Betting on Founders Who Build the Real World

Samir Kaji: Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Venture Unlocked. The podcast takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. In today's episode, I got to sit down with Lior Susan from Eclipse Ventures to explore his journey from building companies to starting his own venture capital firm nearly 10 years ago. I met Lior early in his journey as an investor and I wanted to spend a lot of time going through his learnings and on the similarities and differences of being an operator of companies to being an operator of an investment firm. Spent the bulk of the podcast talking about the things necessary to build a durable firm, including building the right talent base, adapting to changing micro and macro conditions, and how firms need to constantly challenge legacy assumptions. We really hope you enjoy our episode with Lear.

Narrator: Samir Kaji is the CEO and co founder of Allocate. Allocate and Venture Unlocked are independent of each other. Any statements or references made by Samir or his guests regarding third party investments or securities are solely their views and opinions and are not intended as investment advice or an endorsement of such parties or securities by Samir, his guests or Allocate. Allocate or its clients may maintain relationships with or investment positions in guests, third parties or securities mentioned in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Samir Kaji: Lior, it's so great to see you and thanks again for being on the show. It's been a long time coming.

Lior Sussan: I appreciate it Summer. It's going to be great to be here.

Samir Kaji: You know it's, it's funny because we were talking a little bit before this conversation started and now Eclipse has been around for 10 years. I still remember the early days when you and I met in the offices of uh, Formation eight and this was just a thought of what you were going to do. Take us a little bit back into your background and then the things that informed launching eclipse back in 2015.

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I always say that I'm like a purpose build without this strategy. But you know I grew up on a farmland and a kibbutz community so I started my career in the agriculture, then I joined the military, uh, and I went to the special forces. So that was my defense. Then I left to start the company with my brother in the networking hardware space and that was my first hardware touch company, uh, got acquired by Cisco. I met the CEO of uh, Flextonics and joined Mike at Flex to help him build the uh, digital transformation team. And that was my manufacturing. So I'm like agriculture to defense to hardware to manufacturing. I Was like a purpose built there to start this film without knowing it. But yeah, that's as an operator, as a founder, I. My passion was always building in the physical world and 10 years ago I felt these industries are going to have a massive digital transformation and there is no investors focusing on that. And that's the only thing I know or care. So that was, that was the origin of Eclipse.

Samir Kaji: Yeah, and there's so much there in terms of the thesis. Right, so you had the background in manufacturing. You really understand that technology was not just on the screen but it was on these physical devices. But a lot of what I often found when people are starting firms is there's not only a gap that you see that needs to be served through capital, but it's a certain DNA that you want to build the firm around. So you were with the Israeli special forces, obviously started a company, sold it and those things kind of inform like what type of firm you want to build. How purposeful was that piece of it of what does Eclipse stand for from the values and then you know the type of people you bring into the firm.

Lior Sussan: Yeah, a hundred percent. And my first partner at the firm was Pierre Lamond. And when I met Pierre 10 years ago he was 85 and I was 30 and after 10 minutes in a very Pierre fashion with a French accent, he said hey young man, do you want to build a film together? When I didn't know anything about investing but I think where we, him and I very much share the same philosophy about building teams. Naturally he after a national semi, after Fairy Child national semi and then sequoia, uh, for 35 years. I think him and I believe in this special forces mindset of like small group of people that aligning around the same shared vision and mission and collaborate and operate as a one unit and that things 10 years into a cliff didn't change.

Samir Kaji: If you then think back at that time it was union peer peer still around at the age of 95 and a ton of energy obviously in terms of what he's not only done but done with you. But as you look at the evolution of the business which now you know the last set of funds obviously north of a billion total, the first fund was sub 200 million. Walk us through the original thesis of what you related to thinking through this aspect of investing in the physical world when at the time it was all about kind of mobile and it was SaaS. Where did you see the main gap?

