“The central challenge facing the process towards M&A in the Jewish ecosystem is money…”

The central challenge facing the process towards M&A in the Jewish ecosystem is money, in two ways: 1) there is no payout to investors, which is what incentivizes the culture in the tech and corporate innovation world; and 2) most organizations cannot simply absorb the full budget of a smaller organization (and frankly it is inefficient to do so.) Moreover the founders of innovative and startup organizations have an enormous amount of pride and sweat invested in their projects, which might make becoming a department of a bigger organization feel like capitulation, failure, or a professional step backward. Philanthropy can play a major role in this moment by greasing the wheels of these transactions to enable smaller organizations to feel that they will not have to massively cut back on their ambitions – or on their people – if they go in-house; and by creating tracks for execs from the innovation sector to continue to rise up the ladder of Jewish communal leadership even outside the framework of the innovative intervention that launched them. Philanthropy might also incentivize larger organizations to take on the risk and costs of absorbing other projects so that the process is not merely a one-way street.

Yehuda Kurtzer, Facebook post (24 August 2017) [https://www.facebook.com/yehuda.kurtzer/posts/10155741396697174]