Halfway Point

We’re now officially more than one month into the Israeli experience, and what a time it has been.  We’ve met the President, slept in Bedouin tents and hobnobbed at high tech and biomedical conferences.  Given this incredible diversity of opportunities, this blog has been largely dedicated to these amazing experiences.  Amid all of this, we’ve engrossed ourselves in six different technology commercialization projects.  What started as patented technologies have evolved into very strong business models.  We still have a long ways to go, but the feedback from venture capitalists, experts in the field, and of course Asher Epstein and Ze’ev Ganor, will no doubt help us get there.

On our first full day in Israel, we met the inventors of our technologies and our Israeli teammates.  In one short week we scrambled to meet with everyone we could, from the inventor and his or her colleagues to anyone with relevant experience in the field, in order to better understand our technologies and how to apply them in the marketplace.  From there, we’ve narrowed down our list of commercial applications from five to one and honed in on real market size estimates.  From our presentation skills to our business plans, every single individual has made marked and noticeable improvements over the last month.  The venture capitalists continue to poke holes in our arguments, assumptions and models, and we take this feedback into account every week.

While we are still a long ways from launching a business, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labor.  Our first presentations demonstrated how little we knew about our technologies, the industry in which we planed to commercialize them and the details of the intellectual property that protects them.  Since then, we have all become experts on our patents, performed extensive industry analyses, and become quite accustomed to the tough line of questioning that we receive during and after our presentations.  Our presentation slides are polished and professional and where it once took five minutes to explain our technology, we now have the pitch down to 30 seconds.

From financial projections to the final business plan, there is much work yet to be done prior to our final venture capitalist pitches on July 7^th.  With the training and mentoring we are receiving, I am confident we will get there.