Hillel Fuld is a world-renowned startup advisor, tech columnist, and public speaker. He’s advised billion dollar startups and frequently travels the world on speaking engagements.
Since October 7th, Hillel has paused his business operations entirely and shifted his focus completely towards fighting anti-Israel rhetoric online. He’s now considered the leading Israel activist, with hundreds of millions of impressions across platforms.
Be sure to follow Hillel – he is very active on all platforms! hilzfuld.com
This conversation is packed with lessons on networking, career growth, and the importance of staying true to your values.
Enjoy!
Transcript
Victor M. Braca: Hi everybody. Welcome to Momentum. My guest today is Hillel Fuld. Hillel is a globally recognized Tech strategist, writer, and startup adviser. He’s worked with trillion-dollar brands—that’s trillion with a ‘T’—like Google and Microsoft. He regularly writes for columns like Inc. Magazine, and he’s traveled to over 50 cities globally on speaking engagements.
Since October 7th, Hillel has paused his work activities entirely and dedicated his time to fighting misinformation about Israel online, which is just unbelievable. Above all, Hillel is dedicated to helping people, as you’ll hear in the episode. I’m Victor Braca, your host, and Momentum is where I dive deep with exceptional leaders to uncover the key decisions, defining moments, and lessons that propel them to success, and how those insights can inspire your journey forward.
In this episode, Hillel tells some incredible stories. For example, about how he got in touch with Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple.
Hillel Fuld: Honestly, Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple and the man who invented the personal computer… you know how I got to interview him?
Victor M. Braca: And the story of how he met Marc Andreessen, founder of the $42 billion venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Hillel Fuld: He literally takes the phone, he’s like, “I’ll call you back,” hangs up the phone, he goes, “Hello, what’s up?” I was like, “Holy… I’m talking to Marc Andreessen right now like he knows I exist.” I was like, “What the heck?”
Victor M. Braca: Hillel also shares the lessons he learned about how to build and scale a successful company after working with dozens of startups. Every business has to make this decision from the get-go. This was a super insightful conversation. You’re going to love it. Enjoy.
Hillel, welcome to Momentum. This is so exciting.
Hillel Fuld: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.
Victor M. Braca: Thank you for being here. So I actually came across a LinkedIn post, as I always do—you’re very active on social media. You actually posted that Riverside, which is the platform we use to record video podcasts, is an Israeli company. So I want to start there, actually. Why did you post that, and just how does that explain what you do in a way?
Hillel Fuld: Well, first of all, let’s forget the fact that Riverside wasn’t working for us just now and pretend that didn’t happen.
Victor M. Braca: That didn’t happen.
Hillel Fuld: No, but I think, you know, it’s a very interesting thing because Riverside is a super-duper popular podcasting platform used by the biggest companies in the world. Everyone kind of knows that Israel is a leading technology superpower, but there are some companies that everyone knows are Israeli, and then there are some companies that no one knows are Israeli. Like, everyone knows Waze is Israeli; many people don’t know that Wix is Israeli. But Riverside, which again is super popular, almost no one knows is Israeli—which it’s just fascinating to me. So I met with the CEO a couple days ago and I just heard about the company and its growth and its investors and everything. It’s a wildly successful company that just most people don’t realize is Israeli.
Victor M. Braca: So your tagline is “transforming startups into businesses.” I want to hear if you can share with us how you got started in the startup tech ecosystem.
Hillel Fuld: Sure. So about 20 years ago, I’m at my first job, bored out of my mind. I was at a job that is highly unoptimized for someone with ADHD like myself. I’m literally sitting at my desk one day, bored, and I’m like, “This is ridiculous. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I should be doing something with tech and writing. I love writing, I love tech.”
So I just opened a web browser, bought a website, started to write. Today we call that a blog; it wasn’t a word that people used regularly back then. And I sure as heck didn’t have a business model. I just had a deep, deep passion for technology and writing. And so I started to write. Pretty quickly, entrepreneurs came across my writing, reached out to me, asked to meet. I would meet with them, tried to help them in any way that I could, and really just kind of one thing led to another. Companies that I helped early on came back to me, sometimes a decade later, and said, “Listen, you helped us back then when we were a small company. Now we’re a big company and we want to work with you.” And so I built this multi-million dollar consulting business from companies that, again, I met with and offered to help for free, and it ended up scaling.
Victor M. Braca: I want to go backwards in time a little bit. I want to zoom into your childhood. Tell me about your life before you moved to Israel. You moved when you were a teenager, I believe?
Hillel Fuld: Correct. I grew up in Queens in New York to a family of educators. My dad famously started—or was one of the first principals of SAR—really a visionary in the education world. And my mom was also an educator. Hardcore Zionists. My dad’s a rabbi, so grew up in a religious home. All in all, good childhood with five brothers. The second we were able to move to Israel, we moved to Israel. I came in 10th grade. So I was in 9th grade in New York, 10th grade in Jerusalem. Moved here—wasn’t an easy age—but slowly kind of integrated into Israeli society and now, 30 years later, I could tell you it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
Victor M. Braca: Love it. Love it. Were you always entrepreneurial as a child, or did that develop later on?
