He Built Two $100M Companies. Then Everything Changed.

My guest today is the co-founder of Platters, the Canadian tech company that grew to a $100 million run rate.

I mean, entrepreneurship is about resilience. I've been through dot-com. I had to go through the '08 recession and letting people go and hiring back. Now I had another curveball, which was a pandemic. The easiest thing is to throw in the white towel. My wife landed in Israel October 7th, 11 and a half hours. We have no idea what's going on with him. I get word that our cousin, a gunburger, is taken hostage. My wife's doing her PhD at one of the universities here, and people are texting free, free Palestine. We're successful in so many different verticals, owning sports teams, banks, CEOs, tech companies, they think we control the world. We don't control the world. We just happen to be successful.

But that's what you would want to tell people even if we did control the world, right?

We're successful.

Unless I believe there's something special about the Jews, I would assume that there's a conspiracy.

One of my CEOs is an F-16 fighter pilot. As everything in Iran started, he messaged me after 4 days. We're giving them hell. We're doing what we need to do for the safety of our country. Don't worry, I'm serving clients in between.

What?

When are you finding time to serve clients?

What do you think are some of the lessons lessons that entrepreneurs here can learn.

For me, I tell entrepreneurs—

Ishai, thank you so much for joining us here.

Thanks for having me.

You were a co-founder of a very famous and popular app tech company called Platters, which is basically DoorDash or Uber Eats for businesses. And right before the COVID restrictions came in March 2020, the company got to about a $100 million run rate, and then everything changed. This government came and said, hey, this cold is going around, you have to shut everything down. And basically, basically your revenues went to zero overnight. Walk us through that time period. Like what happened? What were the first decisions you made? How did you kind of adapt? But first, a message from our episode partner. About 2 years ago, I purchased my first US real estate and I had to convert a large amount of Canadian dollars to US dollars. I went to the bank and I did my own calculations. Just the fee that the spread they're charging me on the exchange would've cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. I wish I had learned about our episode partner PulseFX. They help private clients and growing businesses reduce hidden foreign exchange costs and manage the risk of moving large sums of money internationally. And if I had used PulseFX on my own deal, I would've saved over $2,000 on just that one transaction. It's actually kind of ridiculous how much the banks rely on us not to try to find an alternative. And it's not just the savings. PulseFX offers real human guidance, not a one-size-fits-all platform, helping you protect your buying power, stabilize cash flow, and move money globally with confidence. So if you're looking to buy properties overseas or your business does a lot of cross-border transactions, you can turn foreign exchange into a financial strategy rather than a costly annoyance you have to deal with. And listeners of the Profit or Pivot podcast, get a further 25% discount on the spread that PulseFX charges by clicking the link down below. That link is thatfxguy.com. So make sure to check out pulsefx.com to learn more about their services so that we can continue bringing you great conversations.

I'll never forget, um, in around 10th or 12th of March, um, me and my co-founder Eran were in Israel because we had just closed our Series B. About six weeks before, and we were going there for their the VC's twenty-year anniversary. When we landed in Israel at eleven a.m., their twenty-year anniversary event got canceled by six p.m. The health minister in Israel canceled it because of some virus health thing, and we were the next day back on a plane. All these things that there's this virus and it's this and that, and everything became starting to get started to get clear when I got on the plane. And I connected to the internet and I started seeing cancellations. Austin, New York, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo. Cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel.

It's like those dystopian zombie movies.

I actually said it's almost like when you go to the ATM and you're putting in and money keeps coming out and you're like, stop, too much money's coming out. And, and, and like, I'm doing the calculation in my head of like all the cancellations. Uh, so that was like the first glimpse. But I, at that point I was just like, okay, it's like a day or two, it's a week. It's 2 weeks, it's a month.

2 weeks, 15 days to slow the curve. That was the—

It was, it was something like that. I mean, I think I was on a podcast 2 weeks after and I said, can we just all get back to work? Like, what are we— what's everybody talking about? And, you know, 3 months later we realized no one's getting back to the office. And like you said, the revenues disappeared overnight. I mean, you're talking about over 5,000 corporate clients that are using you in multi-cities. Shopify was using us in, in more than 6 North American cities.

Right, right. And unlike Uber Eats, which probably DoorDash, I would say at the time became more popular because people didn't wanna go outside. You're, you're, you guys focused solely on office, like delivering to office.

