The office hours have attracted plenty of interest and have been a good experience for Remagine, too. The meetings aren’t about raising funds, he says, “and that reduced a lot of the anxiety that sometimes comes with speaking to investors. It’s just, ‘Let’s have a conversation about something that is difficult for you right now, that perhaps we can help with’.” The office hours are “another tiny but very useful effort” to make life easier for people.
As for how the crisis has affected the startup world, not everything has changed. “When it comes to working from home, entrepreneurs and VCs are well adjusted to that. Entrepreneurs are self-driven in most cases and work very hard,” Vidra says. And many “appreciate the fact that they don’t travel, they don’t have to commute to the office. While it’s not easy to balance work with childcare, the plus is that they can now spend their commuting time with their families.”
On the other hand, “there’s working from home and there’s working from home with kids, and it’s been an adjustment to be able to do the two things.” Vidra himself is the father of two – but even for people without children, “being at home means the workdays all blur into one … you don’t know if it’s Monday or Tuesday, it’s just like another day.” And working from home can lead some entrepreneurs to work too much – even by their standards. At times, Vidra says, he’s noticed that entrepreneurs’ “mental state was deteriorating a little bit. And I recommend, get out, even if it’s to get a bit of fresh air. You can’t just be in your flat and not go out completely.”
Reasons to be hopeful
Vidra’s globe-spanning career has long been connected to startups. During his undergraduate years in Israel, he was selected for a prestigious entrepreneurship programme. That led to an internship at international consultancy Gerson Lehrman Group, where he worked his way up to programme manager, then product manager. Next, he joined Ask.com in San Francisco, where he learned how the company’s creative and business sides went hand-in-hand. While working there, his wife was accepted by the London School of Economics, which took the couple across the ocean and brought Vidra to London Business School. During his degree he was hired by AOL to run its search business in Europe. And then, after graduation, Google came calling.
Over more than five years at the search engine giant, Vidra held several jobs, one of which brought him back to his entrepreneurial roots. He describes his position as founding head of Google Campus, the company’s first physical hub for startups, as “a dream come true”. The campus was a building filled with startups, with different types of activity on every floor, a co-working area, and “a cafe for entrepreneurs that had a thousand applications for space before we even opened the doors”.
Later, he became the head of Google for Entrepreneurs (now Google for Startups) in Europe, then the first general partner for Google Ventures outside the US. But, even with a Google stint on his CV, Vidra says launching Remagine has been one of the highlights of his career. If you succeed with “the Google name behind you”, he says, “you don’t know if it’s you or if it’s Google”. That’s why starting his own VC firm has felt “particularly sweet”. But, he adds, “now it’s just down to me and my partner. We got a ticket to the dance. Now we have to dance.”
Looking to the future, Vidra sees plenty of hardships ahead, but also reasons to be hopeful. “I think 2020 is going to be a very challenging year for companies and startups. Companies that perhaps have some money left today – we’ll see how they are doing fundraising in the next few quarters.”
He is quick to add: “I believe that 2021 is going to be a year of growth. And some of this growth will get accelerated because of Covid-19, which we’re already seeing – telemedicine, remote work, everything cloud. So it’s an exciting time to start companies, because there’s going to be lots of opportunities and new businesses will be built after this. And, as everyone knows, some of the best companies were built in recession.”