The events of October 7th caught Lizzy Goldman – a principal at Samsung Next venture capital fund in Tel Aviv – at her parents’ home in New York. The family watched the news and asked her to stay, but for Lizzy, an Iron Dome combatant, it was clear she was returning to Israel. “After I managed to find a flight, I took my sister and we found ourselves running between gun and military equipment stores in New York buying ceramic vests”, she recounts. “That night I was already on the plane with a suitcase full of vests and flashlights that I passed on to friends in the field”.
A decade earlier, when she was 20, Lizzy decided to make aliyah alone to Israel and enlist as a combatant – and later as a commander – in Iron Dome. After her service, she returned to the U.S. straight to Wall Street, to Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. When she decided to move from banks to venture capital, she preferred to do so in Israel.
“Three times I set myself particularly difficult challenges”, she describes. “The first time – when I decided to make aliyah alone and enlist, I knew I aspired to be a commander but I understood that my chances of being a commander without knowing Hebrew were very low. I dedicated eight months during my service to studying Hebrew and improving my fitness. I managed to get to the commanders’ course and finished it with excellence.
“When I returned to the U.S., I missed the window of opportunity where most of my fellow students went for internships on Wall Street. It seemed almost impossible to find a position on Wall Street, but not least thanks to the determination and problem-solving I adopted from Israeli culture, I found a way in.
“When I decided to move to the venture capital field and return to Israel, I found myself again off the beaten path. I didn’t know friends here from 8200 or from my studies, and I had to pave my way again in a world that’s very much built on social connections”.
Today Lizzy leads investment in digital health, fintech, and robotics at the fund. Among the startups she has invested in are Better Health, Nest, OneStep, and more. In the past year, Lizzy has been working with senior figures in digital health at Samsung to shape the global strategy in the field. Samsung is investing in digital health to connect the billions of users of the company’s products to health services.
Lizzy managed to close two Samsung investments in new Israeli companies during the first month of the war. “I actively choose every day to be part of Israel”, she says. “Whether it means being recruited, volunteering, or simply continuing to work. We don’t have the option to stop the economy in order to fight – we have to do both”.
