Dan Ciporin will work with me on investing in new internet startup

Today was announced my nomination a bit everywhere in the VC / High Tech press (and now this is truely official). Most importantly Dan Ciporin was appointed Chairman of the Internet Lab of LightSpeed Venture Partners and Gemini Israel funds (Jeff Clavier “the radar” spotted it before anyone)

Who is Dan Ciporin? He was the CEO of Shopping.com that was sold to Ebay for more than 600m USD (i wrote about it then) and is now someone i am working closely with on this new project (a fantastic guy by the way!). I will also work with some other great guys (Danny Cohen and Tali Aben, as well as Jake Seid and Ravi Mhatre from LightSpeed)

I was appointed General Manager and i officially started May1st and of course i announced it to you right when it happened after i left ICQ

The internet lab is a joint venture dedicated to fund young internet israeli startups.

Israel is a great playground for high tech and entrepreneurship. It has a proven track record in building successful international companies. Security (CheckPoint), entrerprise software (Amdocs), mobile (Comverse), Semiconductors and Telco infrastructure have been historically well explored.

Curiously enough Internet remains untouched although there are undeniable success like ICQ and Shopping.com. But (call it web2.0 or not) entrepreneurs are starting to focus is attention on internet services more than in the past as they understand this is a great field for business.

There is a new wave of entrepreneurs that are understanding well this industry and that are building new models and new services.

LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab (LgiLab) wants to support those initiatives and be a proactive investor in that domain.

We are impressed with the initial deal flow and met already with many very interesting projects. I will be updating you on our progression on this blog.

We still have to prove that Israel can be as successful in Internet as in other domains.

• Can we build the next Skype or MySpace?
• Can we build international consumer brands with relevant business models? 
• Can we beyond web2.0 find companies that substantially will create value to users and shareholders?

Those are very important questions that we will try to solve over the next 2 years and for which we will have to invest a lot of energy. This is a great challenge too! But i think we can take it.

I feel so excited about it, and i am so glad i have jumped to that train, working with some of the smartest brains in the internet industry as well as getting the chance to meet some of the best entrepreneurs in Israel.

We were so busy from the beginning we did not have the time to build a proper website. But in the meantime you can check our temporary webpage and from time to time check out my blog.

Here the two articles in the Israeli Press (hebrew for now) and soon more to be added to that post. Here is the press release in English and below the print article in the Globes (equivalent of Financial times in Israel)

tags technorati : dan ciporin vc venture capital lightspeed venture partners lgilab gemini israel funds internet israel investment