He Built A $4 Billion Data Protection Unicorn—Here’s Why He Thinks AI Is The Next Dot-Com Bubble

0:00Have you ever wished you could clone yourself to get more done? Our next guest thinks that becoming an entrepreneur and investor is the easiest way to do just that. Welcome to C-Suite Unscripted. I'm Maggie McGrath, your host, and today I sat down with Ofir Ehrlich. He is the co-founder and CEO of Eon, a$4 billion data resilience and protection company. Ofir is a serial entrepreneur who successfully sold a past startup to Amazon, and his goal is to grow Eon into a$100 billion behemoth. He and I talked about exactly how he plans to do that. And along the way, we talked about why fun is one of his primary objectives for his employees and why he sees his work as an angel investor as a fun hobby.

0:47Let's dive in.

0:53Ophir, thank you so much for sitting down with Forbes. Of course, it's a pleasure. You are a multi-time founder. Your current company has$502 million in funding. And two, that's correct. A$4 billion valuation. You're quietly building a powerhouse in data resilience, data protection, backup solutions. Your company is called Eon. And I say quiet because I think if I were to go out on Fifth Avenue and ask anyone on the street, have they heard of you? They'd probably say no. Can you give the 60-second overview for what you do and who you serve? Of course. And as an infrastructure company, which is relatively, relatively young, and that's not very surprising because, you know, we're building the infrastructure on top of applications facing customers can be built.

1:42And we're thinking that there's a significant competition right now between all of those great companies building those AI systems. If you're looking at Anthropic or OpenAI or even Databricks or all of those kinds, Google, all of those kinds of companies. And if you're a company and you're using that, then all of their data coming from the same place. If you want to be competitive, if you want to have your unique value in this new world, you need your own data that you've acquired throughout the years, that you're continuously building and creating. We're trying to solve this problem. We're thinking that your data is your moat.

2:21We tend to collect all of the data that you have in your organization and in your history, make it secure, reliable, efficient, and usable by every system that you want to use. Taking your data, making it yours, and making it usable and viable. And this is what gave us the ability to be so appealing to so many companies in the world right now using us. Can you give some examples of the companies that use you? So some of them are very large fortune companies, which I'm always not sure if they allow us or not to say their names. Other are very public, like Chick-fil-A and SoFi and AlphaSense and other companies like that.

3:01Whether it's traditional enterprises having significant amounts of data and are very formidable companies, or strong technology companies which want to leverage their data in order to provide more value to the world. So for all types of companies that have built a significant amount of data across the years, we are there to make it usable, especially in the world of AI. AI is not the only reason to use that, but it's definitely a significant competing event to use this data. So I started this company as this crazy person starting a non-AI company in an AI world. And the tailwinds of AI taught us, the market taught us, that when we're making data usable, AI is a significant use case that they can actually leverage what we're building to use it with AI.

3:54So we're very fortunate with everything that's happening in the world. But our business is to take all of the data that you have, make it formidable and important and relevant for you. I'm glad you gave the examples of SoFi, AlphaSense, and Chick-fil-A because those are very different businesses. And my assumption, and this is purely based on stereotype, but also year founded, right? So far is younger than Chick-fil-A, let's just say. So I would assume that their data protection and data resilience policies are a little more shored up than a company that has a founding date that's comparable to Chick-fil-A, but you're serving each of them equally.

4:32So how are the ways that modern companies are lacking in data protection? And why are chief technology officers coming to you to say, we need your help? Okay, so it's CTOs, chief technology officers, but also chief information officers and chief data officers, and today chief data NNI officers. Our main compelling event, I think, was actually before AI. That was the move to the cloud. Even the cloud data centers that are not your computer, basically that's the cloud, someone else's computer. The cloud is in the basement. It's a relatively, relatively new thing that companies have actually just started really using the large companies around COVID.

5:13Let's say 2020, 2021, when they understood that everyone started to work from home, it actually makes sense to move everything to someone else's data centers to manage. And we're actually approaching those companies because in the previous company that we've built, we sold it to Amazon. And this was a company where we developed technology to build migration and disaster recovery to, let's call it, all companies leveraging the cloud. And then we had a front row seat, looking at all of those companies, actually moving to this new world, looking at people working for 20 years the same way, moving to something completely new, someone else's data center.