Hillel Fuld: I don’t think that was a word when I was a child. I don’t think that these things that we do today, like “influencer” and “social media” and all these things, existed back then. So I definitely didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur. Truth be told, I don’t know that I think of myself as an entrepreneur now. I think of myself as maybe a marketing executive or whatever it is. It happens to be that I built this company and I guess, objectively, I am an entrepreneur. But I gotta be honest, I never really saw myself as an entrepreneur, even though I started a few startups and I worked with startups. I just saw myself as a marketing guy. And the truth is, you say it and I realize that, yeah, I built this multi-million dollar company with my 10 fingers. I guess I am an entrepreneur.
Victor M. Braca: It’s like once you look back and you really see what you’ve built, you might not have been calling yourself that for your entire career, but a lot of people realize afterwards, “Maybe I can call myself that,” you know what I mean?
I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs and businessmen and marketing guys that their first jobs—their early working experience—paved the way for them in terms of professionalism for their future. You told me your first job was not optimized for somebody with ADHD, right? I want to hear from you your early working experiences as a whole. Did you meet key people? Did you learn key skills? Tell me about that.
Hillel Fuld: Right. So I have a degree in political science, which obviously has nothing to do with tech. When I finished my degree, I was like, “Now what?” I had no idea. Someone said to me, “Listen, you have English—obviously I’m an English speaker—and you like writing and you love tech. So go be a technical writer.”
I was like, “I don’t know what that is, a technical writer, but it sounds good.” Then I quickly realized that technical writers are the guys that write the user guides you get with your iPhone that no one ever reads. I found myself at this tech company writing their user guides literally for AT&T and Verizon.
Truth be told, I didn’t for many, many years understand—because I’m the type of guy who, as a religious Jew, always thinks like, “Why did this event happen? What was God’s plan here?” For many, many years, I would say even decades, I kind of questioned like, “Why was I a technical writer? Why did God send me to do that? What could I possibly have gained from that?”
But now I can tell you, many many years later, that of course I gained from that. What I gained was that a technical writer needs to take something complex and simplify it. That’s the skill set of a technical writer, which is what I do as a blogger, which is what I do as a journalist, which is what I do as a marketing person. I take startups with their deep technology and complicated algorithms and I teach them how to simplify it so they could talk to normal human beings. Everything that I do, in theory, I guess is simplifying. Simplification. And I learned that skill from that first job.
Victor M. Braca: Nice. And you do that as a public speaker as well. You travel all over the world.
Hillel Fuld: True. Yeah.
Victor M. Braca: I love it. So I want to hear about growing your personal brand. You gave us the high level, but what skills, what traits pushed you ahead to do that over the course of 10, 20 years to where you are today?
Hillel Fuld: 15 years ago, I would say, I started this journey. Listen, things become cliché because they’re repeated over and over again because they’re true. So what I’m about to say is going to be cliché, but it’s the truth: none of this would have happened—literally none of it would have happened—had I not been deeply, deeply passionate about tech.
You can’t pursue a career because you think it’s lucrative but it’s something that you’re not passionate about. It won’t work, it won’t scale. So everything started from the fact that I had this deep, deep passion for technology and for writing. That really was at the foundation of building my brand—the content. It’s all I’ve really ever done, if you think about it. All I’ve ever done is content. Content in different forms: public speaking, blogging, journalism, whatever it is.
As I started to produce all that content on the internet, and I did it consistently—I would say at a scale that one might say is a little bit supernatural, but it’s definitely a little bit crazy how much content I produced over the years. We were just looking a minute ago—I’ve never done this before—but you mentioned that you spotified my name. You searched my name on Spotify and you just kept scrolling. I never did that before, and I just opened Spotify and searched my name and I’m like, “Holy hell, I’ve done a lot of podcasts.”
Victor M. Braca: It’s a great strategy.
Hillel Fuld: Yes. I produced a lot of content over the years, and really that is what led to my brand. Because when, as a company or as an individual, you start producing content about the industry that you’re in, everything else that you’re going to do as you continue to build that brand becomes more effective. PR becomes more effective, social media becomes more effective, user acquisition becomes more effective, business development, fundraising, everything is assisted by content. So really, that’s kind of what led to me building this brand, I guess.
Victor M. Braca: Throughout your 15 years building your personal brand, you mentioned you help startups for free with really without any expectation of anything in return. How has that specific mindset allowed you to grow and allowed you to get involved with all these companies?
Hillel Fuld: Yeah, so I think honestly that I kind of stumbled upon something that I think is both unique and, if I may say so myself, slightly brilliant. And that is that if you look at every business—and it really doesn’t matter what type business it is—any business, the order in which things are done is as follows: You make a promise, such as “I have amazing Sushi.” You monetize that promise—AKA, you buy my Sushi—and you hopefully deliver on that promise. Hopefully the Sushi’s good. But you’re making a promise and you’re monetizing the promise, meaning you’re paying for my Sushi before you even tasted it.