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I mean I think you're right and um, 10 years ago I actually didn't even know what is limited partners names. M that it's kind of sounds funny or LPAs or data room. That was all very much new to me. And we started with the first one of $125 million that Pierre and myself contribute to start with. And then I went into the journey of looking for limited partners. It was much harder than I thought it's going to be and thanks to you and few others that helped me along the way, somehow we were managing to raise that fund over 16 uh, months and five closes. So it was way harder than I thought. I'd say that my original thesis was pretty straightforward. If you're looking on the world GDP, call it around 120 trillion. About 85% of that is what I will categorize. Physical industry, manufacturing, mining, defense, logistics, agriculture, aviation. Basically anything that atoms operate in the world is the majority of the world gdp. And if you want to build companies in those sectors, you are going to need to connect bits and atoms together. And that's companies being just being built different Naturally. Some of agentic AI looks very different than Tesla. Some enterprise software looks very different than SpaceX. Some um, fintech looks very different than Nvidia. So I think what's what Diwali is being very focused on in the last 20, 30 years in some way right Spoli on this asset light software Only when I my approach and passion was like no, I like to build in the physical world and that's looks different. That's going to take capital, that's those founders going to operate differently. And that's also drove how we change the fund size in order to support those founders learning that the needs in the market are much severe and the opportunity is much greater than I originally thought.

Samir Kaji: And now that we're year 10 you can kind of look back at all the things that have happened and similarly for us as a company. So at allocate we started four and a half years ago and a lot of the original thesis is the very same which is around the private markets, it's around the size making things easier. And that hasn't really changed. But a lot of things have changed based on client insights, based on the evolution of the private markets. The macro. If you can look back I guess on those 10 years and you kind of mentioned one thing which is adopting the or adapting the fund size based on the changes. What are some of the other big changes that you've seen during those 10 years that did act as a forcing function to change something about what you did, whether it was fund Size, decision making criteria, maybe the portfolio construction, things like that.

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I'll say two things on that. Sam Osman opened our AGM last week and he told me that I thought it's a brilliant sentence. He said Leo, AI is more capital intensive than hardware. And I thought that's just a brilliant comment of uh, we are seeing software is becoming more capital intense than hardware. That kind of dramatically changed the world I think I obsess about building high function team and there is two things around building high function teams and like an elite teams in sports and military and startups, whatever it is, you want to build a culture that uh, the culture is very much cement but you constantly need to change because the world around you change and how you balance between those two I think is the name of the game how I can actually attract the people that will be the most talented I can find in the world, united them around the mission, but not ignore what's happening around me because naturally I operate in a very dynamic market and that's true to any elite team I ever built in my life. And uh, when we started eclipse 10 years ago the opportunity set was for a smaller fund. And I think where we are today is the opportunity set that the largest companies on the globes are in physical industries. Their earnings did a massive catch up in the last 10 years. So the public market wants to see more businesses like that. And for that the richest person on earth started two companies in the physical industries in order to create that world. So the opportunity changed and as a result we are not changing our culture and the way we operate and our conviction but we are adjusting the strategy to support it.

Samir Kaji: When you think about the business model though, and the business model for $125 million fund is very different than a fundraising 5, 6, 700 million. Right? You're deploying more capital, the portfolio construction you're doing follow ons at a much deeper, deeper degree. You're going later in the stack and of course you have both early stage and kind of growth stage opportunities. What has changed I guess on the business model standpoint as you've grown fund sizes in as much as has anything changed in terms of how you make decisions, how you underwrite and maybe just you know, around the edges like things that might be non obvious that managers should think about as they continue to grow fund sizes.

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I would say the one thing that did not change at all is we are still this high conviction, high involvement, high ownership and we actually didn't change it in 10 years. We also didn't Change of us hiring an incredible operators and train them to be an investors. We didn't change our economic uh, structure. Everyone makes money in the same way regardless of which company it is. We didn't change the industries that we operate. We only operate in physical industries. What did we did change is if historically 10 years ago we thought the best company at eclipse would be $5 billion enterprise value. I think we have now few companies at Eclipse that will be 70 and 80 billion. And that's naturally giving you the confidence that he wants to compound capital and not only invest in the earlier stage but also compound as those businesses start inflecting. And that's muscle that we did not have originally. Maybe I find that a lot of managers are not doing that for some reason and for me it was very trivial and maybe thanks to PL partially is this is running a fund, is running a business. It's not raising money and making investments. Oh so fun. How cool. No, it's a company, it's a business. And everything that we do here, quarterly reports, AGMs, emails is like in the top of the way. I can the best I can do and I obsess about it and I stopped not cannot stop thinking about this is a business and we are as good as we are running our internal business. That's how we find the best CEOs, that's how we find the best LPs, that's how we'll find the best partner to join us at the glyphs.

