User:Danalif/Eden Shochat

Eden Shochat (born October 1, 1977) is a venture capital investor in the Israeli Hi-Tech industry and an equal partner at Aleph. Shochat is among the founders of face.com, a dominant figure in the Israeli entrepreneurship scene and a serial entrepreneur.[1] [12] Shochat is also an active partner in initiatives to support and promote nonprofits in Israel, such as Geekcon,[3][4] The Junction[5], and The List of Angels.[6] He is a sought after lecturer in academic institutions and conferences dealing with the Israeli high-tech and entrepreneurship scene.[1]

Biography
Eden Shochat was born in Kibbutz Ruhama, and at the age of three moved to Nigeria with his family due to his father’s work. There he wrote his first line of code at the age of 8. He then lived for a short while in Liberia, and when he returned with his family to Israel, he programmed Nintendo games. At the age of 16, he began his entrepreneurship activities when he founded with his father Shells Interactive, which developed systems in a 3D environment and distributed interactive content on the Internet.[7] In 2004, at the age of 27, he was the founding partner of two companies. The first, Aternity, is a software company that develops systems for monitoring the use of applications in large enterprise computers, which was sold in 2016 at an estimated value of $60-70 million;[8][9] the second was Delavenne Enterprises, an algotrading company.[10][11]

In 2007 he founded face.com, which developed a technology for facial recognition. In 2012, as the company’s chairman, he was involved in its sale to Facebook for an amount estimated at $60-100 million.[12][13] Face.com was selected the ‘Best Exit of 2012’ Europas.[14]

In 2010, he joined venture capital Genesis Partners as a full partner, becoming the youngest partner in a venture capital firm in Israel. After three years leading its investments into Riskified, Monday.com and Joytunes, he retired from Genesis but continued serving in the board of directors of the startup companies he had nurtured.[15

While in Generis, he founded The Junction, a startup accelerator. The Junction is a sharing platform for encouraging entrepreneurs to advance their endeavors. Among others, Shochat was responsible for the facility’s content, which included lectures and enrichment sessions in Internet fields.[10] The accelerator saw the development of dozens of leading companies over the years, including Houseparty, AppsFlyer, ClarityRay,(acquired by Yahoo) and KitLocat (acquired by Yandex).[16][17]

After leaving Genesis, Shochat founded Aleph VC, a new venture capital firm, in partnership with Michael Eisenberg, with the idea to bring about a new and younger attitude to the Israeli venture capital arena. In less than seven weeks, Shochat and Eisenberg raised a fund of $154 million. The achievement was considered impressive, because at the time veteran investment funds in Israel encountered difficulties raising capital.[7][18] The fund was established to invest in promising Israeli startups and help entrepreneurs build big and scalable Israeli companies and succeed on the global stage. The fund invested in companies like CommonSense Robotics, Nexar, Colu, Lemonade and WeWork.[19]

In April 2016, Aaron Rosenson joined Aleph as a third partner, and in September 2016 the company announced it had raised a second fund in the amount of $180 million.[20]

In 2014, Shochat was announced investor of the year by Geektime Magazine.[21]

Work for the Entrepreneur Community
Shochat is involved in a variety of volunteer social and community enterprises aimed at supporting the Israeli entrepreneur community. Throughout the years, he mentored various programs and projects and, according to Geektime Magazine, he “did and continues to do a great deal for the entrepreneur community”.[16] An example of one of his endeavors is the challenge he presented at the Bitcoin Conference in 2015, where he called entrepreneurs to detect basic inefficiencies in cost of bitcoin transactions, suggest measurable solutions to resolve them, and build a business model along the lines of their proposal. The solution with the best performance was awarded a prize of $50,000 as seed investment in the company.[22]

In 2004, Shochat founded Geekcon together with Ilan Greitzer, Nimrod Lehavi and Gilli Cegla. Geekcon is a nonprofit that promotes creativity and innovation. Since then, every year hundreds of scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and artists from Israel and around the world meet for a 3-day technology marathon where they build useless products with the sole purpose of encouraging creativity. Since 2016, five Geekcon events are held every year, each focusing on a different topic, from medicine to the environment and animals. Since September 2016, the platform contributed to the creation of several Israeli startups and to business operations of more than $160 million.[4][23

In November 2014, Shochat published the “List of Angels”[24], a publicly sourced and edited list with the details of more than 150 investors (angels), including their contact information and investment interests. This was an unprecedented initiative aimed at helping the entrepreneur community contact relevant investors. In addition to the richness of the list and the fact that he made it public, the novelty was that Shochat decided to make it a crowdsourced document.[6] The list is available as a Google document, and anybody can add to it information that is of benefit to the community. Within 24 hours from its publication in Facebook, the list doubled itself.[25] Within several days, hundreds of Israeli users edited the list, which grew to include Israeli representatives in VCs, companies and international corporations.[26] As a result of the list of angels Shochat created, additional similar lists were created globally.[6][25

Shochat serves in the board of trustees of Bankinter Innovation Foundation,[28] the organizers of the Future Trends Forum. The forum comprises thirty leading research institutions in the fields of science and technology. He’s also a lecturer in IDC’s Zell Entrepreneurship Program and a board member in Ramot, Tel Aviv University’s Technology Transfer company. [29][30][31][32]