads to breakthrough ideas. We lose the productive disagreements that help us see problems from new angles. We lose the human messiness that actually makes collaboration work.’

Scale Without Staff- Jack Dorsey announced that Block, the payments company that operates Square, Cash App, and Tidal, is cutting more than 4,000 employees globally, taking it from over 10,000 workers down to just under 6,000. The market response was immediate, shares jumped by more than 24% after hours, reinforcing a pattern that’s becoming hard to ignore: capital is rewarding automation narratives faster than it questions them.

The cuts are being driven, at least officially, by AI. Block CFO Amrita Ahuja said the cuts will position the company to “move faster with smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work.” Dorsey predicts that within a year, most companies will arrive at the same place.

Salesforce and Amazon are among a growing list of other companies that have made enormous staffing cuts citing the increased gains they are seeing from AI, though a Forrester Research report last month cast some doubt on how real those gains are versus the likelihood that many layoffs are financially driven.

HOW TO STARTUP

Risk-First AI- Asavin Wattanajantra's refreshingly pragmatic take on AI adoption that starts with risk, not tools. Instead of urging startups and small teams straight into the latest models, the article lays down a 5-step roadmap for experimenting with AI safely — tied to outcomes that are visible, measurable, and reversible. It argues that the hardest part of adoption isn’t the tech, it’s deciding what to change and what to leave alone.

The core playbook is deceptively simple: pick a low-risk workflow, set a clear 30-day outcome, decide where humans stay in control, make the improvement visible, and then lock the behaviour before scaling. What changes is not just efficiency — it’s habits: once manual fallbacks are removed, AI becomes the default, not an experiment. “Your goal isn’t to ‘do AI’. It’s to improve one workflow properly, see a real result, and build confidence from there.”

Outcome Software-  Eoghan McCabe argues that AI will not save SaaS through incremental feature layering. Instead, it proposes a shift from selling access (licenses, seats, subscriptions) to selling outcomes. The piece uses Intercom as a live example of repositioning around delivered results rather than product usage: ‘the unit of value in software is moving from tools to delivered work’. 

HOW TO VENTURE

There is no one way to win- Elizabeth Clarkson raises a great point in her piece that Venture is a power law business, but power laws are relative. A $30M fund needs a different magnitude of outcome to return capital than a multi-billion-dollar fund; these are fundamentally two different games, and there is more than one way to win in venture.

If emerging managers are responsible for an estimated 40–70% of venture’s total gains (per Cambridge Associates), why does so much capital continue to consolidate into the largest platforms? Dan G.’s new piece “Too Big to Succeed” argues venture may be over-concentrating. He says Funds I–III remain underfunded despite repeatedly showing up among top-performing vintages. He attributes EM outperformance to: smaller fund math, sharper focus, and differentiated access.

At the same time, in the podcast episode of Origins with David Clark (CIO of VenCap International plc), whose view is the direct opposite. David is a decades-long LP known for backing larger, franchise-calibre firms, including Andreessen Horowitz.

The new Pre-Seed- Euclid Ventures claims that it's time for a rethink and reshuffle of the seed stage, and introduces a new stage: Inception.

Stage names do play a role in high-level sorting and self-selection in our ecosystem. Euclid Ventures is arguing that we have reached a moment where the terms ‘Seed’ and ‘Pre- Seed’ need to shift, in line with market realities. The word “seed” is being applied to $500k SAFEs and $15M equity rounds. It spans pre-product, pre-revenue teams and companies with millions of ARR. Functionally, the term is now useless.

The new term they recommend using for what used to be ‘ Pre-Seed ' is Inception, as it typically contemplates a $500K–$3M check, written pre-traction, pre-product, often pre-deck, and sometimes before a team is fully assembled. The amount of capital has become a significantly less reliable proxy for stage, traction, or quality. 

The writers emphasize the investors crtical role in this stage: ‘The investor’s value at this stage must go beyond the check: it’s operational co-building during the months when the company’s direction is still being set, iterating at high velocity, and arming the business with high-quality resources and guidance.’ 

Portchain’s CEO and Co-founder Niels Kristiansen on why the conversation about AI implementation should begin with data quality.

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