I said let’s flip that order. Instead of making a promise and monetizing the promise, how about I deliver first? Then the recipient of whatever it is I’m delivering understands that it’s worth their money, that I’m valuable to them, and then they come to me and they need me. Then there’s no negotiation, because I have the leverage. You need me; I don’t need you. So by flipping that order and delivering first, I was able to build this multi-million dollar consulting business from companies that came to me and said, “Listen, we know what you’re capable of, we know what you did for us. Take our money, basically.”
Victor M. Braca: Take me back to the early days of you providing your service for free. First of all, how are you making money and supporting yourself? And did you have that forward-looking mindset of, “If I do this for long enough, I’m gonna be able to build a multi-million dollar brand out of this”?
Hillel Fuld: Absolutely not. At no point did I do any of this in order to achieve success. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I sat with entrepreneurs, I genuinely loved helping them, and I helped them. Again, the irony here is that had I either monetized from the get-go or planned for monetization, I would never have done any of the things that I did. In the short term, it didn’t make any sense, like, “Why are you helping people for free?”
In the beginning, when I was doing this, I had a job. First, I was this technical writer, then I was recruited by a tech company to be head of marketing. Literally as I was working for this tech company as head of marketing, I used to meet entrepreneurs for lunch to the point that the CEO of the company actually changed my title at the company from head of marketing to, I think it was, Chief Evangelist or Senior Evangelist. That was my role: go meet startups and elevate our brand. So I had a job, I was supporting myself at a normal job, but none of this was planned.
Again, let’s take it down to a simplistic level. Had I started blogging in order to monetize, I would have put ads on my blog, I would have tried to get sponsorships, and I would not have been focused on producing good content. That would not have been my focus because I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just doing it purely for the passion. I didn’t plan to monetize and I didn’t jeopardize or compromise the quality of my content, which then ironically led me to monetization. It’s an ironic, kind of weird thing to grasp.
It’s kind of like the more you sell, the less you sell. When people feel like they’re being sold to, then they’re less inclined to buy. I don’t know if you watch Seinfeld?
Victor M. Braca: It’s here and there. Whenever I’m on the plane, I download a couple Seinfeld episodes.
Hillel Fuld: There’s a brilliant scene in Seinfeld where they’re sitting in the living room and they get a phone call. Jerry answers the phone and the telemarketer on the other end says, “Oh, we’re calling to offer you 50% off your phone bill,” or whatever. So Jerry says to him, “You know, I can’t really talk right now. Why don’t you give me your number and I’ll call you back?” And the telemarketer is like, “I can’t give you my number.” So Jerry’s like, “Why? You don’t want me calling you at home? Now you know how I feel, right?”
No one likes to be sold to. No one. And so in an ironic way, the more you sell, the less you sell. And the less you sell—meaning the more you give actual value and the person does not feel like they’re being sold to—the more they’re inclined to actually buy. It’s a weird thing, but it works.
Victor M. Braca: I love it. And I noticed that amongst really everybody who is successful: it’s really all fueled from the passion either to help people or of their product or how they can change the world from the beginning. And then the monetary success comes later. But I think to not focus on that from the beginning is key. I’ve noticed that it’s key.
Hillel Fuld: Yeah. I mean, but again, so your viewers don’t think this is an abstract concept, let’s take this down to a granular, very practical example. Let’s say I develop an app. I develop an app, so now I have a choice to make: do I focus on monetization from the get-go or do I focus on building an amazing product?
Because if I’m focused on monetization, I’m going to put ads in my app, which by definition means that you’re going to like my app less. So yeah, I’ll make a couple of bucks, but it’s not a sustainable thing because people are not going to enjoy using my app because they’re going to be spammed with ads all the time.
Or I could say, “I’m gonna build an amazing product that people are going to love and it’s going to be sticky.” People are gonna keep coming back because they love it. Zero monetization. But once it’s sticky and once it scales and once it hits critical mass, then I flip the switch on monetization, and then the road to monetization is super short because I already have an engaged audience. Every business has to make this decision from the get-go. Every business. Do you focus on short-term gains or do you focus on long-term value? If you focus on short-term gains, you’ll make some money in the get-go, but it’s not a long-term sustainable strategy. Whereas if you focus on real value and building an amazing product, then monetization will follow.
Victor M. Braca: I love it. I love that mindset. You build an amazing product, seek to help people, and you’ll see success in that. So I’ve been following you on LinkedIn for a while—you’re very active, as you said, on all platforms. One specific thing you do on LinkedIn, I noticed you’re a true networker. You’re not a superficial one. You don’t want to try to build up your relationship so you can get things out of people; our viewers can tell. I want you to share about the practice of sharing different people on LinkedIn every week. How did that arise, and what have you seen from that?