Samir Kaji: I couldn't uh, agree with that more. And so many people actually miss this whereby they think raising a fund is just basically around. I'm going to invest a bunch of capital, I'm going to work with entrepreneurs and it's all the other stuff that you have to do because you have to think about your LPs, who are your shareholders. You have to think about your team. It's talent, acquisition, retention, it's KPIs. How do you know it's working in a business that has such a long feedback cycle? Because it does take 10 years to even know. Are you actually building something where the returns are actually showing up? And I want to maybe go down and double click on a few of those. So let's talk about from a team standpoint. You mentioned high conviction investing. You've brought in people that are operators that may not have been long time VCs but really understood sort of the manufacturing or physical world. You teach them to be investors, they're now acting as stewards of capital. How do you think about decision Making because you are taking high ownership in these companies. And when you invest in M, let's say at series A and you take 20 to 25% ownership, you have to be sure it's one of those companies that can grow and potentially return the fund. It also creates a conflict of you investing in other companies that are very similar comparables. So tell us what goes into how you make decisions? Is it consensus based? Is it each investor can make their own based on conviction?

Lior Sussan: Yeah. Say none of the Eclipse members ever wore a VC before. So in some way always we are bringing people that never invested before. And actually when you're looking on the way that Pierre and Don and that team start, that industry actually started by people are coming from an operating background into the world of investing because they were investing in networking and semiconductors and high technical stuff, the stuff that we like. So we actually find that it's very useful for us to keep hiring an incredible operators and train them how to be investors. We are now 26 people at the field total. When I started four years ago, we were four. So naturally we started with this consent decision making. But we needed to adjust over the years because if we will have 10 people thinking about that. This idea is a great idea. An early stage is probably not that of a great idea. But how are you actually doing that in a culture that is we hunt as a pack and the economics, if Samir company is making money, Leo's making money the same way and vice versa. So we actually created here a lot of internal way or of collaborate and communicate. So although we are not looking for a full consent now, when we're making a C series A investment or when we build companies, everyone, it feels like Eclipse did that company rather than Simulio. You will never see us talking about this is that partner company or this partner company, the firm made that investment.

Samir Kaji: When you're having conversations and there are probably so many situations where a company is is loved by a single partner or somebody who sourced the opportunity, worked with the founder, did the diligence, but it may not be obvious. And to the rest of the people that are in those IC meetings having conversation, maybe providing counter arguments or doing it, how does that actually then play out in terms of the individual who's championing the deal actually doing it and then from that are there certain rubrics that are become non negotiables? If somebody brings a deal and it's a founder issue or it's a traction issue that it just doesn't happen? Like where is the index to Allow that conviction to happen.

Lior Sussan: Yeah. So I would say nobody here uh, can make an investment decision by himself still to that date. Now it's not required the nine partners to now have a consent because what we just talked about. But there is always a deal team, at least three partners that needs to pound on the table in order to make that investments. And there is no official veto but if someone is, feels really strong against he will need to speak up. And that person is actually going to join the deal team now. So. And he either gets convinced or he's not and we're not going to make the investment. But the goal is when we are wiring the money everyone is going to go fuck yeah, I'm um, super passionate, passionate about this thing. Even if I having some very big questions about the idea, about the technology, about the market. It is cliche. So I will say the cliche and we will continue to make mistakes although we know that this is the case. We are trying not to compromise on the people and we are good as our CEOs full stop. They are our product. In our AGMs every year there is 10 CEOs and I always LPs will come to me and say listen, we are going to all of those AGMs all of the year. We see maybe one or two. We have how, uh, why you bring so many? And I'm like why? Because they're my product. I have nothing else to show besides my product. This is what I sell to the world. So we are trying really hard to find CEOs and founders that can help us build generational businesses.