5:58And then they need to change all of their habits. But then it was a reset for everyone. So whether you're a traditional enterprise or a new technology company, you're all relying on this same new technology of the cloud. And it's less fragmented than everything else, than what happened on-premises before the cloud. So what we've figured out is that there's less fragmentation. It doesn't matter which type of companies you are, you will basically have the same gaps. You will house the same tools. And we're here to help you leverage these new types of infrastructure in order to protect and govern your data.

6:37Now, as AI happened and started happening really, really fast, it was another transition still going on very strongly right now. And it kind of resembles the transition that happened in 2020, but on steroids. It's way, way, way larger. So we're facing two transitions, not only of technology, but of skill sets and know-hows. And it's new for everyone, whether you're an old company or whether you are a new technology company. We have the same new tools, the same platforms, and we are here to try and help you leverage all of those new platforms, especially around your data. You talk about you've sold two companies to Amazon.

7:19You are also witnessing this. We are all witnessing this AI overhaul of the economy, but you specifically are building a non-AI company in an AI world. Which of those two things was the catalyst for Eon? Was it an experience with data or bad experience that you had as a previous founder? or is it looking at where the world is going and realizing what you said, that no matter what sector a business is in, there's probably a similar data need? It's actually our experience with data and our realization that we need to adapt to how the world works. And CloudOrds first and AI was second. And we're trying to make sure that we're leveraging both of these trends to the maximum extent, or to be more precise, helping companies leveraging those trends so that they can benefit and they can stay relevant.

8:10You read the news, you generate the news. If you're not staying relevant working with the top technologies today, if you're not leveraging the real revolution around artificial intelligence, you're not going to be relevant even in the next few years. And our job is, no matter what happens, we try to help companies. So we try to help companies continue to become relevant. If you were relevant three years ago, you have the opportunity right now, the world is reset. Even if you weren't relevant a few years ago, today you have the opportunity to become more significant. If you were significant, you want to make sure you maintain your significance.

8:49So we're providing infrastructure. We're providing data infrastructure to be relevant in the world of everything is crazy around AI. And I'm saying the word AI, but maybe tomorrow it's quantum computing and in three days something else you need to make sure that you're relevant and you have a competitive advantage and at the end of the day if you're a food chain or if you're a financial company or if you're an energy company or if you're uh any other type of company a consumer goods doesn't matter your data that you've approved throughout the years is the most important asset that you have and no matter what's going to happen we're trying to build a formidable business for the long term.

9:30So I want to make sure that throughout all of the trends that happen, your data continues to become your significant moat and value, and you can leverage everything that you've learned throughout the years and make it useful. You say you're a crazy person who's built a non-AI company in an AI world. I just want to drill down into what that means, because obviously you are working with companies that use AI or building businesses on the backs of it. Does this mean your employees don't use AI? There are no AI tools within your organization? When we started, we said we're contrarians. We're leveraging AI, but we're not solving AI problems.

10:05And then we found ourselves in a place that everything around us and all the problems that we solve are related to AI completely. So we immersed into being a hardcore AI company and started as something different in that sense. that our evolution was aligned with the evolution of the world in AI. I ask because I've also heard you express slightly bearish attitudes about the market and the valuations related to AI. Maybe not necessarily the technology, but kind of where we are right now. So I think you have said that valuations are too high. And at some point in the next two years, there will be a downturn.

10:45Are companies relying on this too much? Are investors pouring too much cash into this trend? So it's a very interesting question for me. I think that first and foremost, the technology is real and amazing and unbelievable. And a day before the ChetGPT moment, which was in November 2022, I wouldn't have imagined that we'll ever get there in our lifetime. So it's truly crazy. And as a technologist, it's even weirder for you to realize that it works and it works tremendously well. So I think it's real and it's here to stay forever. The question is about whether we are valuing all those companies in the right way.

