Lyron Bentovim, CEO of The Glimpse Group, shares his journey of co-founding a hedge fund and raising capital for an immersive tech platform, ultimately.
Lyron Bentovim, CEO of The Glimpse Group, shares his journey of co-founding a hedge fund and raising capital for an immersive tech platform, ultimately taking the company public. The discussion covers scaling, financing, and the IPO process for startups.
Don't give up. Any challenge you see, just assume it's an obstacle to go around. Be creative. Solve around those and good things will happen. [music] All right. Hello everyone and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So today we actually have a really amazing, you know, founder with us. A founder that has done it multiple times. We're going to be learning the building, the scaling, financing, I mean all the above. Even taking companies public, what it is to to to be part of cycles, different tech cycles, the glimpse of really getting companies off the ground, as well as the difference between starting a company in your 20s versus maybe, you know, in your 40s or 50s, which is not the same thing. So, brace yourself for quite the inspiring conversation today. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Lon Ventim. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Alejandra. Pleasure to be
here. looking forward to a great conversation. >> So, born in startup land, startup nation, and you also walk through memory lane. How is life growing up for you? >> Well, kind of a kind of you grew up in Israel. You basically uh have startup in your vein. So, uh it's uh it's part of the culture starting things. It's kind of taking risk and uh and succeeding. And that's kind of what I've been doing all my career. >> How did you uh how did you experience life moving a bit around? Because I mean you were in Israel then in the UK. I mean what kind of perspective and lens you know that open up for you? >> It gives you an ability to look at wherever you are whether it's the US or Israel or England or the world from almost like from an outside perspective. So you're not in and you're looking at things like everybody else. You have that different perspective because you
see it from do different angles. And I think that makes a big difference. The other is is the ability to kind of not be afraid of change, not be afraid of moving around and not be afraid to kind of take risks and kind of do something different because you've done it before. You've moved between different locations and proven that you can be successful wherever you are. And I think that's a big lesson. >> And in your case, you know, talk to us about uh getting started with your first baby, with your first company. You know, it was in the food space, but uh but how was that? So I was kind of very young and kind of basically got together with a friend of mine and we were kind of basically looking to do something and again kind of had that kind of entrepreneur kind of spirit and we looked for a business and we found this uh ice cream store that kind of was doing okay but not doing
great. And we thought that it had great location and great potential and we bought it from the owners uh and the owners actually had the factory at the time and so they were supplying us with the ice cream and we changed around the whole place. We redecorated it. We changed the menu and kind of opened it up and it was like a great success. It was a good first chance to understand how a business works kind of how you balance basically the the kind of the payables and the receivables, how you deal with customers, how you acquire customers, all of those things that you learn in a big scale later in in life. I got a chance to kind of do them early on >> and you know in this case too I mean you ended up selling your portion to your co-founder and it's something that you've done twice. So I think that the question that comes to mind is at what point do you realize you know in the journey
of building a company that is perhaps the right time to turn page. >> It's kind of when when you look at kind of what you've built and you say you know what I've I've I've gotten it where I wanted to get it and now I'm more interested in kind of challenging myself with something different. Uh and uh when that time comes when you fill it and sometimes you fill it after a couple years and sometimes uh it takes longer uh obviously I've been uh running Glimpse now for almost 10 years so kind of haven't had that itch yet. And what is what would you say is the main difference now that and we'll talk about glimpse in just in just a little bit but what would you say is the main difference of let's say starting a company at that such young age versus maybe in your 40s or 50s like you've been able to experience now with glimpse >> it's kind of when you start a company when you're young
you've got a lot of enthusiasm you've got a lot of energy you're running around but you haven't seen a lot of the world you haven't seen it all play out and you're eager to kind of push things forward at a totally different pace than how you do things where you're more mature. You're taking setbacks differently kind of you're not seeing them as kind of basically life-changing but more of a hurdle to pass around. Uh you're basically taking uh no differently kind of when some someone says no, you uh try and figure out kind of how to work around it. you also kind of look at the business uh differently in terms of your willingness to pivot. Uh and I see it a lot with younger founders where they they've got kind of what they figure out is their kind of dream of what they want to build and they set up doing it and they don't have the willingness or the uh ability to almost look from a
different lens at what they're doing and say, you know what, maybe I should pivot a little bit to kind of adjust and align my vision with what the kind of what the world's telling me. Uh so I think when you're more mature uh you're kind of you're dealing with situations in a different way and getting to uh to be more creative in in in resolving challenges. >> How was it like to for you to come to the US because you came here for your MBA program at EEL but h how was how was that like you know of of coming here to the land of opportunity to America? >> Yeah. and and I I really saw kind of coming to the US kind of as as coming to a large opportunity where you can do things at a totally different scale. And uh my philosophy kind of which kind of when I look at kind of immigrants coming in there's two philosophies. One you basically kind of stay within your group and you just
kind of live within your people or you come in and you say I'm coming into this country and I want to be an American. And for me from day one when I kind of arrived kind of at Yale kind of I wanted to be to look at things as an American, to act as an American, to focus I kind of keeping my identity with myself but kind of really kind of embracing kind of kind of connecting with this kind of land of opportunities. Now after Yale um you basically went into what the next company that you would do was essentially another one which was a whip bricks and there you had the opportunity to of experiencing cycles in this case it was the com bust right so how was it like going through something like that and and and what kind of lessons you know do you think you learned because a lot of people are now talking about another potential correction coming. Markets are behaving in a crazy way. Uh I guess
what how was that experience with Web Bricks? >> Yeah. So, so it's kind of obviously it sucked kind of given the timing and I've learned a lot of lessons from it, but when you kind of and kind of I'd love to talk about some of those because it's uh kind of life lessons learned, but kind of taking the cycle first just to understand the digital cycle which the dot crash was a part of. The technology cycles in my view are 30 35 year cycles. So the the digital cycle started in 1980s and that's where I started exposing myself to technology. I remember seeing basically an ad in when I was in the UK for the ZX81, which was one of the first computers with 1K of memory. And I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And I started a campaign uh with my parents to basically kind of let me buy one. And uh took me about a year, but eventually end up with slightly more advanced version as things
evolve. And if you look at the dotcom bust as part of the lens, it is basically probably twothirds of the cycle. So kind of so it started in 1980 the dotcom bust was in 99 2000 and basically the the cycle continued all the way to 2015 uh and it was basically basically the it's almost like the market cleared itself up. So kind of if you're kind of basically get caught on it and kind of obviously I was caught on with rebates and uh one of the lessons I've learned is never say no to money kind of when we started the company we had a lot more money that wanted to invest in us than we wanted to at what now I perceive as crazy valuations. We raised money at 10 million valuation for basically a business plan and a couple of kids. Uh and uh we said no to money if you believe that. And when you look at that, you say you're crazy because kind of when we wanted to uh raise the money back kind of uh
in uh later…