Chemi Peres
speaker
118 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Chemi Peres’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So he told him, look, lots of people are leaving now IAI and there's this guy that I think you should hire him. So he called me and he said, look, I heard great things about you. I want to hire you to the company. So I have a problem with that. I'm not going to work for you. I said, why? I said, because I just experienced this humiliating scene, I'm not going to repeat it.
He said, will you meet me for coffee? I said, sure, of course. So we met for coffee. And he said, look, I'd like you to come and work with me. This is a company which is working in the defense industry. I want to move it into the civilian markets. It was dual use before dual use was used.
and I need somebody like you on my side to run the marketing, business development, those activities, and tell me what will it take to bring you on board. I said, look, the first thing is that I'm not going to be fired again. So he took out a white paper with a pen and he said, please write what are your conditions. I said, point number one, nobody can fire me from the company. He said,
That's fine. Point number two, I told him I'm a student, so I need to be very flexible. I need to be the decision maker about how do I allocate my time. He crossed another V. And then we talked about my salary and my terms, my employment terms. And that was the point number three, which he also signed. And then he had point number four. He said, we're going also to pay for your tuition.
I said, thank you very much. So I joined the company. And we were doing amazing stuff. I think that one of the most exciting part of my experience there was the acquisition of a semiconductor fab in Israel. which was created by national semiconductors.
They invested a lot of money in this factory, in this pub, and they decided that they want to shut it down after they invested huge amounts of money. Our chairman at that time decided to buy the company and gave them a proposal that was really amazing. And they accepted the proposal. We did not have the resources to pull this transaction,
So we went to the Israel Corporation at the time, which was a conglomerate, and we offered them to join us in this effort. They would bring the funding. They would get 40% of the joint venture. We keep the 60%. So the deal was done without us putting anything, but holding 60% of the company.
And the two guys that were running the pub, they said, if you guys are buying it, we believe we can make it profitable. So we went with them and the company shortly after went public, it changed its name to Tower Semiconductors. They did a great job and we took the company public and there was huge success for the company.
And then as we were looking for products to get into the civilian market, I started to have meetings with some young people that came up with ideas. but they had no way to fund it. So they wanted us, they heard about us. We went public and we did this. They thought that we are a strategic partner. They wanted us to invest in minority.
And I told them, look, we're not going to invest in minority in companies. Either we buy the company or we license the product. But for sure, we're not going to have a minority in the board seat. But I saw that there are great ideas and there's no platform to finance those ideas. So I spoke with the CEO, who unfortunately, a few years later, passed away of cancer.
And I told him, look, we need to build a platform to finance these projects. It can be done on our balance sheet. And one of the advisors of the company came in and said, look, there is a program by the Israeli government. It's called Inbal.
which is the insurance arm of the Israeli government, they came up with an idea or suggestion or offering that venture funds that will raise money on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange will get insurance. 80% of your investment is going to be protected. And based on those guidelines, we decided to build a company.
We raised $1 million from our own company, but also from some business people and a small investment bank that was active in Israel. And that $1 million was enough in terms of equity to take a company public at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. We raised $7 million on top of it.
And that's how I started the first fund, which was MoFed, which means industrial R&D exemplar in a free translation, but also the initials of industrial R&D. And I started to invest in young companies, Very inexperienced. And it was an amazing ride. I did it as a part-time job on top of what I did in the company.
But I fell in love with the founders, with the vision, with the broad view of different things you can do. And at some point in time, I said, I want to move full-time to run the fund. And they agreed. So that's what I did.
Beginning of the 90s, yes. The public offering was on January 1993. By the way, on March 1993... They raised the qualification for IPO to $3 million in equity. We were able to go on January, which was the last, actually, the last IPO. And ever since I'm doing this for my main business activity as a venture capitalist, investing in startups,
So first of all, I was in an operating company for five years and I observed how it's done and I was part of the management of the company. I was not the CEO, but I was very close. And I had a lot of influence on things that we've done. But I always felt that I'm much more intrigued by vision, strategy, creation than operation. I thought operation, other people can do better than me.
I'm not the greatest operator in the world. That's something that I always wanted to look at new things, to explore new frontiers, to engage with new technologies, to meet other people. So I felt that venture is better for me. It's more fulfilling.
And as a matter of fact, also, I felt that, you know, in 1973, when Israel was taken by surprise in the Yom Kippur War, what happened to Israel in the course of 10 years, from 73 to actually 84, 11 years, What happened is that the burden of security was so high. And at that time, Israel did not have the high tech sector. And what happened to our economy is that it imploded, it crashed.
We reached 450% inflation rate. And I felt that the future of Israel depends on its ability to create a vibrant economy. And I felt that since we don't have natural resources, the only way for us to do it is by creating startup companies that will scale. And that will be the driver of our economy.
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