Meet Brian Rosenzweig of Joule Ventures

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Rosenzweig.

Brian, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Born and raised in Savannah, Georgia; however, my mother’s family has been in Atlanta for five generations so we have deep roots in the city. In high school we relocated to Baltimore, Maryland. From there I attended Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana where I doubled major in Journalism and Jewish Studies with a minor in Hebrew. After college, I spent a year volunteering in Israel where I got a taste for what was, at the time, a budding yet dynamic startup ecosystem. Following my year in Israel, I came back to the States and lived in Atlanta for almost two years before moving back to Israel — living in Tel Aviv where I got my first taste of venture capital, initially working for a firm out of New York that was making technology investments in Israel, the U.S. and China and where I could dive him helping our portfolio companies with their North American-focused go-to-market. In 2010, my now co-founder and I, both living in Tel Aviv at the time, decided to launch our own venture fund – Joule Ventures – focused on bringing more sophisticated capital to Israel’s booming high-tech sector. From Tel Aviv, I lived a few years in Philadelphia, a few years in Chicago (where I met my wife) and then to Atlanta where we’ve been for nine years with no plan to leave. Today Joule Ventures is one of Israel’s premier seed funds with roughly $200 million in assets under management, nearly 60 portfolio companies, and access to many of the most amazing entrepreneurs coming out of the world renowned Israeli tech sector.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not. Anybody that tells you they were an overnight success is either lying or they never actually had to worry about money in the first place. My business partner Daniel and I didn’t take a real paycheck for years — focusing on raising our first few funds, which took 3-4 times longer than expected. We made some terrible investments in the early years that we’d never make again, but which taught us a ton about what types of founders to partner with and the red flags we should catch quickly in the due diligence process. And then we made some sub-optimal hiring decisions in the beginning, which we’ve since corrected, but had the challenge of having to rebuild our brand in the Israeli ecosystem, which was not easy. Today, we are firing on all cylinders and have a team that I’d choose to go to war with any day. But, as the old saying goes, you learn much more from your mistakes than your successes and the successful business we are running today is a byproduct of many missteps along the way.

As you know, we’re big fans of Joule Ventures. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
For the past 15+ years, we at Joule Ventures have been leading seed rounds in Israeli-founded enterprise technology businesses. If roughly 70% of our investments are in Israeli founders in Israel, the other 30% are Israeli founders already here in the U.S. Interestingly enough, we have an amazing portfolio company here in Atlanta called Arnica, which is an incredible group of Israeli innovators in Alpharetta that have developed the market’s only security-first Artificial Intelligence code review platform. More on that later though. Our job at Joule is to identify dynamic founders that are working on solutions to solve for growing inefficiencies within the modern American enterprise. That can be related to cyber security, data, Cloud infrastructure, human resources, communications, procurement, and so on. What sets us apart is three things — 1) We operate a partner-only firm, which means that whenever a founder is meeting someone from Joule, they are meeting with a decision-maker. The idea being that if we are going to be in business with these folks for 10+ years, why would we outsource the building of those relationships to a bunch of 20-something junior folks? This structure also creates maximum alignment between us and our founders, as well as us and our investors. 2) We operate with a bi-national infrastructure — we can source in Israel but have a massive network in the States that allows us to do things for our companies at an early stage that most other VCs cannot. This is part of what we call our value-delivery chain. And 3) We aren’t chasing ‘sexy’ when it comes to technology. We like to think of ourselves as being in the ‘business building business’, which in other words means we aren’t chasing headlines and flashy tech trends — we are looking for real solutions solving large and known problems within the enterprise world. For our investors, this is one of the most attractive aspects to our offering and a massive risk mitigator in an asset class characterized by high risk.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Interesting question. When Daniel and I were getting Joule off the ground 15-16 years ago, we never had any real mentors. Even along the way we never found people that were just genuinely interested in helping a couple young guys (we were in our late 20s starting this thing) that were willing to spend some time with us to help think through challenges. Now, we’ve got a few folks that we rely on as sounding boards, but building Joule was really trial by fire. In lieu of dedicated mentors, I think Daniel and I relied on one another in the early days — now we have Dafna as well who is a phenomenal talent and incredibly insightful. As a result of this experience, I find myself extra willing to help out fund founders or entrepreneurs who are looking for guidance. My advice for budding entrepreneurs is to talk to everybody — finding a mentor is not just about identifying someone successful in the field, but finding someone with whom you have real chemistry.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.joulevc.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrosenzweig/