Dean Meyer

After early years devoted to competitive sport I realized that my passion was working with brilliant people building amazing things. I had read Startup Nation as a teenager and it opened my mind up to this idea of startups. I moved to Amsterdam to play soccer and home schooled myself through high school. I was lucky, I only studied things that I was interested in—mostly math and computer science. I moved to Israel for college. When I was there studying I built a trading bot that made quite a lot of money. It’s a humbling story because I didn’t put the right systems in place and lost all of the money on automated trades!

During college I joined a startup as a data scientist. The startup had some success and I realized I wanted to get my hands involved in as many of these successes as possible. That’s when I got into venture. Eventually I opened the Tel Aviv office for a young U.S. seed fund. I saw a hole in the market to fill and was able to partner early with exceptional technical founders in infrastructure, cloud, data, AI and cybersecurity.

I’ve always had a drive to be the best, but I’ve learned that as you keep getting better, the levels keep changing. Ultimately it’s always about having fun and being with people you care about and doing things you care about.

I love spending time with founders who are just incredible at what they do, who help me improve the way I see the world—and to be able to give back to them. And I think you do that through repetition. There’s no avoiding getting in the reps. There’s something very unique about spending time with very special people who see the world differently. I look for people that have some real experience in a particular problem space and have solved problems within that space for a while at the highest level. Some of them go on to build something very special based on that domain knowledge that they’ve accumulated.

One of the things that wakes me up every morning is just spending time with people that are 100 times smarter than me. I’m always trying to see how things progress and how technology unfolds and the impact it’s going to have. It’s a constant obsession about what’s coming, what’s next, and how do we prepare for it?

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