11:25I'm not speaking specifically, by the way, about the anthropics and open AIs of the world. I'm speaking about many, many, many other companies which are tagging along for the right, I think. It feels like when you're saying you're an AI company, you automatically get a high valuation. That's how you feel, especially in Silicon Valley. And it feels like what happened in the year 2000 and the bubble then. Internet was real, as you see, we're all using the internet. So it actually happened and actually real, actually usable. The thing is that the infrastructure then was overbuilt. We actually, for some of those infrastructure, we just finished paying, quote unquote, just a few years ago.

12:03Because we just really used the capacity that was built then. The risk is that we're overbuilding a world in AI. If I'm correct, and I hope I'm not misquoting, five of them mag seven with revenue expected to be a few trillions of dollars going to spend more than two and a half X than that to build capacity for AI. And one of the reasons that the investors right now encourage them to invest a lot in capex, in building infrastructure, building capacity, physical capacity, data centers, because they think they're going to be out of demand. There are two issues. First one is, is there going to be really so much demand that's worth so much money that you're building?

12:52Are you going to be able to show return on investment on this amount of dollars spent on data centers? The other thing is the fragmentation. Before AI, you saw consolidation of data centers. You didn't see out of small data centers. You see just a few large clouds that are starting to manage everything. And it felt like everyone's converging to them. With AI, you have so many neoclouds. What are those neoclouds? Those are companies building their own data centers without prior knowledge, without prior infrastructure like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et cetera, have. and they need to build by themselves and they need to find electricity right they need to buy gpus which is harder for them it's a scarce resource and they also need to do marketing and sales so there are a lot of redundancy there so what's going to happen with all of those neoclounds i think some will survive i think the vast majority will eventually consolidate and as efficiency grows you need less and less capacity and i think it would be very hard to justify the investments that's happening right now.

14:00And as a result, valuations are going to drop for many of those companies. So AI is definitely real. It's an amazing revolution. The technology is insane. It's growing as fast as someone can do something. The only question is, are the valuations right? Your list of investors and your valuation would suggest that the investor community sees the financial opportunity here. But you've said something interesting. So again, you've raised$502 million But you've also said that raising money is not the goal, it's a means to an end. And it's also a loan that you need to pay back at either 10x, 20x or 100x.

14:39So Ophir, how big could Eon get? What's the market opportunity specifically for your company? Okay, it's very interesting because when I started this company, my greatest fear wasn't that we'll fail. That's easy. My greatest fear is that we'll be wrong about the thesis and we'll grind for a few years and then eventually maybe even sell the business for a few hundred million dollars, which is great. And I admire everyone who was able to build a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We found ourselves in a position with the right alignment of stars, with the right tailwinds, with the right backers, with the right team and with the right addressable market.

15:20we have a dress on market of maybe over a hundred billion dollars today growing extremely fast and i have a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a formidable company i i lost my innocence i've seen so many companies i'm a very active engine investor and i'm running my eyes every time someone is telling me oh i'm gonna build a i know a 50 100 trillion dollar company i believe today that is my one and only shot in life to build what is today likely a consensus by the investment community, a company that could be a formidable household name company worth$100 billion,$200 billion,$300 billion, even maybe what's fondly called Akilocorn, which is a new name for a trillion dollar company.

16:09It's going to take a very long time. I don't doubt it, but we have an enormous market opportunity. We've been able to build an extremely significant technology value, technology mode. We've been filing so many patents. We got so many of them already approved. We'll get to a few hundreds next year. We think that given the fast pace of the world today, given the growth of the market and the explosiveness of amounts of data, we have a real opportunity, real opportunity of building a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe even more. I don't want to say really maybe more because it's very hard to anticipate how many companies are there.

17:04But there's a consensus today that we have the opportunity. And if we're missing this opportunity, I need to go and live under a bridge and I can't show my face anymore. And I kind of like showing my face. So I better execute. So you put that pressure on yourself as an executive. But I like it. I think that's part of the fun thing that I have, that we actually understand that we have the right team. We have the right market. We have the right vision. We don't have excuses not to be successful. If we fail, that's on us. and I think it's a positive pressure. How much do you articulate that to your employees?