Samir Kaji: So if you look back and you've invested in a lot of great companies over the years, some of massive billions of dollars in a private market cap any commonalities in terms of the founders when you met them, the early days of the traits they had that really got you convinced to go on a journey with them.

Lior Sussan: Now I found that there is no factory of founders and they are coming in so many different shapes. I will say maybe one thing we skewed towards the founder of the building and physical industry tend to be slightly older. So in a lot of cases it would not be kids out of yc. Although I know we are seeing more and more great stuff coming out of those places but that's just historically. But listen we had people that are uh, drop off from high school and we have people with PhDs, we had people that works in Tesla and we have people that came from the academia, we had people that failed in startups and we had people that Took companies public and are doing another company. We actually, I cannot tell you that we find one architect, uh, of uh, someone that can build massive business.

Samir Kaji: Yeah, so then as you kind of think about the business itself, we're talking about you picking investments. You meet a founder, you like the founder, you go through DD and ultimately you discuss it in ic. At the same time, you still have to win that deal, meaning the founder on the other side may have other options to which they can pick. And in a market today that's incredibly crowded with a number of different investors, big funds of your size, some generalist, some sector specific, how have you evolved your business model to provide a service? And going back to this analogy that you are running a company while your service offering has to increase, the more ownership you are taking, the more capital you're providing. So maybe talk a little bit about how you've evolved from day one to where you are right now.

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I would say, uh, in some way we actually did not evolve in that end, and I will explain myself, ours, you're right. The CEOs is our, is the product and we are providing them service. Capital is, I always think it's commodity actually. Capital is not what I offer them. What I offer them is my time. And if you're building a company in the manufacturing space, you want Greg Ryko because he built Tesla manufacturing. If you are building a company in the robotics space, you want Charlie Moenge because he deployed the entire robotics for Tesla, Rivian and cloud kitchens. If you want to close big commercial deals in the enterprise Worlds, you want G10 Bell because he did it for Rivian or Caitlin Glancy because he did it for Flexbot or Aiden because he did it for Samsara. If you're doing anything in the applied physical AI, you won't set win trough because he did it 4G. So in some way the way we win those deals is because we are those people before, uh, on our operating life and now we have the ability to provide them our operating backgrounds and networks and knowledge when they are building companies in the sectors that we know really well. We don't do crypto, we don't do consumer, we don't do enterprise. That's the only thing we did as an operator and that's the only thing as we do today as an investors.

Samir Kaji: When we think about the sort of this value add and value add can come in so many ways. It can come in the form of general advice. It could be helping with customers and getting in front of customers, partnerships obviously raising capital, talent Acquisition, all those things. In a uh, in many firms you have a partner that basically is your quarterback. And then some of the firms have adopted things like platform teams. You know where they have groups that are focused on one thing, talent, gtm, whatever it is. And in your case you have very senior operators that are helping you know each company. But how do you think about activating the entire Eclipse team for a given company where let's say Liora, you are the board member but at the same time you have a number of team members across the Eclipse organization that could help in different ways with that company that you're on the board of. Does that also work in a team approach?

Lior Sussan: Yeah. There is no associates here, there is no platform team, there is no someone to. There is us, there is only nine of us. And ah, we do the entire work building the thesis and building the company, hunting for the deals, winning the deals, scaling those business and one day exiting that. And I found that like in the special forces, it's not a scale. There is a reason we have small teams is because you can actually align them and really choose an elite backgrounds folks with the backgrounds that actually can achieve something. That is incredible. And that's the view that we are taking. I am the one that working with the CEO to sign a $3 billion commercial deal this year that we, I just did and when the time to scale manufacturing I'm calling Greg Riker and say Greg come help here. We just signed this $3 billion and I need them to build two more factories. Um, so we are very much work as a one unit and mobilize the different backgrounds of the partners between the needs of the particular situation. But we personally are not big believers in those platform teams. We're believer of we are the one that's going to do the work for you.

