Feature: Hillel Fuld, the Legendary Tech Enthusiast

This week I had a sort-of revelation. I have a blog, I thought, and I meet amazing, interesting people all the time. So why not share these insightful conversations? And so that’s what I’ve set out to do: Interview interesting, influential person in the startup/entrepreneurial/business world and feature them here.

I’ve set the bar high: My first feature is the foremost tech ambassador for Israel – Hillel Fuld.

Hillel grew up in New York and moved to Israel at age 15. The rest is history – he’s a tech enthusiast, startup mentor, and prolific blogger for many publications such as TechCrunch and VentureBeat. He’s incredibly entertaining for those who follow him online (Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, the whole deal) and recently, Hillel cofounded his own startup – Zcast. He’s also a master at personal branding, but maybe most importantly, Hillel is a true mensch and friend to many in the Israeli startup ecosystem.

Amazingly, he’s also helped at least 85 people get jobs in Israeli tech, as he’s quite connected and his name carries weight.

This week he was generous enough to allow me the honor of interviewing him. Enjoy:

Hillel is probably most known for his blog, which now has thousands of followers. Interestingly enough, it’s this blog to which Hillel credits his entire career. How’d he start? Accidentally, actually:

“Around 10 years ago, I was sitting in my cubicle at work one day, and realized that I have a lot of thoughts on tech and mobile. So I started blogging. At the time I didn’t think of it as a blog because there was no such thing as a personal blog back then. All I really did was start writing down my thoughts on tech and really quickly I started building up an audience. That led to startups reaching out and asking me for advice to give them guidance, on things like telling their story, sharpening their pitch, PR, social media strategy, and content. One thing led to another and soon I found myself mentoring a whole bunch of them.“

When we spoke, he made clear it wasn’t for a couple years until he gained traction:

“I definitely did it for the right reasons..it was more about real passion. I stuck at it for a long time, posted very consistently. And slowly but surely built up the audience. But there were definitely years where I didn’t really gain anything from it in the short term. I’ve never spent a dime on a follower, but I do spend a lot of time building great content. What was most important was having a vision to constantly build towards, cultivating relationships, and building a brand.”

According to many in the Israeli tech community, Hillel is the Israeli tech ambassador. People who follow him get a window into the unparalleled Israeli startup scene. Among the publications he writes for are TechCrunch, the NextWeb, VentureBeat, BusinessInsider, and the HuffingtonPost.

Recently Hillel co-founded ZCast, a platform to “democratize podcasting.” Basically it’s a website that makes it super easy to podcast and start your own radio show.

When I asked if ZCast was his “full-time job,” he responded:

“The words full-time are pretty relative to me because I work 21 hours a day. I try to do a lot. I’ve taken my passion and created a job out of it. I guess I’m pretty blessed.”

Hillel reached some pretty impressive people through his blog. Online he has a list of the most influential leaders he’s interviewed, and it includes people like Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Marc Andreessen, mega investor and entrepreneur. I asked how he does it:

“No magic, I reach them all through different social media platforms, by leveraging the content I create and building a personal brand.”

I asked him for some blogging advice, and was quite surprised by his response, to focus on quantity over quality. So whats the secret?

“Consistency. Keep it up. Don’t start getting worried about analytics early on. Ignore the fact that there are other companies and other blogs doing it. Own whatever you’re passionate about and just keep generating content on a regular basis….Of course you need to keep quality to be interesting, but I actually think in this case quantity is far more important than quality. It’s better to write one post a day that’s good than one post a month that’s amazing.”

In this past June alone, Hillel told me, startups in Israel raised over $561M in funds, “which is obviously completely insane.”

Who inspires Hillel?

“People that really help this startup ecosystem scale, like VC Mike Eisenberg. What really gets me excited are entrepreneurs who are under the radar, those who are modest and humble, and building real sustainable businesses that scale to become billion dollar companies.”

We hear so much about Tel Aviv. What about Jerusalem?

“I think Jerusalem is very hot right now and its only getting hotter. It’s not even a question that it’s an up-and-coming tech hub.”

Can entrepreneurship and business collaboration bring peace to the region? Hillel thinks so, as initiatives to bridge the divide between Israelis and Arabs are becoming more popular. Two hot programs in particular are Hybrid, an accelerator for startups with at least one Arab co-founder, and Our Generation Speaks, a social-enterprise incubator for Israelis and Arabs led by Ohad Elhelo, a friend of mine and recent graduate of Brandeis.

Hillel spends a lot of time mentoring startups. Here are the two biggest problems he’s noticed young companies have:

“A lot of times entrepreneurs have an idea, so there’s passionate about something and they want to run forward, and they don’t spend the time on competitive analysis to figure out who they’re up against. Oftentimes they’re in a very dense market and they have no idea. It isn’t a problem that they’re up against a lot of companies, just that they don’t know who they are.”

“Another huge problem startups have is telling their story. I think it’s super key. A lot of times Israeli founders focus on what they build or how they build it, but they rarely focus on why they built it. Like why do I care? What’s the pain point?”

Last, but not least, Hillel gave me some advice on how to optimize my (and your) summer internship:

“Just learn as much as you possibly can. Step out of your comfort zone, make yourself uncomfortable, and learn a lot.”

Have any suggestions of who I should interview next? Or any questions I should ask? Tweet me @ajacobson47 or email me: andrew.jacobson6@gmail.com.