17:44I articulate it a lot and I think when employees join Eon, they understand that this is the reason that they come. We have ex-employees from Google, from Amazon, from Microsoft, from storage companies like Vest Data and Xtreme.io and from Wiz, like security companies and Palo Alto Networks. And I understand the size of the potential of what we're building here, the size of the market and in essence what i'm telling them and i keep repeating that is a message i strongly believe is i take fun seriously i try to bring the best people for the task best smartest people you can find that are very high caliber point them to the right place and make sure that they have fun and the reason is if you bring a lot of people and you have a lot of real processes and management hierarchies and everything, but they wouldn't enjoy, they won't enjoy, nothing will work.

18:45But if you get really smart people to want to wake up every morning and come to work and work with their colleagues and bring other people and solve very hard problems, then all the other things will fall in line. So my management philosophy is take funds seriously. and this is a soft KPI. I'm speaking with my direct subordinates and I'm speaking with them about how much fun do their employees have. It's hard to measure, but usually it's if someone having fun, you see that and if they don't, you probably see that as well. Do you see that in productivity or do you see that in the hours that they're logging or is it just the demeanor in meetings?

19:27I know you said it's a soft KPI, but how do you specifically? So it's not the hours. Hours doesn't necessarily mean people work a lot of hours. Doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing a good job. And productivity, especially in the field of invention, how do you measure productivity? If they invent just one amazing thing a year, it might be way better than inventing quite a few small stuff every day. So eventually it's how energetic they are, how other people like them, how they tell how much they like other people. How do you see them interacting with the group around them? How do you see them enjoying where they're successful on solving something?

20:14How do you see them frustrated if they're failing to succeed in the task that they have? How do they recover from that? so those kind of soft kpis are the things i'm trying to certainly measure but maybe at a high level understand whether we're on the right path or not and i'm also trying to be proactively asking and engaging whether it's myself or my direct subordinates that will speak with them and converse with everyone and that they manage and see that they're actually in the place that they want to come and want to go to work, want to build, want to make a difference. And they think that doing what they're doing in E.ON.

20:59actually makes this difference. Is this a philosophy you've come to only just now at E.ON? Or is it something you developed at one of the prior companies that you started? Actually, I started thinking like that in the middle of my previous company, when we saw that it's actually going to something that looks like a success. And I tried to think, because I'm advising quite a few other companies as well, and I'm investing a lot of companies. What makes other companies succeed or not? And one of the things I'm also thinking about is I never want to hire someone, even if he's really, really smart, that is toxic to the environment that people don't like him.

21:37And that is not easy to work with, even if they're geniuses. At some point, I'm a very analytical, logical guy and try to go back and look at patterns of what works or not. And then tried to look at other companies and started to dig in, speaking not just with the CEO, but with vice presidents for R &D and product and sales and marketing and others. And tried to understand from their perspective, who are their top performers and why? And eventually came to realize that for the vast majority, the top performers are people that are really, really, really enjoying what they do. So you can say, if you do X, Y, Z, they will enjoy what they're doing.

22:18or you could go the other around the same, make sure they enjoy what they're doing. I only ask about the hours because two founders who've sat in your seat in the last few weeks have talked to me about the hours that they work at their companies. And it is surpassing the nine, nine, six weeks that have become so popular in parts of Silicon Valley. And I've pushed them on this and they've both been smiling genuinely. And they say, we're having so much fun. We're there because we want to be. And I think that's a crucial component. If you're going to work hard, If you're going to work long hours, it at least better be enjoyable.

22:51So I think that this is the, you see people, Jeff, I'm paraphrasing Jeff Bezos here. In an interview, he once said, people are not feeling pressure because they work hard. They feel pressure because of uncertainty. They feel bad. And if you have the certainty and you enjoy, you will naturally work most of the time long hours. Now, I think it's a marathon and not a sprint. And you need to make sure that you're, especially with people with families, your significant other won't hate you and your kids will see you. And I've seen people going to work for many, many hours, but being effective, very, very small, small amount of them.

23:31And because they're 15 hours in the office, they're drinking coffee when they're in the morning. And then it takes them two hours, but say, OK, I have a lot of time. then they go to lunch for an hour and a half and say okay i have a lot of time then another coffee and eventually they it doesn't work effectively so some people are really good with working long hours all the time and enjoy that others simply can't because of how the personality is built and so i i know the trend of 996 and and further i'm hearing crazier things than that and you know Silicon Valley always has its strengths. I'm trying to count less count hours.