Hillel Fuld: So, you know, again, it’s really the same concept. While everyone else is focused on themselves—me, me, me, self-promotion, talk about me, sell me—I’m like, “Let me focus on other people. Let me give other people a stage.” And, again, I did it really for the right reasons because I happen to meet unbelievable people and I figure it’s great to feature these people and let the world know about these unbelievable people.
But if we’re going to get cynical for one second—if we’re going to put on our business cap and think about, “Okay, what’s the ROI for me?”—well, if you think about it, if your LinkedIn feed is full of 800 pictures and every single one of those pictures has two things in common: One is that the person in the picture is an absolute rock star, and the reason that they’re a rockstar is explained in the post itself. So that’s the one thing they all have in common. And the second thing they all have in common is all 800 of them in that picture are standing next to this dude named Hillel Fuld. Well, what does that say about Hillel Fuld? If he’s standing next to 800 rock stars, I guess it means that I’m a rockstar.
Now, I at no point said I’m a rockstar, but perception is reality in marketing. So, again, I don’t do it for this purpose, but it’s an amazing marketing tactic to build a stage and put people on that stage because then you’re perceived as the person who built a stage, as the owner, as the real deal. And, again, it’s not just LinkedIn posts or Hillel Fuld; companies should do this too. As a company, you should be interviewing people in your industry, you should be listing people in your industry, you should be featuring people in your industry, you should be highlighting people in your industry. And then you’re perceived as, “Oh, it’s that company that features all those rock stars. The company must be a rockstar.”
Victor M. Braca: As somebody who travels all over to speak to people, to deliver messages, to tell people your advice, do you have any tips on being an effective communicator?
Hillel Fuld: Yeah, of course. First of all, always think about the audience. Again, that manifests online and offline. I’ll just give you a very basic example. So many people, specifically on Twitter but on all platforms, are constantly concerned with how they get more followers. So one of the things that these people do is they basically stuff their tweets with hashtags because they want people to discover them. But what they’re in essence doing when they say that is, “I care more about getting new followers than the followers who follow me now.” I’m not focused on the people who follow me now because I’m not giving them any value; I’m just stuffing these hashtags into my tweets. So you’re not paying attention to your audience. Think about your audience. Stop thinking about potential audiences; think about your audience.
So, first of all, know your audience. Think about them. In other words, the other day I gave a talk to a group of business coaches. When talking to them, I didn’t speak the same way or give the same tips as I do when I’m talking to a tech company. It’s a different audience.
And again, that manifests online as well. Many people post something and then either copy-paste it or use some app to just broadcast on all their different platforms. I don’t do that. I do one by one because my LinkedIn audience is different than my Twitter audience and my Twitter audience is different than my Facebook audience. It’s not the same writing, it’s not the same format, it’s not the same message.
First of all, know your audience. When I tell startups all the time, if you’re going to an investor and you think that you’re going to come in there and start talking to the investor about your algorithm, you’re sorely mistaken. This is a logical mistake that entrepreneurs make because it’s their baby; they’ve been building this technology forever and they want to talk about it. But again, they’re not paying attention to the audience. No one cares what algorithm you built; it’s irrelevant. Talk to me about why you built it. Why should I care? Not what you built or how you built it. No one cares. Talk to me about why I should care. That’s something that is so fundamental to the way startups communicate.
In terms of public speaking, there’s endless literature on this. I can tell you a nice hack that I’ve kind of… I don’t know if I invented or I heard it from someone, but if you’re speaking and you feel like you’re losing the audience, here’s a good hack. It works 100% of the time, 100% success. If you’re talking and you feel like you’re losing the audience, just simply say, “All right guys, I shouldn’t tell you this, but…” and you see everyone’s like, “Oh, what’s he gonna say? What’s he gonna say?” You know, that’s just a nice hack.
You gotta engage the audience. For example, when I’m talking about tech, I always kind of get into my talk at some point saying, “All right, raise your hand if you use an iPhone.” You know, iPhone and Android is like a religion. It’s such a loaded topic that people care so deeply about. So when I ask the audience, “Who here is using an iPhone?” Everyone’s so excited to engage. It’s always good to engage the audience.
Obviously humor is a great tool. So when I ask, “Okay, who uses an iPhone?” everyone raises their hand. I say, “Who uses Android?” and then like five people raise their hand and I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” Then everyone starts laughing. Humor is a great tool.
But it’s always good to have a structure. You have kind of an opening of who you are and what you’re here to talk about, you have the meat of it, and then a strong ending. Don’t just end with like, “All right, great, bye guys, have a good day.” You gotta end strong, whatever that means. Sometimes I say, “All right guys, that’s all I got, thank you so much, done, finished, easy,” whatever. Or some strong ending where you know it’s clear, boom, this is where it ends.
It’s always good to have structure but at the end of the day, I often go over to Bar Mitzvah kids in shul before they start reading the Torah and I say, “Listen, you spent whatever amount of years studying. Don’t open and start studying. You know it. That’s not your issue right now. The only thing right now that separates whether you’re going to do this successfully or not is your confidence. If you get up there and you read the encyclopedia but with confidence, people love it. If you get up there and you’re shaky and you’re not confident, I don’t care how well you know it, it’s not going to be good.”
