Aggaeus

Jonathan Karmi has spent more than a decade inside performance marketing, working across hundreds of clients and watching one problem get harder every year: Attention is disappearing. Today, the average social media user scrolls the height of the Eiffel Tower every day. For direct-to-consumer brands, that means the battle is no longer just about targeting, budgets, or bidding. It is about creative...

Amir Haramaty has helped build and scale companies that were later acquired by Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta, and other major players. But his story does not start in a boardroom. It starts on a bridge, deep in enemy territory, wounded while trying to defuse explosives and realizing that humans were still being asked to risk their lives for problems technology should solve. That moment shaped the re...

Most people only learn judgment after the damage is done. Then reality gives them feedback: late, expensive, and with interest. That is why serious operators and investors pay attention to Cedric Chin. Through Commoncog, Cedric has built a business education company used by hundreds of operators and investors who want to accelerate their business expertise. His work is read by people inside top co...

In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Collin Stewart for a brutally honest conversation about revenue, ego, customer discovery, failed validation, and the painful difference between persistence and refusing to let go. Collin started as the sales guy surrounded by engineers building software in silence. He was the one in the phone booth. Talking to users. Talking to custom...

Eran Shir started as a theoretical physicist studying black holes. Then he helped build Israel’s Arrow missile unit. Then he crowdsourced a map of the internet. Then he sold an AI company to Yahoo. And somehow, that was all before Nexar. In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Eran Shir, co-founder of Nexar, for a conversation about one of the hardest frontiers in AI: makin...

Yair Attar spent years leading nation-state incident response in the IDF before co-founding OTORIO an OT cybersecurity company built for the physical world: factories, critical infrastructure, industrial systems, and the environments where a cyberattack can shut down real operations. Then came two major exits in rapid succession. OTORIO was acquired by Armis. Not long after, Armis itself was acqui...

Guy Solomon left investment banking to buy a small business. After years at Barclays and Wells Fargo, he went deep into the world of Search Funds and Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) in Israel — a market filled with profitable, often overlooked SMEs that nobody was really institutionalizing yet. But this wasn’t a straight-line success story. Guy screened more than 8,000 companies, met wi...

In this episode, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Gadi Benjamini, Co-Founder & CEO of FireDome, an ex–Israeli intelligence operator from Unit 81 turned deep-tech founder building an autonomous, on-site wildfire defense system. This conversation starts with collapse: Gadi shutting down his first climate startup after October 7, going through the emotional crash that follows, and then finding...

Elizabeth Zalman is a 4x founder who’s raised ~$80M, built StrongDM, and now leads Sandgarden while also co-authoring "Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO" with Jerry Neumann. We talk about how she started as a scrappy eBay/consignment hustle that forced Elizabeth to build software before she ever “became a founder.” Then we go deep on her hard...

Eric Malka arrived in NYC on a Greyhound bus with no money, no education, and no green card, and then built The Art of Shaving from a single 200-sq-ft shop into a $100M+ brand acquired by Procter & Gamble. We talk about turning story + customer obsession into a premium brand from creation to exit. We unpack: • The “New York Times moment” that took sales from $10K/month to $10K/day • How to bui...

Ra’anan Cohen has lived the full founder arc: he built one company to an IPO (MobileMax), built another into a unicorn (Bringg), then wrote a brutally honest memoir that became a bestselling business book in Israel—and is now being adapted into a TV series. In this episode, Ra’anan and Haggai go into the decisions that define a founder’s life: the moment Ra’anan turned down a $10M offer to take mo...

Haggai is a paying customer of Neal Foard’s Storyfire—and this episode is the “how it actually works” playbook. After 30+ years in advertising and sales, Neal has a simple conviction: most people don’t lose deals because their product is weak—they lose because their story is forgettable. We talk about the real mechanics behind persuasion: why the best pitches feel like show business, how to turn y...

Yuval Samet helped scale Klarna from ~150 to ~2,000 people—then came back to Israel to tackle the most “quietly painful” problem in daily life: money stress. As CEO of RiseUp, he’s building financial wellbeing at scale by turning messy bank + card data into one clear picture of disposable income, plus step-by-step actions people actually follow. Yuval grew up with discussions about bank debt “as a...