24:11And I think that this is a derivative of having fun. I've been talking about your past experience, but let's dive in just a little bit. You have a long resume. We may not get to all of it, but I was asking you about your first job, which was a software engineer. You actually said you started programming when you were nine. When you started your career, did you think it was just going to be in software engineering or was entrepreneurship always the goal? No, no. I thought I'm going to only do software engineering. And I remember my father telling me, why won't you become a manager? I didn't even think about entrepreneurship.

24:42And I said, no, no, no. I enjoy writing code. I don't want to do anything else. I'll write code for the rest of my life. This is what I like to do. And I'm really passionate about technology. Today, I laugh at it with my dad, but when I started, he said, I don't understand. Why won't you want to manage? Why don't you build more? I said, what I want to do is create technology with my hands. It feels like magic. For me, writing code is like poetry. And it's always fascinated me. When I was younger, I was writing code for 3D graphics and understood exactly all the math. and I understood exactly why everything I do does what I think it should do.

25:24But when combining everything, even though I understand exactly why and how every part works, because I built that, I'm seeing those graphical things spin on the screen. I say, oh my God, that's magic. How do you do that? And then I remember I did that. And I love it so much. I'm so passionate about doing something that you create and it materializes in front of your eyes. The only reason later that I started being an entrepreneurial manager is because I said, okay, so if I get more people enthusiastic and I can activate it based on what I'm thinking or my vision, I can scale myself and build greater things.

26:06So that's how it started. So from your software engineering job, you went on to be a researcher, developer, and team leader for Israeli military intelligence. What's one hard skill and one soft skill you learned during that job? I would actually focus on the soft skill and I'll tell you why. Hard skills are easier. The most important thing I've learned is that you can't be like the TV, a super genius working alone and no one works with them. The teamwork that you have to endure, that you have to create, the trust that you have to build with the people who work with you. The empathy that you must have for your peers, for your subordinates, for your managers is extremely important.

26:49And it's way more important than any other hard skill you can learn. That's easy. In my opinion, in general, especially around software, soft skills are too many times underrated. And I'm putting a lot of emphasis on soft skills. You've probably met a lot of engineers and we are all characters. And you want to make sure that you're able to make peace with that and be very relatable to a lot of people and understand that people are different, but have a lot of values. Sometimes they're different than yours, but the combination could be amazing. I will say I edit a project in the very first year of this project.

27:27It involved art, dev, design, every single different team. And I thought, as the wordsmith, I'm a good communicator. It was in communicating with the developers that I at one point turned to a colleague and said, I feel like we're just speaking two different languages to each other because we were playing in our own worlds and hadn't learned the soft skill of communicating with each other. So you learned how to work within a team. You were with the Israeli military until October 2006, but September 2005, you start DigiCash. So that was your first stint at being a founder, which you said you were trying to learn how to scale yourself.

28:04What was the biggest learning? I didn't even understand at the time. I started as a partial thing and then transitioned into a full-time job. And at the time, I was naive. I didn't understand the implications of what it means and that you have to build something in full time on late 2006. I converted to full time job building this venture. I didn't understand what building a venture means. I didn't understand what promises to investors are. We somehow raised$6 million for this venture for a DigiCash. God knows how. To this day, I don't understand. I think the entire world was more naive than today.

28:44but I didn't understand what's going on. I think sometimes it's a virtue. I would say ignorance is bliss. And you see that a lot in Silicon Valley startups with a lot of 20 years old starting companies. You know, we're success biased. We're seeing only the success stories. You don't see all the Stanford dropouts who started a company. Nothing happened with that. And you need to remember that. And the reason you see success is because a lot of them are innocent and they find out that they're really good at what they're doing, but they didn't really know that before. and starting this company digicash till this day it's very hard for me to articulate what is it that we've done we provided marketing tech technology that helped e-commerce sites sell more we didn't even understand exactly what it means what we're doing i thought i knew everything and will be able to do that because i know how to write code and my partner knew how to write code and he came from microsoft he was a manager at microsoft so okay he's coming for a big company I'm really good at writing code.