Yes. B2B was certainly our, our market, but we were also not on demand. If you look at any of the on demand, right at that time, still SkipTheDishes and the Foodoras and, and, and DoorDash was not even here yet. Uber Eats wasn't even here yet. But everybody's ordering food and it's, You know, on demand. Our orders were catering. You had to place the order at least, you know, 24 hours, 48 hours in advance. Our average order was over $1,000. It's not a $20 ticket item. In fact, some companies ordered from us a month in advance or a quarter in advance because they only paid when they actually ate the food, but they already knew in the system their orders were placed. So it's very different.

So what were those first set of decisions you had to make? Right.

So the first decision obviously is, you know, when you realize that no one's coming back to the office is You know, you gotta cut the burn, right? You, you'd raised over, you know, $30 million US, and now you're burning a lot of money because there's no revenues coming in. So you have to make the difficult decision of letting people go. Very difficult day for me and my co-founder making decision to let people go for not doing anything wrong.

Hmm.

It's different when letting people go for not hitting your KPIs or you have performance issues, what have you. But people have to do anything wrong in getting letting them go. That was very difficult. So we had to let go of you know more than seventy percent of of the employees. It was over two hundred employees in different markets. We kept a you know smaller team in Toronto and and figured a way to you want we have to pivot from food in the office to something else. So we pivoted the company from platters to Thrivor. We listened to our corporate clients and we asked them you're all home. What are you gonna be doing now that you're home? And so a lot of them said like, we still want the employees engaged. Uh, so we'd love to do yoga and stretching and stuff like that. We'd love activities and games. Uh, we'd love swag. We'd love, you know, anything. Uh, I think at the time I called it, we were in the schmutz business.

Mm-hmm.

Whatever they wanted, we threw in the marketplace just to keep the engagement, uh, with them. Uh, but it was difficult because food had stickiness. Food, you could have some corporate clients that were ordering, you know, 6 orders a day. started doing yoga once a week, then once a month, then once a quarter. They were starting to get Zoom fatigue. So the first 2 years was difficult. And the last 2 years of the pandemic, we almost went back to food in some of the red states that didn't really believe in COVID.

Or didn't believe in COVID restrictions.

Correct.

Correct. Because, yeah, whatever. I'm not going to get into COVID or talk about that to death. But it was one of— unintended. But it was one of the first times I've ever spoken publicly against Anything political. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I was against the restrictions from very early on.

It's on the record.

So that, that's pretty interesting. What ended up happening with Thrivor?

So, you know, thankfully, because we were very careful with the cash and we didn't let ourselves run out of cash, we put ourselves in a position that we still had cash. The revenues were starting to grow again. It certainly wasn't the scale as it was, you know, right before COVID But it was starting to pick back up again. And my co-founder and myself, at that time, there was a lot of chain of events. There were several companies that were talking to us about our technology and partnerships and stuff like that. And in parallel, also October 7th hit. And October 7th took a toll on certainly me and my co-founder and a lot of our families and friends in Israel. And we had to decide I was going to take a leave of absence for a while, but then I stayed on almost till Q1 of 2024 and we ended up selling the company to Gusto in Silicon Valley.

Right. So you ended up, you know, being able to kind of pivot the company enough and create enough value. It's essentially going back from zero revenue that you had. You know, you closed your Series B, was it $30 million USD?

Yeah, it was almost $33 million.

Yeah. Right, right. That's great. And okay, so you got an exit.

I don't know if it was probably the exit you were looking for, but yeah, no, it certainly wasn't the exit that we all wanted, you know, when we started the company. But at some point you look and you say, okay, we still have all this money in the bank. There's a great offer on the table. Shareholders can still, you know, make some money. But it, you know, wasn't the outcome that we'd all dreamed when we started the company. And there was also, you know, What had happened was with October 7th as well, it just led us to believe, me, myself wanting to step away. It was already 9 and a half years and my co-founder was going to stay and keep running the company. But everything in life is also timing. There's a couple of inbounds on the company. We went down that path. It started to get more and more attractive. And all the shareholders, we decided to sell the company.

I want to get back to October 7th because there's a whole story here after and starting a venture fund and all that. But I think people understanding your origin story a little bit will help them understand why October 7th really hit you the way it did. You're a Jew and Israeli, as am I. Everyone kind of reacted differently, but I think getting that background will help people understand that as well. But before we're getting into that, I'm going to ask you a dumb question. When all these restrictions hit and your revenues went basically to zero, why not just close up shop and return money to investors and say, listen, there's no market here, let's just kind of go do something else?