Confidence is extremely important when you’re speaking. The energy. People come up there and they’re low energy and they’re nervous. I get it; public speaking is the biggest phobia in the world, the biggest fear in the world. I get it. And I’m tremendously grateful to God that I don’t have that fear, that I have this gift that I just get on stage.
I’ve never, in the thousands of lectures that I’ve given, I’ve never prepared. Ever. Once. Really—sorry, let me correct that—once I did a commencement speech and it was extremely formal, so I prepared a little bit for that. But thousands of speeches, I’ve never prepared. In fact, when I was asked to prepare, I was like, “No way,” because if I’m sitting there on stage reading off of index cards or paper, it’s just not as authentic. It’s not as appealing and it’s not as engaging.
So confidence is important. Of course, if you don’t have a memory or it’s hard for you to remember the structure and you need to write it down, then again, write down like a one word on an index card so that it sparks memory. But don’t start reading off a piece of paper under any circumstances; that will never work. So it’s structure, it’s humor, it’s engaging the audience, and I think it’s confidence.
Victor M. Braca: Has not preparing ever backfired on you?
Hillel Fuld: No.
Victor M. Braca: Wow. It’s that off-the-cuff feeling that you’re going for. You really want to keep it authentic.
Hillel Fuld: Yeah. But it also again brings us back to that original point, which is passion. If I get up and I’m asked to get up and speak about whatever topic that I’m not passionate about, then I’m not going to be able to do it successfully. But if I’m asked to get up and speak about Israel, to speak about tech, to speak about cars, to speak about things that I’m passionate about, then I could do that in my sleep because I love it so much. So it has to be something you’re passionate about, otherwise it’s going to be very transparent that you’re up there speaking about something you’re not passionate about.
Victor M. Braca: For sure. Guys, sorry for the quick interruption. I just want to ask you: please, if you’re enjoying this podcast, share with a friend, leave a comment, a like, anything you could do to help grow the podcast would be greatly appreciated. Back to the episode.
So throughout your blog, you’ve interviewed people like Marc Andreessen, Steve Wozniak, Gary Vee, a plethora of other insanely successful and well-known people. How do you go about making a memorable connection with them? You meet them and you want them to remember you, and they meet hundreds of people, thousands of people every year. How do you approach that?
Hillel Fuld: First of all, here’s a secret for you and your viewers: Everyone likes to be on stage. Everyone likes to be interviewed. Everyone has their mom they want to send the interview to. How do I know that? Because 100% of the people that I asked to interview agreed. 100% of them. Really. Don’t say it’s because I have a lot of followers, because when I interviewed these people I didn’t have a lot of followers. In fact, it’s the opposite: I gained the followers by interviewing these people.
People like to be on stage. Now, of course, if you’re going to reach out to someone who’s not active on Twitter and you’re going to write them on Twitter, they’re not going to respond. Be intelligent about it. But honestly, Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple and the man who invented personal computing… you know how I got to interview him? I sent him a message on Facebook. True story, promise.
Victor M. Braca: You didn’t email him? You sent him a message on Facebook?
Hillel Fuld: I kid you not.
Victor M. Braca: And he responded.
Hillel Fuld: He responded.
Victor M. Braca: Where’d it go from there? He said yes right off the bat?
Hillel Fuld: No, first time I asked him he said no. But he responded, which was super cool in and of itself. I followed up like a year later and I said, “Listen, it would mean so much to me.” He again said no. Followed up a year later and I said, “What would it take to convince you?” and he said, “All right, just send me the questions.” Sent him the questions, he sent me back the answers, copy-paste, post went viral. He comments on my Facebook and says, “Had I known you were this popular, I would have let you interview me three years ago.” And we became friends—like actual friends, offline friends. He came to Israel, we had breakfast, I had to rush into a bomb shelter… crazy stuff.
Victor M. Braca: That’s cool. So you reach out to these people and you’re sitting with them, you’re interviewing them. How does that pan out for you? Meaning, you’re talking to them, but in the years following do you have a structure in terms of following up, in terms of really like staying on their radar so that they don’t forget the one of a thousand interviews?
Hillel Fuld: So, first of all, most of my interviews were not done offline; they were done online. So Steve’s interview was done over email. I sent him 10 questions, he sent me back 10 answers, I copy-paste. I met him offline afterwards, but the interview was done online.
Same with Marc Andreessen. I had not met Marc Andreessen. Those that are listening might not know who Marc Andreessen is. Marc Andreessen is one of probably the biggest venture capitalists and, you know, first investor in Facebook and many other leading companies. But he is most well-known for inventing the web browser at Netscape. Today we have Chrome, we have Safari, but he basically invented the modern web browser. He was on the cover of Time Magazine—the guy’s an absolute legend.
