An Exit from a Shoebox
The first investment check I ever wrote wasn't a check.
We were the pioneer generation of Ecommerce in Israel. Modern fintech solutions didn’t exist yet.
I flew to the US and went from bank branch to bank branch, begging someone to open an account for me so we could sell on Amazon too. Eventually a branch in Las Vegas said yes.
The business grew nicely and we were making $20,000–$30,000 a month. Two single students living on a $2,000 monthly budget - we had no idea what to do with that kind of money, so we just let it pile up in the bank.
Then a friend who was building a startup offered us the chance to be his first investors.
The company was called Weissbeerger, and the product: smart beer tables - everyone pours their own from a tap at the table and pays by the drop.
We did our due diligence. We went to talk to bar owners, and every single one of them told us to walk away. Nobody would ever put a thing like that in their bar.
We decided not to invest.
But we set up a meeting with the founders anyway - at least we’d share what we’d learned from the market.
We walked into the meeting to give advice. We walked out with a final decision to invest.
Back to the American bank, where the money from the business was sitting. The most efficient way to move it to Israel at the time was withdrawing cash from an ATM. There was a daily withdrawal limit, so it took a few weeks of daily withdrawals to collect the full investment amount.
When the money was ready, I put the bills in a shoebox and drove to Tel Aviv.
I handed the founders a shoebox full of cash, and became the company’s first investor.
Weissbeerger quickly moved on from smart tables and invented a new category - Beverage Analytics.
Years later, they were acquired by AB InBev, the largest beverage company in the world.