Illai Gescheit

Illai Gescheit is an Israeli entrepreneur, inventor, and venture capitalist who is passionate about bringing innovation to large and complex ecosystems, such as corporations or the global energy market. As a Venture Partner with Siemens Energy Ventures in London, UK, and a former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at BP and Amazon, Illai excels at combining the power of start-ups and large corporations. He is particularly excited about their potential to jointly create innovative solutions to some of our greatest issues, including climate change.

The Entrepreneur

Illai’s entrepreneurial journey started in 2006, when he joined the founding team at Medingo, an Israeli start-up that created innovative medical devices. As Medingo’s Patent Engineer & Designer, Illai led the company’s product design and helped grow the team from six to 350. After Medingo was acquired by Roche for $160 million in 2010, he spent three more years as an Innovation Manager with the new parent company, working both on Medingo’s integration and on other intrapreneurial projects.
 
The experience with Medingo, as well as his education in Mechanical Engineering at Tel Aviv University, fueled a desire in Illai for building and creating: Ideas, products, and companies. He created over 20 patented ideas and founded multiple start-ups, mostly as answers to issues he experienced in his own day-to-day life. They included: Hangout, a smart laundry hanger for small apartments; SquaredFit, an online platform for apartment rentals in Tel Aviv; and Mobifile, an Android app that helped users organize all their digital files in one place. Later on, as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at BP, Illai co-founded VYVE, a service that helped individuals and businesses understand, track, and reduce their travel carbon footprint.
 
At BP, Illai developed a deep passion for innovative, technological solutions to the global climate and energy crisis. In 2021, he founded his own Venture Capital firm, called ZeroFirst Ventures, which works with start-ups, investors, corporate innovators, and universities to build a sustainable, low-carbon energy ecosystem. With ZeroFirst Ventures and beyond, Illai is particularly interested in solutions that are able to scale their impact without scaling their environmental footprint.
 
Beyond building his own products and ventures, Illai successfully empowers other founders and innovators, especially in their collaborations with large corporations. He has done so with BP and Amazon Web Services, as well as currently with Siemens Energy Ventures. In these positions, Illai plays the dual roles of finding, growing, and supporting start-up ventures, while also creating a broader supportive environment, by systematically transforming the way the corporate environment thinks about and relates to start-ups. This latter role is highly entrepreneurial in and of itself, as it requires bringing new mindsets and mechanisms to complex environments that are notoriously hard to change.
 
Illai’s experiences with creating his own products and helping others build theirs led him to develop a design and ideation methodology called Patent Thinking, as well as a product design framework called ZIZO: Zoom In Zoom Out. ZIZO enables entrepreneurs and product managers to juggle the competing focal areas of developing the product itself and understanding the user’s experience with it. Illai’s Udemy course on ZIZO, which he launched in 2019, has been completed by more than 6,600 people.
 
Driven by his desire for helping others and working on a wide variety of fields and issues, Illai holds countless mentoring and advisory roles, where he supports other entrepreneurs with his expertise and network, many of them in a voluntary capacity. These include roles with Techstars, Google for Startups, Singularity University, and Zinc VC. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network and shares his wisdom through Medium, LinkedIn, and guest articles. Finally, he inspires a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs by lecturing at London Business School, Cambridge University, and the technology-focused Product School.
 
The Vision
 
Illai is driven by an urgency to collectively find innovative and scalable answers to the world’s growing climate and energy crisis. He believes that building and scaling these solutions will require the creation of global entrepreneurial ecosystems focused on climate and energy innovation, far beyond the current venture capital environment. These ecosystems will need to be supported by funders, corporations, and policy makers, and provide entrepreneurs with capital, mentors, networks, and access to markets. 

Most importantly, these ecosystems will need to enable and empower far more people to be entrepreneurs than has been the case until now. Illai is particularly excited about unlocking the innovative potential of three types of people: Those with a deep understanding of AI and other technologies that can help create a better understanding of the problem and its potential solutions; those who come into the climate space from very different backgrounds and therefore don’t have the “this won’t work” response of many incumbents; and proximate leaders, those who have lived experiences with the problems they are trying to solve.

However, no matter their numbers, innovators and entrepreneurs cannot solve the climate crisis on their own. In order to scale their impact at the pace that is required, their solutions will need to be adopted by the institutions with the greatest influence on our future: Governments and corporations. The problem is that these institutions are used to operating in ways that largely maintain the status quo and minimize risk. As a result, although many corporations have tried to integrate start-ups, and many founders have tried to find corporate and governmental support, most of these initiatives have failed to yield tangible outcomes.

Illai believes there are three key parameters to successfully building these critical collaborations between start-ups, corporations, and governments – and he is actively working to improve each of them. First, as a mentor, investor, and Venture Partner, he educates and supports entrepreneurs in their engagements with large institutions. Much attention has been given to how corporations need to change in order to successfully integrate start-ups, but far less focus has been put on what entrepreneurs themselves can do to learn and adapt. Illai is working to improve this and, through his work and public writing, he stimulates others to do the same.
 
