Adi Pundak-Mintz

Who is Adi Pundak-Mintz?

As a General Partner at Gemini, Adi draws on his start-up, VC and scientific background to make seed investments. Since joining Gemini in 1999, he has specialized in seed investments in the areas of enterprise IT software and systems, and financial software. Adi sits on the boards of a number of Gemini portfolio companies including dbMotion, Diligent, Neocleus, Metrolight, Octavian, OpTierand Traiana. Adi came to Gemini from Neurone, a boutique Israeli VC.“Boards have a tendency to delay decisions to the last possible minute – but we try to supply adequate financing in a timely fashion - even with uncertainty. For example, a few years ago, one Gemini company was facing a major Board decision to support the company or to shut it down. The company had changed markets three times and did not have an enormous technology barrier – just strong management and a good idea. I felt that the caliber of the management was different – and I felt that they could do what they said they would do, which is to re-define themselves. They had a domain expert and identified a set of customers that their technology could serve. They needed a bridge loan and the Board was delaying the decision. We convinced the Board to support the company. Less than 6 months later, they had a viable product in the market and a further investment from Sequoia.”Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Adi held business development and marketing positions with Nexus Telecommunications (NASDAQ:NSUSF), joining as one of the company's first employees. Nexus develops wireless technologies for messaging and location services. “Working at Nexus was the best kind of start-up experience. You felt it was a privilege to work there. You could do what you were good at with none of the politics or bureaucracy of a big company. People worked all the time – often straight through the weekend – and they were brilliant. I’d venture to guess that more than 20 of my colleagues at Nexus went on to start or lead new companies. I learned two very important lessons there. 1. Know what you don’t know. Admit it and hire people that are better/ smarter/ more experienced than you to do the things you don’t know how to do. 2. Everyone is better than you at something – figure out what that is and learn from your colleagues what you don’t know.”Prior to Nexus, he was an engineer at ECI Telecom (NASDAQ:ECIL), in the early days of the company’s SDH (a standard for communicating digital information over fiber-optic cables) business unit. His team developed the first SDH system. Earlier in his career, Adi served in the Israeli Navy as a project engineer for Naval Underwater Systems.Adi is a graduate of the INSEAD MBA program. He holds two degrees from Ohio State University, a BSc with honors in Electrical Engineering and a BA with distinction in Mathematics. He completed over two years towards a PhD in vision-computer science at the Weizmann Institute but ultimately decided that business, not academia, was his true calling. Adi is a frequent speaker in Israel and Europe on VC and high tech topics.