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OurCrowd Jerusalem Global Summit Opens With $10 Thousand Minimum Investments
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Meet OurCrowd Head of Investor Community Zack Miller
Elan Zivotofsky is a partner and the head of investments at OurCrowd. He attended the Global Investor Summit in spite of a broken leg, the result of a recent car accident. He spent the day alternating between crutches and a wheelchair.
He does not have an MBA, nor was he a business major at college. Instead, Elan learned the ropes of business and corporate investments as he went along during his career in the field. He did, however, take the opportunity to sit in on some finance courses at Wharton while he was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania.
Currently a resident of Efrat in Gush Etzion, the 42 year old has been in Israel for 17 years.
Elan explained how he came to be involved in OurCrowd.
“Jon came up with the idea, but I was one of the first people who joined him
as a partner, ” he said. “I thought there was a great idea here bringing together millions of people around the world who want to invest in Israeli startups, but didn’t have the opportunity and bring them our professionalism, our experiences from the world of angel investing.”
In other words, he believes that many potential small investors around the world want and need the benefit of the collective experiences of people like him and his partners for investing purposes. Not everyone has millions and can afford the services of top notch professional investment brokers.
Elan acknowledged that they were influenced, at least in part, by crowdfunding websites like Kikstarter. But those websites do not bring in investors for serious new companies, nor do they offer donors a real equity in the companies. He also admitted that OurCrowd was not the first to specialize in what they do but said that they are today by far the largest in the world in investments in and the only one that operates exclusively in Israel.
“What we saw is equity based crowdfunding (in contrast to Kickstarter). We’re not the first but the first in Israel and now the biggest in the world ion terms of Dollars invested.”
The purpose of the conference he explained was, ”we built the conference to give our own investors from around the world the chance to come to know our portfolio companies better.”
There were also plenty of potential future investors there too.