Second, Illai encourages corporations to shift their priorities when collaborating with entrepreneurs. Rather than primarily seeking to reap benefits, such as new technologies, talent, or financial opportunities, corporations must engage entrepreneurs from a starting point of providing value first: Capital, mentoring, and access to partners and customers. At Siemens, as well as through his writing and previously with BP and Amazon, Illai makes corporate leaders understand the outsized potential for innovation and growth when they approach entrepreneurs with this giving-first mindset.
 
Third, Illai empowers people in the organizations he works with to improve their ability to deal with change, particularly those in positions that are most prone to resist it, such as middle management. In order to successfully address the climate crisis, everyone will be required to adapt to change, at a much faster pace than most people and institutions have been used to. Corporate employees and policy makers will need to learn how to integrate new ways of operating; in other words, their organizations will need to become changemaking institutions. Unfortunately, in organizations stifled by hierarchy, KPIs, and ingrained operating procedures, this type of adjustment is difficult and often unsuccessful.
 
The key to solving this complex question of how to create more changemaking institutions is in the hands of people like Illai: Those who not only have the ability to think like creative, fast-moving, problem-solving entrepreneurs, but also possess the track record required to convince executives and policy makers, and have the empathy and understanding needed to enable change in individuals throughout the organization. Illai speaks the languages of both the corporate and start-up worlds and, building on his experiences as a mentor and teacher, is able to deeply connect with people in a way that empowers them to adapt to change and become changemakers themselves.
 
Critically, in all his current roles – Venture Partner, investor, mentor, lecturer, and writer – Illai seeks to bring people along in his vision for this global entrepreneurial ecosystem full of innovative climate changemakers. He does so by publicly sharing his vision and providing people with actionable ways to move themselves and their organizations in that direction. As a result, the impact of his work doesn’t stop with the people in his direct environment; it is setting in motion a systemic shift towards greater collaboration between all the actors that have the power to change our collective response to climate change.
 
The Person
 
“Kindness is my strategy” is Illai’s way of approaching the world and those around him. A father of three sons, he judiciously applies the giving-first perspective he suggests for corporations to his own relationships. Always willing to help, he believes in the power of small gestures, such as a quick introduction to a funder that will help an entrepreneur close their fundraising and build a successful business. He fundamentally favors the idea that people who are kind, generous, and willing to give first will achieve the best outcomes in the long term, even from a transactional perspective.

With a soft-spoken confidence, Illai exudes a calm, thoughtful, and grounded presence that naturally invites people to join him on his journey. He strongly believes in the power of personal relationships and in trust as the base upon which everything else is built. When working with entrepreneurs, he is ultimately more interested in their journeys – as an entrepreneur and as a person – than in the products and companies they build. Conversely, he believes that the most successful entrepreneurs who come to Siemens Energy Ventures do so not because it’s Siemens and the value the corporation can bring, but because of the people like him who are on the Energy Ventures team and the value each of those relationships holds.
 
Illai’s focus on personal relationships also comes through in how he evaluates and relates to the start-ups he mentors and invests in. As a venture capitalist, he is used to seeing his peers looking for the numbers, such as revenue and past exits. By contrast, Illai focuses on what he calls his “founder’s sense,” which helps him determine whether the start-up’s team is made of people who are kind, willing to listen and grow, willing to challenge and be challenged, and, most importantly, thinking first about their customers rather than their business. Illai also favors looking at “heart counts,” not “head counts.” Especially in the early stages of building something challenging, it doesn't matter whether a team has the best engineers and scientists; what matters is having people who are fully committed to the start-up’s values and vision and will therefore stick around through the inevitable ups and downs.
 
The importance Illai places on kindness and relationships stems from an unlikely origin: The five years he spent in the Israeli military, before his time with Medingo. As an officer, he learned that it was trust and empathy that motivated the soldiers under his command, not discipline and hierarchy. These experiences can be found in his core leadership principles: Empowerment and Inspiration; Generosity and Curiosity; Humility and Respect; and Compassion and Humanity.

A natural polymath, Illai is always seeking to learn and expose himself to new types of environments, industries, and solutions to work on. He gets uncomfortable when staying in his comfort zone too long and forces himself to take on new challenges regularly. As a member of the Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network, he seeks to be challenged by a type of impact-focused social entrepreneur he hasn’t worked with much yet, as well as to learn about how to fund and create policy for big, system-changing ideas.

In his personal career, Illai will keep fostering a mutually empowering environment between entrepreneurs and corporations – whether it is as a venture builder on the corporate side or as a more fast-paced founder of his own ventures. Either way, he will continue to proliferate his vision and, through the many diverse hats he wears, continue to empower innovators and changemakers along the way.

Illai Gescheit has been a member of Ashoka's Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network since 2023.