Episode 49 - with Mor Assia & Shelly Hod Moyal - Founding Partners & Co-CEOs of iAngels The Human Founder

How superwomen investors navigate together investments & motherhood? 
 
In light of International Women Day, I chose to share my conversation with two inspiring women.
Shelly & Mor have been close friends from New-York for years. They often discussed the challenges that they saw with investing in Israel, until they decided to pick up the glove and said:” We have to do it”. From their point of view, working in a big organization at the time, where there's a lot of discipline and many practices, the ecosystem seemed to them like a Jungle. Mor was working for Amdocs, and Shelly was working at 
Goldman Sachs  - and they both loved it, being able to do big things and having that corporate back. But on the other hand, Mor felt that her job was too narrow - she wanted to do more and expand.
She started dreaming about building something from scratch, and bringing an innovative approach for investing. So instead of taking her maternity leave - she took a risk. 
It took a lot of discipline to make the time for their work, both Shelly & Mor, especially as mothers to very young babies. It was a true test to their commitment, and they passed it successfully, armed by new confidence in what they can bring to the table.
 
Shelly always wanted to do something of her own. After the 1st child - she knew she couldn’t delay it any longer, she wanted a change. 
She was thinking about connecting between investors & founders and creating a professional way to invest. Her background in financing & investing allowed her to experience the finance system from many different angles.
Together, with their complementary skill set, Shelly knew they could be a good team.
 
They met in a meeting of young Israeli professionals in New York. Shelly was very impressed by Mor and came up to her. They became friends. The partners. Now they’re family.
 
The superpowers that  were the base for their partnership - Trust & Open Communication
 
Shelly shared about Mor’s talents - her strong sense of self, optimistic, crazy original logical way of thinking, analyzing, good dialog that sharpens her thinking, teaching her things about herself and the world. Mostly, she felt that their relationship has created a lot of personal & mutual growth for both of them.
 
As for Shelly’s abilities, Mor shares that Shelly is very smart, a crazy work ethic that pushed her to work at Goldman for 22 hours a day. ”She is my superpower”. Their different enough backgrounds were complementing without them stepping on each other’s toes. 
“I totally respect the fact that Shelly can have her own opinion, and sometimes it won’t be my opinion, but we have so much mutual respect, admiration, love and values that allows us to engage in probably anything. We can talk about things openly, we can decide to disagree and still love each other.” Their early employees were shocked by their chemistry, one of them told them that their communication was on a completely different wavelength so that they didn’t even have to talk to know what the other one is thinking, and another one was floored by seeing them completely disagree about something in a meeting and being seemingly very upset, and then grab lunch together like nothing happened. 
 
Their baseline of communication is trust - Know the other person has your best interest at heart - it took a lot of training to build that.
 
While choosing how to react in a situation - one should ask him.herself:
How would you act differently if the transaction only happened one time or if this was a repeated transaction? If you know that this is the partnership you want for life, it’s no longer a transaction, it’s continuous. They both understood that this is what they want in life. What they will build together, is what they will share. Shelly compared it to marriage - it only works if you’re thinking of the other person. 
She stopped nitpicking in her close relationships.
In negotiation, Mor shared - “when you ha