Samir Kaji: Yeah. And the DNA in many ways is very similar in terms of going really deep with these founders, having partners, not having a bunch of junior associates. And one of the things that you had mentioned is everybody on your team came from an operating non VC background, yourself included. Right. You were a longtime operator, starting companies, leading companies. And one of the questions I always get from people um, is like what is the hardest part of transitioning somebody that's only been an operator with no investing experience to being a full time investor.

Lior Sussan: Yeah. And we still fail 10 years into it, we still fail and we have multiple of people that was partners at Eclipse that now actually in the portfolio. So I would say it's very hard transition and I think give you a couple of things that we are very much spending time on when we are thinking about onboard someone or we call it the boot camp. You, I don't know G10 manage 10,000 people and now it's him. Aiden took a company public and now it's her. There is like this big suddenly vacuum of like you are coming from building something at scale to now it's just you and you are individual contributor. You write the memo, you do the outbound, you build in the thesis. There is nobody do the work for you do the work. And the other thing that I found that is really interesting. You are bringing people that was elite individual in building companies and you bring them to be rookies because they're new to this business and there is something around the brain that is like uh, a really tough switch. Shit. I was just ringing the bell building my own company and now I'm this rookie learning about sector. I didn't. I don't know anything about venture capital. So there's like a multiple of things that we learn to appreciate and trying to learn. Doing our interview process to making sure that in your personality DNA M we find what we like.

Samir Kaji: When you're then recruiting people and bringing on new partners, obviously bringing on a new partner is not a trivial thing to do because they're fitting into a very small team and they represent the firm and they represent the founders. Are there certain things that you index on based on your learnings of who has made the successful transition from being an operator to to being an investor?

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I'll say two things we learned. For example, that was not obvious to me when we started the firm and I made some mistakes is like the ability to scale down. So even people that build companies and scale them and you were like oh yeah, he was there at seed and they took it public. It would be easier for him to go to seed. Not true. So the ability to scale down is one thing. And the second thing especially with a lot of we have so many operators here that have such a crazy deep manufacturing supply chain engineering background is the business understanding. M And then those early stage companies mainly needs us on the business side. Yeah, we can help on the manufacturing. We can help someone in engineering when they where they will fail on the go to market fundraising ability to tell the world how they are going to change. The mining industry for example or the manufacturing or the defense industry. So the two things we are heavily indexed is the ability to scale down and the business instinct.

Samir Kaji: Yeah. And we've talked about all these variables that have helped you evolve and A lot of your evolution in terms of growing is obviously insights from what the founders need. It's also obviously the change in the markets but macro venture market. And I wanted to kind of zoom out for a second because it's been an interesting 10 years in the world of venture capital. A lot's change. Obviously the introduction of artificial intelligence which is now omnipresent in every single conversation. We had a zerp period when you started so no interest rates then Covid and then the basically peak in 2021. Where do you think we are right now? And maybe just outline the uh, big things that you've observed and how venture has changed and how it's impacted or informed what you do today.

Lior Sussan: I think in some way listen and I know there is this massive chatter about the frothiness and bubble and whatnot and I'm um, not didn't finish high school so I don't have some crazy MBA degree to tell you if we are in, in a bubble or not based on interest rate, GDP growth and unemployment. I don't spend any time thinking about it. I'm spending time building companies. I do think in some way our thesis is connect to what's happening to venture. And my main point here is if you think about venture capital is like the best place to introduce new technology in something. If technology 10 years ago when I started Eclipse had only a small sleeve to penetrate and that was the world of Internet, enterprise software, cloud, consumer etc. If that sleeve moving from 8, 9% of the GDP is now to a 20%, 30%, 40% because now we go into space and we go into automotive and we go into defense and we go into mining and manufacturing, uh, arguably the venture should grow significantly because that's how we enter technology into a much bigger town. So in some way do I think there is too much money? Yeah. Do I think there's some stupid valuation? Yeah, for sure. But net when I take a step back I always asking myself fundamental question do I believe the world's going to have more technology or less? And if I believe the answer is more in this very very of industries we need to see more capital coming to a venture.

