enso — Agentic Growth Lab

Dear friends,

We lost Zaki this week. Suddenly, far too soon, on a business trip in New York. I have started this letter four times. Words feel small against a person that large, but silence feels worse, so I am writing anyway.

Zaki was one of our earliest believers. He backed enso when the idea was still just a thesis on a whiteboard and a stubborn hunch about where attention was leaking. He wrote the kind of check that comes with a phone number — pick up any hour, any day, and Zaki was there: thinking, introducing, pushing, listening.

That was Zaki's operating system. He gave away his rolodex the way other investors hoard it. He treated founders like peers and peers like family. He had the rare instinct to spot a market failure years before it was obvious, and the rarer instinct to spend his social capital making the right people meet.

Through Fresh Fund and Fresh Defense, he helped a generation of Israeli founders begin — Remilk, BlueGreen, Sepio, Dream, Metis, and many quieter ones who will only later realise how much of their early courage came from him. Through Kulna, IsraAID, and Tevel B'tzedek he carried the same conviction into places that had nothing to do with returns.

On the last day of his life he told an investor: "I love what I do. I'm always working with people so much smarter than me — our mission-driven founders solving big problems. I am the luckiest person in the world."

We were the lucky ones, Zaki. To have had your time, your attention, your warmth, your seriousness about the work, your lightness about everything else.

We will keep building the way you taught us to build — with conviction at the earliest stage, with kindness as the operating system, with the patience to work on problems that actually matter. That is the only way we know how to say thank you.

Our love to Ben, to his parents, to his siblings, and to the wide, wide circle of people who got to call him a friend.

With gratitude and a heavy heart,