Jason Wolf joins Haggai Klorman Eraqi for a rare, behind-the-scenes conversation about building (and investing) when the world is literally shaking. Jason helped scale TopTier to a $400M cash acquisition by SAP, lived through the Better Place era, and today co-leads Iron Nation—a VC fund created three days after Oct 7 to keep Israeli startups alive when term sheets were getting pulled overnight. I...

Omer Menashe has been building for nearly two decades—startups, a long-running agency, and now a venture studio designed for the AI era. In this episode, he unpacks the “lifelong entrepreneur” path: why he became a lawyer (and why he quit immediately), how early internet hacking/piracy shaped his builder DNA, and how he turned digital marketing into a repeatable growth engine—powering Clyr, 1Flo,...

Roomer didn’t just survive travel’s worst crash—it rebuilt itself inside the industry. In this episode, Gon Ben David (Co-Founder & CEO, Roomer) breaks down how Roomer went from a bold marketplace for reselling canceled hotel reservations, to partnering with giants like Kayak, to building “cancel-for-any-reason” infrastructure—then pivoting post-COVID into the creator economy, where travel dec...

David Bartholomeusz is a serial entrepreneur who’s built (and let go of) dozens of businesses—not to chase exits, but to design a life with more freedom and more play. In a conversation that starts light and quickly goes deep, David and Haggai unpack what leadership really is when you strip away ego, hustle-culture scripts, and the “CEO identity.” You’ll hear how David runs rapid, low-cost startup...

Rachel ten Brink has lived the full loop: corporate operator → YC-backed founder → GP at Red Bike Capital. She co-founded Scentbird, helped pioneer early DTC growth (before “playbooks” existed), and now backs founders at pre-seed and seed as a VC. In this episode, Rachel shares thestory behind the wins: the awkward first meetings, the bad business models, the “almost gave up” moment, and the tacti...

PlayerMaker didn’t build “another sports gadget.” They built a FIFA-certified, footwear-mounted sensor system used by top football organizations—the kind of product that takes years of R&D, brutal accuracy standards, and relentless credibility to earn trust. In this episode, Yuval Odem (Co-founder & COO) shares how two tiny sensors that clip onto an athlete’s shoes and track foot motion at...

Before Facebook, before Twitter, and before Chrome became what they are today, Outbrain helped shape the modern internet—and grew into a $1B+ revenue, public company with 1,000+ employees. Ori Lahav, Outbrain's former CTO and Co-Founder, opens our conversation with: “Entrepreneurship is like living with a chronic disease.” Not because it’s “morbid” — because it’s constant. It never stops calli...

A Michelin-trained chef builds a premium private aviation catering company, serves royalty + “flying palaces,” survives COVID, then exits. All this while operating in a cutthroat market that is private aviation, where there are basically no contracts, you get <48 hours' notice, and you are just as good as your last meal. Daniel Hulme takes you inside a world most people never see: business...

Before Mor Assia ever wrote a term sheet, she already had a fascination with tech companies. As a kid, she’d flip to the tiny “Israelis on Nasdaq” section of the newspaper and track the numbers. At home, dinner conversations were about who founded what, who raised, who exited, and who’s building next. Fast-forward: Mor becomes a Technion-trained engineer, serves in 8200, codes, climbs corporate st...

After ELLI•Q™ landed above-the-fold on the New York Times front page, Dor Skuler—CEO & Co-Founder of Intuition Robotics—joins Haggai Klorman Eraqi to unpack how you build trust, etiquette, and real companionship with a machine. Dor shares the decade-long journey that started long before Amazon even shipped Alexa, survived 80+ investor “no’s,” and finally created ELLI•Q™, a proactive AI robot d...

Roi Bar-Kat leads Intel Capital’s investing in Israel—and he’s helped back companies across AI, deep tech, cybersecurity, and more. In this conversation with Haggai Klorman Eraqi, Roi breaks down what consistently separates the startups that earn conviction (and outcomes) from the ones that don’t: founder quality, storytelling, and defensibility in an AI-accelerated world. We go from Roi’s “non-tr...

Orly Shoavi has done what most founders only talk about: built through the “two years in the desert,” found a breakout wedge, and exited—then came back for round two with ClarityQ. In this episode, Orly (Co-Founder & CEO, ClarityQ) sits down with Haggai Klorman Eraqi to unpack the real founder journey: choosing a co-founder like a marriage, surviving the emotional whiplash of acquisition talks...