Samir Kaji: There was a time and you remember this is maybe 15 years ago where people said venture can only support funds raising 40, $50 billion a year because you just look at the math. I think Roloff both recently said there's just too much capital relative to the outcomes. But there's the counter argument that I see which is the companies stay private longer, they're Getting bigger because how ubiquitous the adoption of technology is. So think about like some of these AI labs doing billions of dollars not in valuation but revenue. The growth of these companies in video now being close to a $5 trillion company. What's your view right now and how that informs sort of like the prices you're paying? Because I could. On one hand I agree with you. A $5 billion exit 15 years ago would have been one of the biggest exits we'd ever see.

Lior Sussan: Yeah.

Samir Kaji: Today we are going to see companies that go public that are going to be north of $500 billion. And how does that impact how you think about an early stage company? If the valuation might be 3 or 4x what it used to be like, how do you balance between the techno optimist view versus what you believe is realistic and fundamental today?

Lior Sussan: So we are very fundamental investor and operators and we know at the end of the day it's a blended cost game and it's my blended cost into a business and the entry and then over time if I'm um, doubling down or doing pro rata the blended cost of that versus enterprise value and then and on a timescale, this is this business and you constantly need to run those maths and those formulas in order to calculate. Are you still happy with the uh, absolute multiples than cash on cash that you're going to generate? I understand what Ruloff was saying. It I will argue that if I take all of the great private companies, OpenAI and Stripe and SpaceX, and take all of them and throw them now in the public market, there is no going to be any question if the venture model don't work or not. Right. There's no question. And there is also no question that SpaceX, uh, or Stripe or OpenAI don't have a very durable business like an incredible durable business. So what I think we should solve for though, how you're thinking about old duration, because I think we all still operate on a model that has been created 50 years ago, 10 years plus 1, 2 plus 20. And I'm like, I actually think we need to spend a little bit more time to look on the model and ask ourselves is that model in 2025 when we are building those companies is still the right model? And if it's not the right model, how we are creating a route model that aligning the managers with the limited partners with the CEO, uh, to collaborate together.

Samir Kaji: Yeah, and that's I think a really important point because the whole periods obviously have gone longer and longer and these companies have so much private capital to tap into the need to go public or the need to get acquired early is just not there. And so how do you think about that from an exit standpoint? Because let's say now the exit is 12 years for some of these best companies, maybe 14. Stripe has been around much longer than 12 years. Is it more a function of looking at secondary opportunities and selling which used to be something that no one would want to understand because of the signaling risk? Like where do you see this changing?

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I'll say a couple of things there. Uh, I think the, the process is broken. I actually think I saw Tom Lafont talking about it. Thomas Lafonte talk about it, uh, yesterday. Oh, so it was Philip. Sorry, it was his brother. Philip talked about it yesterday. It got so hard to go public somewhere. The SEC is so painful. I completely agree with the president. What we should consider moving from quarterly earnings to maybe two years earnings. But we need to. The system of going public also didn't change for 50. We need to change the systems because the reality there is no Fortune 500. There's 20 companies that getting all of their capital and those public investors wants to see more assets and wants to have new inventory and the process is just broken. We need to fix it. We raised money from university endowments and foundations and hospital systems and pension. We get paid and they get paid when we are taking something public and selling or distributing when we are selling a company or we're selling a secondary. And I view my job as an early stage builder is to. I need to pass the ball in some point to the next person in line within a great asset so I can take my time to build again. And I also can meet with capital distributed and pay to myself and my team. So I'm still in the belief that we need companies to go public and we need many more of them.

Samir Kaji: So. So let's say fundamentally though the, you're right, the cost and the tax to go public is pretty high because then you're. It's a quarterly which sometimes don't align with long term company building and doing the right thing. And the bar is so high today. Let's say you have to be 3, 4, $500 million a year in revenue. You have to have good unit economics path to profitability. Hopefully there's very few companies that can kind of fit into that. Where does the logjam break? Is it something that happens from an uh, innovation standpoint in the private markets to enable liquidity for those companies that just decide not to go public for 15, 20 years.

