Years ago, when venture capitalist Jon Medved took an interest in backing various health tech startups, he had no idea that one day, he would need them to improve his own quality of life.
Israel tight-knit startup community received a blow in October when Medved, one of its most famous VCs, announced he was retiring immediately. He was forced to step down from the firm he founded, OurCrowd, after he was diagnosed with the debilitating disease of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS,) also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“This has come rather sudden,” he told TechCrunch in an audibly hoarse voice — a symptom of ALS — on what could be his last interview.
“I had been feeling a little weird before and they didn’t know what was ailing me,” he explained. “I was in the hospital for several weeks recovering, and that’s when they tested me and said, ‘You’ve got ALS,’ which is a horrible disease, the worst you can imagine.”
ALS is a condition that degrades the brain’s motor neurons, leading to loss of muscle control, eventually impairing walking, talking, eating, and breathing. He didn’t have the classic symptoms, as his voice was attacked first, not his extremities, he said. But he knows that the condition will worsen, and there is no cure, only therapies.
Medved is considered one of the fathers of Israel’s startup ecosystem — often called “Startup Nation” after the decades-old best-selling book of the same name. He helped usher it in, having moved from California to Israel in his 20s, then founding and selling several tech companies before turning to investing.
In 2013, he founded OurCrowd. While Israel has many powerful home-grown VC firms, as well as branches of global firms like Bessemer, OurCrowd essentially invented crowdsourced venture capital, where a limited partnership was open to any accredited investor.
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The firm’s roster attracted LPs from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, growing a network of 240,000 accredited investor LPs in 195 countries, the firm says. Many of them are doctors, lawyers, and ordinary people who not only help their investment companies, but would have otherwise been cut out of the wealth generation that VCs experience.
OurCrowd has backed names like Anthropic, Beyond Meat and Lemonade.
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