29:42Probably will be amazing. The most important thing I've learned there is that technology is not enough. It's very important. And we look at it a lot, but I learned much later in life. And that's, I think maybe in Amazon, is thinking for the customer backwards. You need to always start with not what I can build and then apply this technology to something, but what are the pains or the needs or the wants of the person, not the company. person, maybe it's in the company, maybe it's individual that I want to sell to, and then go backwards and then try to build something that will solve this pain, this need for this person.

30:24And this is the most important thing I think I learned throughout the years, especially in my first startup, which was DigiCash. I want to fast forward though. I was eager to get to CloudEndure because you founded that in November, 2012. You ran it as co-founder and VP in R &D for 10 years. It was eventually acquired by Amazon Web Services. That's right. You note here, this company raised less than$20 million from VCs, but was acquired by Amazon Web Services. Why was that important to say the less than$20 million from VCs on your LinkedIn about this? It's a very interesting question. Actually, I wrote it years ago, so I can't tell you I remember exactly.

31:01But what was different at the time when I built that, it's a rather unusual sum, relatively low to a technology company that got to this scale. What happened with us is that we built a company. I hate the name CloudEndure, by the way. I invented the name CloudEndure. I looked for an open.com domain and looked for a whole bunch of names. We're doing something with Endurance and Cloud. We said, oh, CloudEndure. Okay, let's find this domain name. We'll replace it in a few months. Till this day, inside Amazon, they still use CloudEndure, but never mind. And then the company existed for six years and then acquired for Amazon.

31:38So that's why it's 10 years. Six years as a standalone company and four years as a company inside AWS and then completely transitioned into Amazon. We've built a company where we thought we need to build an efficient, cashflow positive, profitable company. One thing I've learned, investors don't appreciate being profitable early on. They want you to be able to be profitable, but instead use money, leverage the fact that you're able to be profitable to raise more money and grow quicker. Investors appreciate growth, at least on earlier stages, way more than they appreciate profitability. And you see that with the markets now, everyone's speaking about Anthropic and OpenI, all of those companies saying, oh, they're not profitable.

32:23It's because that relatively, they're relatively early stage. Think about it. They're early in the making of this AI world. And investors think more of their growth and how they will expand. And they want to know that for the long term, at some point, they will be profitable. They just don't have to be today. In CloudEndure, we didn't raise a lot of money. We were$18.3 million. We were profitable. We actually never spent any dollar from our round A, which was the A and the B. It was actually almost the same round. It was$13 million. We never spent any dime of it. And in retrospect, we should have.

33:04And we should have raised more money. And we should have become more formidable as a result of that. Sometimes you would speak with investors. They would say, of course, I want a profitable company. And the question to investors shouldn't be, what kind of company do you want? but what kind of company would you tolerate and still invest? And it's not the same thing. And the reason is to say, of course, I want you to be profitable, but we also want you to grow more and we also want you to do other stuff. So there's a question, what do you really want? What do you really care? And that's a non-trivial question with sometimes trivial answers and you just need to understand that.

33:44And this is what I've learned from CloudAdoo more than anything else. We've built a tremendous business It was really good. We're profitable. Not only that we were profitable, after selling to AWS, we grew the business internally to over a billion dollars in revenue run rate. So it was a really good buy for AWS. And when people in AWS realized for how much we sold the business, which was according to newspapers, a bit over$200 million, they always laughed at us that we left so much money on the table. And the reason was that we didn't necessarily understand and how we're going to be measured by investors and acquirers when building and selling the business.

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34:56Interesting. So if you had to go back and do something different, would you have raised more money? Would you have spent more money? What's the biggest thing you would change? Okay, so it's easy to speak in retrospect. And, you know, when we are smarter now, have more experience, I can say a lot of things I would have done differently. I could go to ninth grade and get a higher, highest score in a test, right? I actually wouldn't change anything. I'll tell you why. Because this got me to wonder, how can we sell this company for this amount? And then I have friends with the cyber companies, not doing almost any money, just burning lots of cash.

35:30Maybe we'd have a million dollars of ARR, maybe selling the company for 200, 300, 400, 500 million dollars. How can it be? And this got me to try to understand how the world works. And that got me to start investing. investing. Which brings us to, you have invested in something like 30 companies? It's actually over 60. Over 60. Oh, okay. The email that I had was wrong. We could probably spend hours talking about what you've learned in sourcing these investments and what the founders ask of you. I'm just going to ask, what is the number one thing you look for in an angel investment? It's very simple.

