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Israel has been in the news for months because of Iran. The part that gets buried is that the same country fighting a war on multiple fronts, with a media narrative that constantly paints it as the villain, has quietly become one of only two places in the world where breakthrough technology actually gets built.
Michael Eisenberg sits between both worlds. He is the founder of Aleph VC (almost $1B AUM), a perennial Midas List investor, a former Benchmark partner, a board director, and the author of 9 books (7 in Hebrew). He also advises the Israeli Prime Minister.
We were scheduled to record. He showed up late and explained why: "I just came from the Prime Minister's office."
This week's episode of Forged in America, the podcast I co-host with Ravin Gandhi where we sit down with operators, founders, and investors who built something real. Subscribe if you have not already.
The beats:
00:11 Michael walking in: "I was late because I was with Netanyahu." That is the cold open. Watch the first 15 seconds.
04:48 The venture industry might be dying. VC was always a craft business built on trust, not an asset class. Big funds spraying and praying at the early stages to feed their late-stage funds are crowding out the tinkering innovation that built Amazon, eBay, and Palm. Michael thinks the music stops the way it did in 2000.
05:16 The sharpest line in the episode: "People have turned on Israel because they hate America." Whatever your read, hearing it from someone who lives in both worlds lands different.
06:44 The Vanishing Jew thesis. Michael wrote a book on why anti-Semitism rises when economies struggle. He flags 2008 as the watershed where the welfare state replaced bootstraps and turned a generation against the people who succeed.
15:23 The forgotten chapter of VC history. The Four Horsemen banks (Hambrecht and Quist, Alex Brown, Robertson Stephens, Montgomery Securities) took fledgling venture-backed companies public at $60-80M revenue. That muscle does not exist anymore.
20:40 The Iran missile war was won in software. The Iranians fired hundreds of thousands of missiles. The damage was manageable because of what Michael calls "the high tech wizardry of two great countries" working together on air defense, intelligence, and AI.
22:27 The sentence that brought him to Israel. He asked a rabbi if he should move to Tel Aviv to do something meaningful. The rabbi told him to forget the philosophy and "open a factory that will employ 10,000 people."
25:33 "Israel produces civilians with agency at scale." America has magnets of agency. Silicon Valley for tech, NYC for finance, Texas for energy. Israel built a country where agency is the default. National service, mandatory military service, responsibility at 15.
28:27 The optimistic scenario is not what you think. "It is not that the war ends. It is that the regime in Iran falls." Michael lays out the case that the Iranian regime is the gating factor for the entire region.
30:42 On Thomas Friedman, journalists, and skin in the game. "If no one knows shit, I prefer to hear the BS of people who have actually done something in the world versus the people who have done nothing."
33:09 On serving Netanyahu. Michael does not want to litigate Israeli domestic politics. He does say this: "I serve the Prime Minister of our country. I serve him proudly."
36:22 How Aleph started. The handshake deal with Benchmark, the promise to stay in Israel and create 10,000 jobs, and the original obligation to a rabbi 30 years earlier.
38:05 "The Sabbath is the greatest gift given to mankind." His advice for raising kids in 2026: kill the devices, sit around the table, invite the grandparents, let them banter. The antidote to the Me generation.
If you want a clear-eyed read on how Israel became a tech superpower while fighting a war on multiple fronts, this is the episode.
@mikeeisenberg @alephVC @ForgedUSAPod @netanyahu with @RavinGandhi1 and me
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