Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:00:00 · James Pringle
[00:00:00] S0: This episode is sponsored by Seapoint, the business account built for startups. If you're a startup founder fed up with finance admin, you need Seapoint. Seapoint is different to neobanks because it connects all your bank accounts and your Stripe account to see your cash position, burn, and runway instantly. It automates bookkeeping by pulling invoices and receipts from your whole team's inboxes, so you just sync the whole lot to zero and pay outstanding bills with a click. Plus, it has a 3.51% yield on treasury and real human customer support. Find out more at seapoint.co. That's seaprint.co. Use code unicorn for a free month. Seapoint offers money market funds managed by BlackRock. Rate recorded at 10/01/2026. Rates are variable and subject to change. Capital at risk. Hello, and welcome to a new episode of riding unicorns. Today, we're delighted to be joined by Yaron Valor, the founder and chairman of Target Global. They manage more than €3,000,000,000 across Europe, and, Yaron has more than three decades of experience investing and back to more than fifteen unicorns, which is incredible. So Yaron, it's great to have you on. We're really excited to learn a bit about your investment experience, what you're excited about in the industry today, but also cover your new book, The New Europeans, which is really interesting. You've got a fascinating thesis about migration being at the heart of innovation and change and new opportunities. So we're really looking forward to diving into that. Maybe we could just start with a quick introduction on yourself and Target Global and sort of what you do day to day, and then we'll talk more about the book.
00:01:39 · Yaron Valler, James Pringle
[00:01:39] S1: That sounds great. So first of all, thank you for having me. It's it's, it's great to be on the podcast, and I appreciate the attention that you're giving to my book. I think that it's a very contentious subject, which I'm happy to talk about. And you mentioned before, Target is a multistage investment fund, investment management company. We're managing eight different funds or eight generations of the three types of funds in addition to very large direct positions or SPV positions that we're holding in companies. So we've been really investing in European tech since 2014, 2015, before that, through other vehicles since the beginning of the century. I was trained to engineer. I bring sort of that approach a little bit to venture capital because I always look at the technological gap and I look at the advantage that technology can give a company. I then started a couple of companies. The last one that I started and sold was in 2003, so quite a long time ago. And then I became a venture capitalist initially in Israel, and then I moved to Europe and started running funds there. [00:02:40] S0: Awesome. And you've had a very successful career as an investor now, and obviously, you were a founder prior to that, and you bring this engineering edge as well. So you you kind of go Swiss army knife there, Yaron, of of everything you'd want in an investor with all that different experience. What do you think has been the most important skill that you've had as an investor and also one that you've improved that has really helped you as an investor?
00:02:40 · James Pringle, Yaron Valler
[00:02:40] S0: Awesome. And you've had a very successful career as an investor now, and obviously, you were a founder prior to that, and you bring this engineering edge as well. So you you kind of go Swiss army knife there, Yaron, of of everything you'd want in an investor with all that different experience. What do you think has been the most important skill that you've had as an investor and also one that you've improved that has really helped you as an investor? [00:03:07] S1: I can tell you what I think the most important skill is, period. I'm not sure how good I am at it, you know, for other people to say. It's understanding people and understanding what motivates them. At the end of the day, almost everything else is fixable, but having a bad team is something that you cannot fix. I'm also speaking about it in the book, I'm explaining why this is such an important trait, but finding people with a long ego and a very high energy is usually the key to success. [00:03:36] S0: Incredible. How do you try and spot that as an investor? Obviously we have many calls with lots of founding teams. How have you learned to pattern recognise low ego, high energy and agency?
00:03:36 · James Pringle, Yaron Valler
[00:03:36] S0: Incredible. How do you try and spot that as an investor? Obviously we have many calls with lots of founding teams. How have you learned to pattern recognise low ego, high energy and agency? [00:03:49] S1: It's someone that is very confident, but doesn't take themselves too seriously. Someone that is real and not busy saying what they think that people wanna hear. Someone that has... Usually a good indicator is someone that is very detail oriented. Someone that has a good plan. Having someone which has detail orientation, a lot of energy, and at the same time, not overly pompous or doesn't think that they are the gift of mankind. That's usually the trick. What I miss, I usually miss there. I usually miss by misinterpreting the personality type and the... Or misunderstanding the cues. [00:04:27] S0: So you think you misunderstand those? [00:04:29] S1: Oh, for sure. [00:04:30] S0: Do you think we're all susceptible to... [00:04:32] S1: By portfolio, you know, I don't know. I only have successes. I've got lots of failures and the failures are failures are usually caused by me not understanding something at the beginning. Sometimes it was just how things evolved, you know, market or whatever it happens. But sometimes it was definitely me misreading the team leaves and not understanding that the team doesn't have the right makeup or has some deficiencies. [00:04:54] S0: Absolutely fascinating. And so tell me a bit how that that kind of understanding of what you're looking for evolved into the thesis that underpins your new book.
00:05:07 · Yaron Valler
[00:05:07] S1: Maybe I'll explain the motivation for the book and that will become clear from that. So I've been a sort of a foreign implant in other countries for most of my life. I've never been an immigrant per se, right? I was much more of an expat than an immigrant, but I was always an outsider. And one of the things that I've noticed over the years is that outsiders make really good entrepreneurs and that the vast majority of successful companies that we have are driven by either people who are really immigrants, outsiders, or people that are very comfortable with moving around and share the same traits. And they started noticing this, and and then they said, wow. You know, maybe this is enough. Maybe this is something that needs to be validated. I mean, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence about it, but why don't they try to validate it? And from there, after I was convinced that this is a validated phenomenon and something that you can show, I started thinking about the broader implication of immigration. And of course, you know, having lived in Europe for so long, the issue of immigration is burning. It's almost self explanatory that a continent or a geography that doesn't grow in people, doesn't grow demographically, and doesn't grow economically, will decline. And the ways to offset this decline are also self evident. So there's a huge discrepancy between this logical understanding of the importance of immigration to Europe and The UK in the current circumstances that they're facing. And at the same time, there is a lot of resistance to it, which is very natural. So I was trying to understand the roots of the resistance, the value that this brings, and to explain how we can overcome them as a society without losing our identity.
00:06:38 · James Pringle, Yaron Valler
[00:06:38] S0: Absolutely fascinating. So tell us a little bit about what you discovered in the research and the benefits of new ideas, new energy are obviously massive. But how can nations harness that in the best way? Because it's not always harnessed in the best way and it could be improved. You know, governments have a responsibility to not only welcome immigration, but also to harness that new energy. So what have you kind of discovered through your research around that topic? [00:07:08] S1: I think there are several identifiable traits that we're seeing with immigrant entrepreneurs. Some of them are very trivial. You know, people that don't have a safety net work harder. It's very clear. But some are less evident. For example, the fact that people see things from the outside, this gives them a fresh perspective. You know, one of the examples that I give in the book is Wise, where the founders were horrified by the cost of transferring money. And this is something that they saw because they were outsiders, because they had to use this service. So many times it comes from a need. It comes from a need that you see as an immigrant. And this is something that is identifiable and you can show it with research and you can show how this fresh perspective is driving lots of the unicorns or lots of the successful stories in in entrepreneurship and tech, particularly in tech. You asked me about what governments can do, and I think that's the... [00:08:03] S0: Yeah. What can governments do? Yeah. Because it's a... Obviously, it's quite a topical kind of conversation.