Yaron’s Blog

It’s nothing less than astonishing what a country the size of New Jersey and in a perpetual state of survival and hourly radio “hicon” has been able to produce in 60 short years. The Israeli high tech community is a shining beacon of our tiny country’s tenacious entrepreneurial spirit and it has become the breeding ground of many of the world’s leading talent, technologies and companies.

Next Weds, May 14th at 6:30pm at the Chrysler building offices of Blank Rome, 150 NY Israel Tech members are gathering for a special event. The current class of IDC Herzelia University’s prestigious Zell Entrepreneurship Program is coming from Israel to share an evening with our group. Three of the top student startups; Joongel, Wizario and IDAREU, will present their stealth projects to the group. Attendance, as always, is free thanks to our sponsors, Sunshine Suites and Blank Rome.

RSVP NOW (Space is limited to 150)

Party like a 60 year old tonight! See you next week.

This Friday the Pandos and blip.tv crew met on the hallowed fields of High Velocity for a friendly death match of Paintball. Pics here and here. (Cheers Hiro & Angus). Some healthy pre-match trash talking was followed by some mid-match stake raising; Losing team has to finish up an upcoming integration (hawt) between the companies. Paint flew, dogs and beer were devoured and bruises remain. Don’t be fooled by the smiley faces, the shit hurts ya’ll. I look like I have over-sized chicken pocks. At the end of the day, and after some last second controversy (something about grenades and surrender), the blippers pulled off a stinging victory, aided by three Pandos that had to switch sides, including yours truly, in order to balance out the teams. Good times friends. Good times.

This week I was featured in a documentary by Oshrat Kotler on Channel 10 in Israel. The documentary looks at the alarming trend of Israel’s brightest talents leaving to pursue their dreams and careers abroad. I don’t exactly fit that mold in that 1) I’m not that bright and 2) I’m Israeli but grew up in the US. I was interviewed for founding Pando and supporting the Israeli high tech community by facilitating experience sharing of high tech entrepreneurs outside of Israel so that we can birth and build successful global companies in Israel. The growing “brain-drain” in Israel is very troubling. Many leading GDP countries create strong incentives for their talent to return. Israel needs to step up as well or risk losing our most precious asset. As Israeli entrepreneurs we can take the lead by bringing our experience back home.

Last week Scott Heiferman, Meetup.com’s founder and CEO invited me to talk to his company about my experience building NY Video 2.0 and NY Israel Tech, the two meetup groups I organize. I’m not only a fan of Scott’s, Meetup.com as a company is inspirational to me, so I gladly accepted the invitation. We spent a couple of hours together but the gist of my message to the 60+ team at Meetup.com is that what they’ve built is something that I aspire to; a technology platform that brings people together for a common greater good. Meetup.com leverages the inherently linked nature of the web to facilitate offline human contact. How right. In the case of my groups, we bring together entrepreneurs to help each other by sharing their dreams and experience. There is no way we would have grown to over 2,000 peers without Meetup.com. Thank you Scott and crew.

Today was a special day, a day of firsts. It feels like I’m having many of those lately. What a great feeling. Today was the first board meeting of Aprigo, a new startup headed by a long time friend, Gil Zimmermann. It was also my first board meeting as a Director. I’ve always sat on the entrepreneur’s side of the table so this is a great new experience and enlightening perspective for me on the dynamics of a board meeting. Dorin Miller of Cedar Fund rounds out our Board of Directors.

Gil handled the meeting with the precision, poise and confidence of a seasoned CEO. You wouldn’t know it was his first time. This guy is going places. I first met Gil back at BackWeb where he worked for me as a Product Manager. You could tell back then the kid had potential, but I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the professional trajectory he’s on. I’ve met a handful of executives that possess the deep business, product and personal acumen necessary to move mountains. Gil, at only the beginning of his CEO career, is one of them.

Aprigo is a winner and I’m honored to serve on its board. Stay tuned on their blog or at www.aprigo.com.

Today is my first day at my new office. I’m pumped! I’m renting space at Sunshine a killer shared office space for startups in New York that’s run by some friends. There are hundreds of startups in the three Sunshine buildings in the city. I’m in the new Tribeca location on 12 Desbrosses St. Vibe here is amazing. Its a great deal for young startups that need the flexibility to rent space on a monthly basis and upsize/downsize quickly. I have a quad (4 person cube) right now. Neighbors are Jango. Great guys. I take a 7 minute Ferry ride and walk to work. Beautiful day today. Life is good ya’ll.

Literally the day I posted about my last full-time day at Pando, the Wall Street Journal and several other newspapers wrote articles about the Labor Department reporting that February job cuts in the US were the largest in 5 years, signaling that our recession has begun. Whether you believe the US is already in a recession or not, few would argue that we’re at the onset of a down market and its going to get ugly for Internet startups without revenue or cash reserves. I love down markets. Down markets are when the really big opportunities are quietly hatched. When the weak of stomach pause, those who dare capitalize most by making a splash in still waters. Ask any aspiring real estate mogul. Now is the time to innovate and break away from the pack.

My friends I have a special personal announcement to make today. Four years ago, on this day, I started working on an idea to change the way people and companies move and monetize high quality video online. That idea, which became a reality thanks to my co-founders Laird and Robert, our superstar team and some brave investors, blossomed into my greatest professional achievement to-date; Pando Networks. Today, with over 17 million users worldwide and media giants such as NBC as customers, Pando is a leader in the exciting Peer-Assisted Content Delivery space. We’re helping to standardize P2P so that it works for everyone and more importantly to ensure that our aging Internet doesn’t buckle under the tsunami of high quality video coming online. We’re also helping family and friends stay connected by sharing their life moments and creativity across continents with full-screen, full-length personal videos and media. Your enthusiastic feedback and support over the years has been my greatest daily reward. Thank you.

Pando has always been more than a job for me. It’s my baby and my passion. I’ve given it the best four years of my life and it has given me more than I could have imagined both personally and professionally. It now gives me great pride to realize that we’ve brought the company to a point where I can move on to my next crazy idea with the confidence that Pando is not only at the best place that its ever been, but that its being run by dear friends that are uniquely capable of taking it to the next level. Exciting things are ahead this year for Pando.

It’s with a mixture of sentimental reflection, deep gratitude and building forward excitement that today I announce my last full-time day at Pando. I’m jumping back in the water again and starting to work on my next company. I am transitioning from my day-to-day role as Pando’s CMO but will remain an active advisor, joining our distinguished advisory board. I will continue to help the company realize our ambitious mission of creating a new Internet infrastructure standard for efficient, secure and commercially viable rich media delivery. We’re at the right spot, at the right time, with the right people to do it.

So what’s next for me? First of all, a one-week vacation! I’ll be blogging about my new company on this blog in a few months so feel free to subscribe, but for now I’m going into stealth mode. I’ll still be organizing NY Video 2.0 and NY Israel Tech; two startup peer groups whose 2,000 creative thinkers have inspired me to get back out there again.

Stay in touch! (No really)
I’m always available at yaron@pando.com or my personal email address and you can find me online at LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr.

Onward and upward!