36:11it's I'm investing mainly in team second in space the rest doesn't really matter because they'll pivot almost always when did you last see a company that didn't even slightly pivot almost never happens and what I'm looking in the team is grit is the ability to be you know aggressive and first of all and kind at the same time. And I'm looking for a complete team that have both technology, go-to-market, product, vision, all in the same team is complete. Because I think you can't outsource your critical component to anyone else. And if you have an amazing team in a space and there's founder market fit and the space is something that I think that investors would appreciate and would also want to invest in the next round, the next round, the next round, because the first round is the easiest today.

37:10Then I would invest. And you can see very differentiated investing that I did. In the earlier days, I did more controversial investments. Today, I'm doing more, lots of investment with Sequoia, with Lightspeed, with Greylock, with Index, with all the T1 investors. But when you go back on successes, you see team and space are really good. So just two days ago, one of my portfolio companies got acquired upon acquired by OnePassword. Just had breakfast with the founder of the day. I originally connected him with his investors. And really good founders with the right space. You look at the space, you see a lot of acquisitions in retrospect.

37:49You see good teams. You see comprehensively that they know how to do go-to-market and R &D at the same time. These are the teams that you want. So the world changes, technology changes, trend changes. Eventually, the team and space are the most important things, in my opinion. We've talked about how big Eon could get. Do you see yourself being an angel investor for the rest of your career? I love it. I think it's a hobby for me. And the reason I'm doing it, I'm investing in a lot of companies. I'm involved in a lot of venture capitals. I'm advising quite a few. The reason I'm doing that is not for the financial gain.

38:25It's not significant relative to other things. this helps me understand how the world works it's very non-trivial for a founder to understand what does they do they need to build how does success look like the worst advice i ever got in business is build a great business money will come what do you mean when you come how do you define a great business i don't know i have no clue you need to understand how you will be measured. And those who will measure you will be the investors, the acquirers or the underwriters. If you go to an IPO, you need to understand it now so you can plan accordingly and make sure that you put emphasis on the right things.

39:12For example, don't be profitable too early. Depends on the industry. For example, focus on generating more annual recurring revenue as opposed to one-time revenue or as opposed to a longer contract. Those are things that usually contradict and you need to understand what are you aiming to do? What's more important to your business? So that's one thing I'm constantly learning with interacting with venture capitals and with acquirers and likes. The other thing is that it's scaling me. I'm working with these amazing people. I'm picking with them when they have a critical decision to make. I give them my opinion, my data, my logic, my opinions.

39:52And then I see what they're doing. The great thing is I may be in agreement with them or not, but I'm not accountable to their decision no matter what happens. And then I speak with them again in three months, in six months and see what they decided to do and what actually happened. You have a simulation of life where you can see a whole bunch of decisions being made and you're not accountable for them. And you see what happened and then you can analyze in retrospect why. Then you can take all of those learning and apply it to yourself. and many of those things completely change how i think the example i gave you like profitability and what do you measure are examples also different types of roles as a new organization who is a really great leader he who is a great entrepreneur should they be a great manager should they be a visionary what is the important trait that they should have what is core competency that you should have in-house, what can you outsource?

40:50Those are not trivial things. And you see a whole bunch of companies. In addition to that, I just really love people. I really love speaking with people. I really love meeting crazy, smart, fascinating people. And those founders raise money from Sequoia and Lightspeed and Greylock and Index. Those are the kind of people that you want to interact with because those are crazy, smart people that think radically different than others. and how will you be able to meaningfully interact with them in other ways? So the best way for me is to be an angel and try to help as much as I can in critical moments because at the end of the day, it helps me become a better CEO and a better manager and a better founder, but also maybe a better husband, I hope, and a better father and a better person.

41:42and I think I would always do that because I just love it. It's my passion. It's my hobby. Other people have hobbies like knitting or watching Netflix or playing poker. I used to love playing poker. I don't have time today. My hobby is venture. That is a lovely place to end this. Ophir, thank you so much for sitting down with Forbes. Thank you very much.