Lior Sussan: So I think today there is a big misalignment in the private because what's happening with the employee tender is you let employees meeting capital before the cap table. And I think it's super misaligned because when I build the companies, my employees and myself was seeing the capital when my capital was still the capital. And there is no difference between the way it's operate and I think we should fix it. And I believe it's an issue. That's my personal take. So I think if we believe those companies should stay private longer, we should build system that allow you to actually sell big portion of the cap table without signaling. And there is different class with different cost of capital that their job is to liquid early cap table so the company can stay private for 10, 15 more years or the alternative is I think we should work with the regulatories and the SEC's and the bankers and the lawyers to simplify and significantly of companies to go public.

Samir Kaji: What are you hearing I guess from an inside standpoint from the LPs because the LPs are the ones that are holding these assets longer. And of course they also had a tough time during 2021 where capital was called very quickly and then 23, 24, 25 is harder to deploy based on the fact there's no distributions coming back. What are they asking for? They're asking for anything different that has surprised you over the last couple of years.

Lior Sussan: I would say that I know people talk a lot about LPs I will think it's not only LPs it's like it's LPs and managers. When we don't distribute, we don't get paid. So I actually think we are in the same boat here. I don't believe it's only an LP problem. I think it's a manager problem as well. And I think we need to work together in order to solve it. But yeah, no doubt that especially in the ENF world, the LPs that we have. If you're taking what's happening with endowment, tax and research funding cut and lack of distribution, I think there is much more stress in the system. And the things I'm worried the most is this thing can slow up, slow down innovation and our ability to build. If those people are going to say hey, privates now is 45, 50% of our book because valuation continue to go up, but that's paper value distribution goes down. So we cannot only commit to new fund and new capital calls without getting some fresh capital uh, coming Back to us.

Samir Kaji: That totally makes sense. As we wrap up this conversation, I wanted to ask you a question I ask all my guests and that's really around the things that you have learned over time. And more specifically the thing that you know about investing today that you wish you knew before and in your case you've been exposed to some great investors along the way very early. Whether it be Joe Lonsdale and of course Pierre Lamond. Is there anything that you've taken away from um, somebody like a pier that informs how you think about investing today?

Lior Sussan: Yeah, I mean I think listen, Pierre is, is the godfather of discipline. And I think a lot of the walls here of Eclipse and I say his culture is embedded in the walls is not only when he's coming here, is around being disciplined and being maniacal, honest about status of companies, risks, opportunities where we should double down and not trying to only looking on a half full glass. I mean I think the lessons that I completely underestimate when I started Eclipse, coming from an operating uh background into the worlds of investing is this is a power law business and I know you can read all about this thing but when you are coming as an operator you always fix, you always believe you can fix everything and you can build everything and it's not the case and you are going to have few companies that making the whole difference and you're deleted to identify who is those companies leaning with your time and your capital is going to dramatically influence how is your absolute performance looking.

Samir Kaji: That's great. And to end maybe this one last question in terms of that I like to ask people which is what is your non consensus prediction for 2026 that you think will come true but it's not talked about enough?

Lior Sussan: It's a good question. I would say that I don't know how much is a non consent but I definitely believe I'm um, not a big believer of globalization and I think the modern world was getting obsessive around globalization for too long. I believe that there's only one country that enjoy globalization and it's China that tend to be our number one competitor. And I think we need to work much harder to align between what we call the five forces inside Eclipse. Capital policy and government, talent, technology and customer demand. We need to do much better job in this country in the western atmosphere to align on those five forces. Because if I'm right and deglobalization is going to accelerate. Oh boy, we are behind.

Samir Kaji: Yeah, I totally agree and we've seen that. But you know Lior. Thank you for joining us. This has been a lot of fun. Great seeing you and congrats on all the growth.

Lior Sussan: Thank you Sameer. It's a pleasure to being here. And um, thanks for being a friend for so long.

Samir Kaji: Thanks for listening to another episode of Venture Unlock. We really hope you enjoyed our conversation with lior. If you'd like to get Venture Unlock content straight to your inbox, go to ventureunlock.subsack.com and sign up or or go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and subscribe. Thanks again for listening.