Yeah, I just reached out to him online and I said, “Can I interview?” and he said, “Yeah.” Some of these interviews, video interviews, were done obviously offline, but most of these interviews, Gary included, Marc and Steve were done online.
By the way, quick story—I don’t think I’ve ever told this story actually—but I had not met Marc Andreessen in real life. But after I interviewed him, we stayed in touch. I’d send him deals all the time. We were—I wouldn’t say we spoke regularly—but I would say at least once a month we would communicate by email.
On one of my trips I was in Silicon Valley and I obviously wanted to go to Andreessen Horowitz, which is Marc Andreessen’s firm. I went to meet one of his other partners, a guy named Benedict Evans, who’s just a friend of mine from Twitter. I was sitting with Benedict Evans and I finished the meeting and I left the office. Marc was not in and I was pretty bummed because I had not met Marc but we were in touch for so long.
As I’m leaving Andreessen Horowitz, a black SUV pulls up, tinted windows, and the door opens and Marc gets out. He’s on the phone and he’s talking—I’m telling you, I don’t think I ever told this story—and he’s talking to one of his companies, clearly a company in distress because it was clear from the conversation that he was telling them whether they should shut the company down or not. For an investor, that’s a pretty high-pressure kind of call, like you invested in this company and they’re about to shut down.
But here’s my chance. He’s about to walk by me and he’s on the phone. I’m like, “Well, I’m going to miss the opportunity,” so I literally like wave at him and I’m like, “Hillel Fuld!”
He literally takes the phone, he’s like, “I’ll call you back,” hangs up the phone, he goes, “Hello, what’s up?” I was like, “Holy… I’m talking to Marc Andreessen right now, like he knows I exist.” I was like, “What the heck?”
And by the way, that’s not even the coolest story when it comes to these kind of things. Gary Vee, by far the coolest story. He had been following me on Twitter. I met him when he was in Israel. I would say we were acquaintances plus friendly; we weren’t friends by any means.
But about 10 years ago, I was hosting a conference in New York and I really wanted Gary Vee to be the keynote. So I DM’d him on Twitter and I said, “Gary, I’m coming to New York, I’m doing this event, I’d really love you to come keynote.”
He’s like, “Yeah, no problem, done.”
I’m like, “Great.”
He goes, “$50,000.”
I’m like, “Dude, we’re an early-stage startup. I can’t… like, I really want you to come, but I don’t have a budget for that.” And I thought that was the end of the conversation. I said to him, “You know, I appreciate it, love you, but not gonna happen.”
About a minute later, I get an email from Gary to his assistant, CC’ing me, saying: “Please waive the $50,000 fee for Hillel. He’s a friend.” And he came to the conference and he spoke for free. It’s on YouTube.
Victor M. Braca: Wow.
Hillel Fuld: Yeah. Now I would say he would call me a friend. We see each other, we give big hugs and you know… I mean, I have some issues with him right now because he’s not really speaking out as a Jew, he should be speaking out, but that’s a whole different discussion. But yeah, we speak pretty regularly. Sometimes I’ll send him either a CV or something and he’ll respond right away, say like, “Dude, I have no time for this right now.” He’s always very responsive. And that all happened from reaching out online and offering to interview.
Victor M. Braca: So cool. And you mentioned Israel advocacy briefly. I want to dive into that. Tell me about how you’ve shifted your focus in terms of business to Israel advocacy.
Hillel Fuld: Yeah, I mean, listen. At the end of the day, while I was a tech guy promoting tech, really the underlying message was Israel. It was always Israel. It was always Israeli tech. But if you followed me, you would have considered me a tech guy, not an Israel guy.
Six years ago, my brother was murdered in a terrorist attack and he was a very outspoken Israel advocate. So that kind of pulled me into the conflict. I kind of half removed the mask of the tech guy, and if you followed me you understood that I’m promoting tech but really I’m promoting Israel. But I still didn’t remove the mask completely. I still was a tech guy.
October 7th happened and I’m like, “The world doesn’t need more marketing right now. The world doesn’t need more tech right now. The world needs more Israel right now.” And so I completely shut down the business and I completely transitioned to Israel advocacy. I just realized I have this large platform and I have the ear of the tech world who, generally speaking, is pretty anti-Israel and they’re not going to be listening to any Israel advocates. But they don’t view me as this “Hasbara guy.” They view me as Hillel, their colleague. So they trust me.
I realized I’m in this unique position. Since the war started, I’ve been 100% focused on Israel advocacy, providing real-time accurate information and just giving people a reason to get up in the morning. Israel has been my 100% focus since October 7th.
Victor M. Braca: Beautiful. And you were just honored by the Israeli government. Tell us about that.
Hillel Fuld: Yeah, yesterday. It was pretty nuts. I get a WhatsApp about, I don’t know, three weeks ago from some woman. Says, “Listen, I’m representing Dan Illouz, who’s an MK, a Knesset member, and he’s putting together an event, a conference, with some of the biggest warriors for Israel online, and we’d love to honor you.”
