Eran Savir has been on both sides of the table. As a three-time founder with two acquisitions under his belt, he spent years pitching investors, dealing with ghosting, vague rejections, and the slow grind of building something from nothing. Now, as the Founder and Managing Partner of Savyon Ventures, a seed-stage fund investing in AI, digital, and commerce companies, he applies that experience directly to how he invests, and how he treats the founders who come to him.
The conversation he had on the IsraelTech podcast covers a lot of ground: the honest difficulty of starting a VC, what “real revenue” actually means, why Israeli founders are unusually good at breaking into new markets, and how the VC model itself is quietly shifting. Here is what stood out.
Starting a VC Is Harder Than Starting a Startup
This is not a modest claim. Savir says founding a VC is roughly ten times harder than starting a company, maybe a hundred times. The reason is structural.
When you start a startup, you have a problem to solve and a product to build. Investors can see it, test it, react to it. When you start a fund, you are asking people to trust a thesis. There is no product, no customers, no proof of concept yet. You are raising money based on your judgment alone, your track record, and your ability to articulate a view of where the world is going.
On top of that, fund managers are legally restricted from publicly soliciting investors. You can only approach accredited investors, which means your network has to be strong and warm before you start. No cold ads, no public fundraising campaigns. The hustle is almost entirely relationship-driven.
Savir built Savyon as his third fund. His first was a corporate VC in advertising and e-commerce. His second, Intango Ventures, went public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, raising around $15 to $16 million. That experience, navigating public market investors who think in terms of liquidity and multipliers rather than vision and technology, was a significant education in how differently capital thinks depending on where it sits.
What “Seed Stage” Actually Means
Savyon invests at what Savir calls early seed, meaning initial revenue, not pre-revenue, not friends-and-family revenue.
The distinction matters. A few paying B2B customers who found you through your network does not count. Revenue that came through because your uncle runs the company, that does not count either. What Savir is looking for is real customers who went through a proper sales process, paid real money, and have no personal reason to do you a favor.
In B2B, that might mean three to five customers, depending on contract size. In B2C, it could be a few hundred transactions. The number is less important than what it represents: evidence that someone who does not know you has decided your product is worth paying for.
This is a meaningful filter. Plenty of founders have enthusiastic conversations and warm intros. Far fewer have converted those into actual revenue from outside their immediate circle. Savir sees that moment as the first real signal that a startup has something.
The Go-to-Market Reality for Early-Stage Founders
Getting from your first-circle customers to genuine market traction is where a lot of founders stall. Savir is direct about this: most founders do not know how to reach second-level connections, the people who are one or two steps removed from their personal network.
The path, in his view, runs through legwork. Events, cold outreach, guerrilla marketing, showing up in the spaces where your customers are. It is unglamorous and it requires a kind of persistence that not everyone has or sustains.
Israeli founders, he argues, have a particular advantage here. The network density in Israel is unusual. If you are selling to software companies, there are enough Israeli-founded unicorns and scale-ups that the leadership is often Israeli, which means there is usually someone in the org who knows someone you know. Combine that with the cultural tendency to approach people directly without waiting for formal introductions, what gets called chutzpah, and you have a population of founders who are generally effective at working their way into rooms they were not initially invited into.
This is not just about Israeli companies selling into Israel. The same dynamic plays out globally. Israeli founders tend to find other Israelis wherever they are operating, and those connections tend to be activatable in ways that other professional networks sometimes are not.
Why Founder-Turned-Investor Is a Different Kind of Partner
Savir is not the first investor to argue that having been a founder makes him a better VC. Most investors make some version of that claim. What is useful here is the specificity of how he describes it.
His clearest example: when he sits with a founder who is going through something difficult, he is often one of the first people they call with bad news. In his view, that is the real test of alignment. Investors who have not built companies tend to hear about problems late, either because founders do not trust them to understand, or because they worry about how it will reflect on the investment relationship. When a founder calls you early with a problem, it means they trust that you will respond usefully rather than reactively.
The other thing he mentions is restraint. He describes a specific scenario: a founder sends a monthly update that is not structured well. The instinct, as an investor, might be to send back a list of corrections. But Savir knows from experience that the founder spent a significant amount of time on that report and felt relief when it was done. Piling on with detailed feedback when it is not necessary does not help the company. It just creates friction.
That kind of contextual awareness, knowing when to push and when to leave things alone, is something you tend to develop through having been in the founder’s seat, not just from observing it.
The VC Model Is Shifting
Savir sees a structural change in how early-stage investing is organized, particularly at seed. Fewer large generalist funds dominating the round, more smaller specialized funds writing smaller checks and co-investing together.
His own approach reflects this. He rarely invests alone. He brings LPs into deals alongside other investors he trusts, specifically people he describes as smart, honest, supportive, and unlikely to interfere unnecessarily. The goal is to build a cap table that functions as a resource for the founder rather than a group of people with competing agendas.
This is partly practical. A small fund writing a small check cannot lead a round alone. But it also reflects a view about what founders actually need at the early stage: not one big institutional backer, but a group of aligned people who have seen the kinds of problems the company will face and can help without adding overhead.
On Transparency and Business Ethics
One of the things Savir is most consistent about is responding to founders, even when the answer is no. His email is publicly listed on his LinkedIn. He answers inbound messages. When he says no, he explains why. When he is on a call and realizes fifteen minutes in that the deal is not right for him, he says so before the call ends, and offers honest feedback to anyone who wants it.
This is not the norm. A lot of investors ghost, or give soft rejections that do not actually communicate anything useful. Savir’s position is that this is bad business ethics, and also counterproductive. Founders who receive honest feedback know what to work on. Some of them come back later having addressed exactly the thing he raised, and at that point the conversation has already started from a better place.
His transparency principle is essentially this: investors need great founders as much as founders need capital. That relationship works better when both sides treat each other like people who might work together again.
About Eran Savir and Savyon Ventures
Eran Savir is the Founder and Managing Partner of Savyon Ventures, a seed-stage fund based in Israel investing in AI, digital, and commerce companies, both B2B and B2C. Before founding Savyon, he managed Intango Ventures, a publicly traded fund on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and previously invested through a corporate VC focused on advertising and e-commerce. He has founded three startups, two of which were acquired.
Savyon Ventures invests at early seed, specifically in companies with initial real revenue from genuine customers. The fund typically co-invests alongside other investors and LPs who are themselves tech founders and executives.
