In December 2004, 19 years ago, I started VC Cafe with the simple goal of sharing insights, resources, and perspectives on venture capital and startups (with a spotlight on Israel). What began as a side project has grown into a passion that has accompanied the evolution of the tech ecosystem over nearly two decades. My motivation for starting VC Cafe in the early days of blogging (Techcrunch started in July that year), was driven by a sense of curiosity to experience the back-then new tech, but also with a purpose: to provide news about the bourgeoning Israeli startup ecosystem that went beyond the conflicts you may read in the news. While the conflicts remained, my curiosity and my sense of mission remained and even grew. Today, as I celebrate 19 years of VC Cafe, I’m reflecting on the journey so far and the transformative changes we’ve seen over the past year.
Looking Back: A Year Defined by Generative AI
2024 will go down in history as the year generative AI truly went mainstream. Tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, and DALL-E 3 pushed the boundaries of creativity and productivity. LLMs developed quickly and offered startups powerful new tools to build companies on. It wasn’t just startups leveraging generative AI—corporates like Adobe, Salesforce, and Google integrated AI-powered features into their core products, making it ubiquitous.
As an investor, I saw first-hand how generative AI looked to reshape entire industries. From content creation to drug discovery, companies leveraged this technology to reduce costs, accelerate workflows, and unlock new business models. At the same time, we saw a frenzy of AI-related investments with over 30% of US venture dollars flowing to AI companies in 2024. Yet, 2024 also served as a cautionary tale: valuations skyrocketed, but not every generative AI company delivered tangible results. This reinforced an important reminder—tech innovation without clear product-market fit remains risky.
Highlights from VC Cafe in 2024
Over the past 19 years, VC Cafe evolved from covering news (a challenging task for a 1 man show) to focusing on the areas of interest for us at Remagine Ventures (the pre-seed fund I co-founded with my partner Kevin Baxpehler) as well as key trends shaping the Israeli startup ecosystem.
- Newsletter Growth: I started the #Firgun newsletter in 2020, in the peak of Covid lockdowns, with the goal of giving the Israeli startup community a reason to celebrate, even when everything looked bleak and to spread positivity. In 2024 the #Firgun newsletter has organically grown to 6,000 subscribers with expanded its readership significantly, fuelled by a growing appetite for curated insights into tech, venture capital, and industry trends. More on what is “Firgun” and why it matters here.
- Deep Dives: I explored topics like spatial computing, sports tech, B2B SaaS Benchmarks, requests for startups and of course my annual collection of Israeli startup landscape maps, helping founders and investors navigate emerging opportunities.
- If I may call out a few posts that stood out in 2024 (ICYMI)
- Seizing the Moment: Why Experts Believe Now is the Golden Opportunity for Investing in Israel
- The VC shakeup 2020-2024 and what’s ahead
- Cutting Through the AI Noise: How Startups Can Stand Out in a Crowded Market
- Generative AI: Opportunity or the end of media as we know it? (guest post by Kevin)
- Everybody is talking about AI Agents and Automation
- Israel’s Growing Generative AI Landscape – May 2024 Edition (our landscape published by Calcalist)
- The Magnificent Seven Invest $400 Billion a year in Frontier Technologies
- 2023-2024 B2B SaaS Benchmarks
- AI Agents: The Evolution of RPA
- The Booming Voice AI Landscape: A VC Perspective
- What comes after LLMs for VC Investments
- Israeli startup Landscape Collection – 2024
- How the pre-seed round made a comeback in 2024
- Requests for Startups in 2024
- If I may call out a few posts that stood out in 2024 (ICYMI)
- Community Impact: The VC Cafe Network on LinkedIn grew to 35,748 members, comprising of mainly investor professionals and entrepreneurs. Are you part of of it yet? Join here.
I’m incredibly grateful for the readers, contributors, and partners who make VC Cafe a vibrant space for ideas and learning. Thank you for being part of this journey!
Predictions for 2025: What’s Next in Tech and Venture
The prophecy was given to the fools, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to make a few predictions on what 2025 might look like for tech and venture.
- AGI in the horizon? Generative AI will continue to create value and will continue to drive enterprise adoption. As LLMs compete to get to AGI, we’ll see more groundbreaking improvements in model reasoning, real time multi modal AI that can understand and communicate back with video and audio in real time. Equally, we’ll see the bubble burst a bit – GPT wrappers that were built on hype with little tech differentiation will have a reckoning.
- The year of robotics: the advancements in multi modal AI are enabling the rise of humanoid robots. We’ll see more robots being shipped to consumers and businesses alike, starting with repetitive manual tasks.
- Consumer makes a comeback: for a while it seemed like VCs have distanced themselves from B2C startups. With limited enterprise adoption, generative AI found that consumers (or pro-sumers) are early adopters that don’t mind spending on new experiences and capabilities. Categories that were previously monopolies like search and social will open up to competition. And M&A in this space is going to grow.
- Big consolidation in venture continues: The number of active venture capital investors has dropped by more than a quarter from a peak in 2021, and about 35% of US venture fundraising is concentrated in 8 funds (!). As a result, we’ll see smaller, early stage VC funds like Remagine Ventures go back to the roots of investing in founders and making bets on big ideas that seem contrarian at first. The pendulum will shift back to emerging managers when this is done.
- The Trump administration will have a big positive impact on tech: It’s still too early to predict the full impact of the new administration, but the signs (and appointments) so far point for a favourable environment for tech, focused on keeping the US a world market leader. This means the returns of IPOs, more tech M&A, increased adoption of crypto and reduced red-tape. Let’s see. I referred to this in a recent interview series published by Calcalist.
Here’s to a hopefully much better 2025
The journey of VC Cafe has taught me one thing above all: ecosystems thrive on collaboration. Founders—surround yourself with advisors who challenge you and peers who inspire you. Investors—look beyond the trends and find the outliers who are solving real problems and don’t neglect investor connectivity. The next person you meet might change the rest of your life!
As we navigate the twists and turns of 2025, I’m excited to keep learning, sharing, and growing together with all of you. Thank you for 19 incredible years—hope to see VC Cafe continue to grow in the years to come.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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