I’m like, “Okay, that sounds amazing, whatever.”
And yeah, yesterday we showed up at the Knesset and it was 50 Israel advocates. We had some MKs speak and every single basically Israel warrior in the room. They presented each one of us with a nice award from the State of Israel, thanking us for our fighting for Israel on behalf of Israel online. It was a beautiful event and it was quite emotional, actually.
Victor M. Braca: Beautiful. First of all, congratulations on that. I want to ask you, as somebody who was able to shift their focus completely from business to Israel advocacy—to giving back, that’s your form of giving back—how do you incorporate giving back into business? How do you do it from your day-to-day?
Hillel Fuld: I mean, networking obviously is an incredibly important part of business. Most people, again, when they’re looking at the network, they’re thinking, “What’s in it for me?” Instead of doing that, why not, if you want to meet an investor, instead of reaching out and pitching them your startup, offer to interview them? Give them a stage. You just got on their radar. Easy, right?
Or if you’re going to meet someone, instead of focusing on what you can get out of the meeting, ask the person you’re sitting with to tell you about them. Ask them what their challenges are. People love that, people talking about themselves. And it differentiates you from everyone else because everyone else is “me, me, me, me, me.” Stop focusing on you.
Talking about Gary Vee, he has his famous book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Give, give, give, and then take. Try to focus on others in networking and in business in general. If you stop selling and start giving, a company realizes, “Wow, this guy’s legit. He has incredible value, we need him.” And then they need you, and then you define the terms, not them.
Victor M. Braca: You’re very responsive on social media, on email, and I imagine you get reached out to by many young adults, ambitious young people, whether it be wannabe startup founders or people interested in the business world or in the advocacy world. What do you tell young adults as the first step to take? Say somebody like me, I’m 18 years old, I’m starting college. What should the first step for me be to take to put myself ahead in terms of business?
Hillel Fuld: It’s a good question. I’ll tell you what I tell people. First thing I tell people is to sit down and ask themselves the following question: When you’re 120 years old on your deathbed, you look back at your career and you make a big checkmark. What does that look like? What are your top priorities for your career?
I’ll give you a couple of examples. Is making money your top priority? Okay, fine. That’s legitimate. If that’s your top priority, then maybe working at an early-stage startup is not right for you because they can’t pay you good money.
Is having an impact your top priority? Making the world a better place? Fantastic. So then maybe you want to work in like a healthcare company.
Is having an impact in the organization important for you? Then you don’t want to work at a corporate because you’re not going to be impactful in Google.
The list goes on and on. What is it that you want to accomplish? You want to make people happy? You want to work with good people? What is important to you? It’s not just one thing. You should have a list of, let’s say, five to 10 things that are your top priorities. Once you have that list in front of your eyes, you have a lot more clarity about what you want to do and what you don’t want to do. If you want to have an impact on the world, then you’re not going to work in gambling, right? Or if you want to work with good people, then maybe you shouldn’t work in a certain industry, whatever it may be.
That’s the first step that I tell people: Sit down, figure out what your priorities are. Once you have that list, then you have clarity of kind of what you want to do. Once you have that clarity, I tell people: Make an Excel sheet. Make five tabs. Each tab is a vertical.
Again, let’s say having an impact is important to me. Okay, so one tab might be healthcare. One tab might be mental health. One tab might be helping special needs. Whatever it is, things that are meaningful. And then under each tab, start doing research into companies and come up with a list of let’s say 10 companies in that vertical that you like. Why do you like them? I don’t care why you like them. You like them because you like their product, you like their investors, you like the company culture, you like their website… I don’t care.
Once you have done that, then you have real clarity. You have 50 companies that you want to target. And then comes the networking. Find someone who can make introductions for you. Have cups of coffee. At least in Israel, that’s how things happen—everything happens over cups of coffee. Have a cup of coffee with someone, not in the context of, “Hey, I want to meet you so you could hire me.” No. “Hey, I want to meet you because I love what you’re doing at the company and I want to figure out if I could help in any way.” People love that. That’s kind of the first couple of steps in terms of building your career.
Victor M. Braca: I love that as a theme of really this entire episode. Focusing on the last thing that you just said, which is you have to help people. Don’t just be in it for yourself. Amazing. Any books that you find yourself going back to for a sounding board, for advice, or for techniques and strategies?
Hillel Fuld: Oh man, there’s so many. Where do I even begin?
There’s a book called—by the way, I once emailed Marc Andreessen and I asked him that question. I said, “Marc, what books do you know?” And he CC’d his partner Ben Horowitz, and Ben and him threw out some books at me by email. It was the coolest thing ever.
Zero to One is amazing. Extreme Ownership is amazing. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is probably my favorite book ever about startups. Just Tim Ferriss’s books like Tribe of Mentors. I could look right here at my shelf. I’m looking at Tribe of Mentors, Lead by Greatness… what else we got here? The thing is that my books are a mixture of Jewish stuff and business stuff. But yeah, Hooked is a great book by Nir Eyal. Steal the Show. Lean Startup. The list is long.
