A few months ago, I had dinner at Le Colonial with Mark Gerson (the founder of Gerson Lehrman Group and Joe Sigelman (the founder of Office Tiger). As an aside, I was introduced to Mark by Jeremy Levine from Bessemer as they are investors in both Gerson Lehrman and OLX. Joe was the TA in one of my math classes in Princeton!

We decided to find young, smart aggressive people to find early stage startups for us outside of the beaten path. In Israel, we started working with Yaron Carni who introduced us to Lab Pixies.

Lab Pixies is one of the largest widget companies, and a leader for for iGoogle, Live and Netvibes. They are not as well known as Slide or RockYou given their focus on iGoogle rather than Facebook, but they are a fantastic company. The company has 41 million unique visitors per month and over 750 million monthly gadget views and the gadgets are awesome. The leading gadgets are ToDo List, Sudoku, Weather, Babylon Translation Box, Birthday Reminder and Backjack.

We were impressed by the team of 10 great engineers based in Tel Aviv and decided to invest $1 million in the company.

You can read an overview of the company on TechCrunch:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/15/israels-labpixies-offers-highly-awesome-wigets/

Ran, Oded, Nir, Udi: make it happen!