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Meet OurCrowd Head of Investments Elan Zivotofsky
OurCrowd opened its inaugural Global Investors Summit this morning at the Inbal Hotel in central Jerusalem. The Summit is offering an opportunity for more than 800 investors from 27 different countries around the world to learn more about almost 40 companies that OurCrowd is promoting.
Calling itself, “the leading global equity crowdfunding platform for accredited investors, ” OurCrowd combines angel and crowdfunding investment. For a minimum of $10, 000, anyone can invest as long as they pass a vetting process.
The ceremonies this morning were opened by the company’s CEO and founder Jon Medved who said that he felt like he was giving his bar mitzva speech. This was because for him the forum felt like a life achievement as after less than 2 years since its founding OurCrowd is already a success.
Medved introduced Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat who officially opened the event. The OurCrowd CEO said that Barkat, “represents everything that we’re about.” This is because Barkat was himself an entrepreneur who led the Israeli company Checkpoint Software to one of the country’s most successful exits.
Barkat talked about the growing success story of the Israeli high tech world. For example, he pointed to the fact that Israel has more than 30% of the world’s market share in the field of life sciences and that figure is increasing.
The Jerusalem mayor gave his take on why Israel has been such a success in business and high tech. “Genes help! The Jewish Genes, ” he said, meaning that Jews are born with an innate ability to be successful.
“Democratize finance, ” is a major theme of OurCrowd’s. Medved used the term democratize quite a lot. He said that this is the firm’s primary mission.
Like Steve Jobs at Apple, Medved said that he first began the work of building OurCrowd from his garage. “Its been quite a ride, ” he said. “We’ve really hit all of our goals. But now we’ve hit a mountain and all of a sudden K2 is in front of us because the world has changed.”
Andrew Scharf, VP of business development who came in from OurCrowd’s NY office elaborated on that saying, “nobody had ever tried to accomplish, to tear down the barriers to entry to the VC community, that was a large challenge. Who wants to keep doing the same thing?”
So the new challenge for OurCrowd is to find ways to top itself.
“Investing is ultimately about building a community, ” Medved proclaimed.
The opening was followed by a number of presentations from OurCrowd companies including ReWalk which has developed a device that lets paraplegics walk again.
There was then a panel session led by OurCrowd partner Elan Zivotofsky. The rest of the day is to be divided into a number of small groups where various startups can take the opportunity to promote themselves.