Victor M. Braca: For sure. I love it. My books are also a mix of Jewish-focused and business. I love it. The show has a signature question. The show is called Momentum. We’re trying to inspire young adults on their journey to success and to giving back and philanthropy. We want them to build up their momentum—small steps lead you to big things in the long run. So I want to ask for you: Your momentum moment. The moment where you saw what you were doing—whether it be startup advising, writing, interviewing people—what was your momentum moment? What was the moment where you realized things were catching on, you could do this as a career, and you love what you do?
Hillel Fuld: I don’t know if there was one moment, but I think I have these moments pretty regularly. I’ll give you one example. Many many years ago, a company in Silicon Valley came out with an iPad app. It was a beautiful, beautiful app and I loved it. It was really early days of the iPad. I loved the app and I started to write about the app and promote the app. Again, not because they asked me to. I had zero relationship with them. I loved the app genuinely and promoted it because I loved the app.
This went on for years. And again, at no point did I speak to the company. At no point did they ask me to promote it. It was purely from an authentic and genuine place. This went on for literally a decade. One day I’m minding my own business at home and I get the following email. I’m reading it for you. The subject of the email is “Thank you.”
The email says: “Hillel, I won’t ever forget…” This is, by the way, a multi-billion dollar startup in Silicon Valley. Not Jewish, not Israeli, nothing to do with Israel. Just an amazing startup. “Hillel, I won’t ever forget your enduring support for what we have been building over the years. It’s time we got you some stock and asked you to be a formal adviser. I know you wouldn’t ask for this, but it’s the right thing to do. I hope you’ll accept. We are only just beginning and I could really use your advice when you have time.”
My mind… I was like, “What the…?” Again, multi-billion dollar company. I’m like… so that was kind of one moment where I was like, “Holy crap.”
But throughout the years, like, I met so many companies and tried to help in so many different ways that sometimes when I get a message reminding me of what I did for a company, it blows my mind. I did one of these features last year and I featured a CEO of a company. His name is Ariel Assaraf and he’s the CEO of a company called Coralogix. I featured him and I wrote, like, I remember I helped him in the beginning of the company but I don’t really remember what I did, but I just do remember I helped him.
So he commented on that post and wrote the following: “So that our LinkedIn connections don’t stay in uncertainty, I’ll remind you how we met. I texted you that we started something a couple of years ago and it isn’t going great. You: 1) Met me for lunch to learn more and see how you can help. 2) Gave advice on how crappy our social media presence was. 3) Helped me prepare and launch in Product Hunt to get to second place that day, ahead of a launch by Apple. 4) Connected me to over 10 people, including some key tech decision makers in the Bay Area. 5) Connected me to job candidates I was looking for. 6) Asked for nothing in return. Thank you, man. This is a great opportunity to look back and say it. I appreciate you and all you have done for us and so many startups.”
I read that and I’m like, “Who’s he talking about?” you know? Things like that, when I get that kind of feedback, it’s extremely gratifying.
Victor M. Braca: Gratifying. Rewarding. It keeps you going. That’s the underlying… that’s your momentum. I love it. That’s beautiful. Hillel, thank you so much. Is there anything else you think young adults today should hear? I know one takeaway that I have, if I may from this conversation: help first. Seek to give value. Don’t seek for anything in return. The number six on the guy’s list was “you didn’t ask for anything in return.” Beautiful. Do you have anything else that you think young adults today should know and live by?
Hillel Fuld: Yeah, I think that the worst advice people give is that the nice guy finishes last. That’s just ridiculous. Absolutely not true. Absolutely not true. Being nice in business is the best business model in the world. Always, you know—I don’t know who said it—but don’t step on people on the way up because you might meet them on the way down.
Victor M. Braca: That’s good. That’s a good quote. And that’s a great one to end off the episode. Hillel, thank you so much for coming on.
Hillel Fuld: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Victor M. Braca: All right, awesome. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Momentum with my guest Hillel Fuld. As I mentioned just a few seconds ago, my main takeaway from this episode is one word: Give. Give, give, give, give to others. Provide value, provide your time, provide dedication to others and you will see it come back tenfold.
Guys, make sure to follow Hillel on all platforms. I’ll link his socials in the show notes. He’s at @hillelfuld on all platforms. Be sure to follow him. If you enjoyed this episode, I highly encourage you to check out my conversation with Allan Levy. Allan is the extremely experienced founder of Alchemy Worx, a marketing consulting agency working with brands like Disney and SiriusXM. Allan opens up about how he founded multiple companies during the tech bubble of the late 90s, how he raised venture capital funding, how he got ousted from his own company, and more. You can find that episode in the show notes or by searching “Momentum Allan Levy” wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that’s Momentum Allan Levy with the CEO of Alchemy Worx.
With that said, thank you again for watching. Please be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. We’re on all platforms: Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Instagram—everywhere. Please rate the show five stars, leave a comment. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Until next time.
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