Yeah, not even an option for me or my co-founder. I mean, entrepreneurship is about resilience. I'm almost 54. I've been through dot-com. I've been through an '08 recession. I had a company in Boston for 10 years that was extremely successful, and I had to go through the '08 recession and letting people go and hiring back. And now I had another curveball, which was a pandemic. The easiest thing is to throw in the white towel and say, here, take your money back and move on. But you, you know, today I mentor, I work with so many startups, I invest in startups. It's all about, you know, the pivot. Nothing is what you think it is when you start.

Profit or Pivot podcast. That's what we call it.

It's the pivot.

And we need that in our heads.

Yeah, you should. And, but the pivot, You know, you're always going to get curveballs thrown at you. Nobody right now in Israel thought they're going to be with a war in Iran right now. There's always curveballs thrown at you. It's how do you wake up the next day and go through those curveballs? And, and there was never a doubt in our mind that, okay, let's pack it in and call it a day. It was just like, okay, we got money, we got a product, we got a lot of clients. They're just not using that product. Let's find a product that they would like to use and leverage some of the technology and so forth. And so it's about An entrepreneur has to be resilient, has to wipe the dust off their shoulders and get back up. And that's what we did.

You already figured, I guess you already figured out one of the most difficult things to do in business, especially a marketplace type business, which is distribution. You found the people to sell to. Yeah. So if you could just plug in another product or service, I mean, it kind of makes sense. You created the value, like your platform had significant value at that point already.

That's right.

You mentioned a bunch of curveballs. Why don't you just take us through a couple of those stories? Like, this is not, you're like a 30-year overnight success, right? You've had multiple successful businesses. So Platters was like the latest iteration that career. People will probably just know you from Platters, but why don't you just walk us through some of those other stories?

Well, certainly, um, I started my tech career, um, I went over to Israel at 21 to do my MBA. And, um, at that time, English was, was the asset. Um, nobody really cared that I had an MBA. Now today, the English is a lot better and different with this generation, but back then my English was a big asset and I didn't realize it. And I got offers from a lot of different companies, Amdocs, CCI, Orbitek, and I ended up working for the gentleman who invented the voice The company was called Comverse, not to shoo Khan, Comverse. And their claim to fame was voicemail because, you know, how did people leave messages before when there was just home phone and no wireless? They used the tape recorder and a cassette.

Wait a second. So voicemail is an Israeli invention?

It is an Israeli invention.

So all the boycott, divestment, sanction idiots, retards, I could say retards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trump is president, we can say retards. Right? These psychos, they can't use voicemail now too.

So in fact, I say to every single person that, you know, bashes Israel or tech, if you take your iPhone, 90% of the things in the iPhone come from Israel except for the fruit. Fruit sign is not from Israel and the device itself, but half the— more than 80% of the things come from there.

The actual physical device is made by little children in China.

Well, so I mean, let's go through it, right? So voicemail, I'm selling now voicemail in over 92 countries, sold to Rogers, the first voicemail platform. But then we developed the first SMS platform. People don't know the first cell phones actually came out with numbers, not with letters. So somebody came up with the idea, oh, A, B, C, D, F. So now I'm selling SMS technology around the world, right? Then the first ringtone we did, uh, me and my team out of Tel Aviv.

Same company?

Same company, Converse. 10 years. But it grew to a NASDAQ 100. I joined, there was a couple hundred people. Um, but a lot of those value-add services are things that today people on the phone still use. Everyone's bill that comes home, whether it's Rogers, Bell, or Telus is still Amdocs, Israeli company. Most of the features in the phone are Israeli companies.

It is a conspiracy. These guys—

Exactly. So that was, uh, so that was probably the, uh, the 10— that was a 10-year stint in getting into tech. I didn't know what tech was. I wasn't a coder, but I was always on the business side. Then, you know, like everything in life, I got married in Israel. Um, they— I wanted to resign. I actually wanted to come back to Canada, want to start a family, and they relocated me for 2 years. 2-year relocation has turned into 23 years in Toronto. That wasn't the game plan. Yeah, I arrived here in 2003, 2-year relocation. And then in 2004, I met a couple of Jewish folks that were starting, they were on, had a fund in Boston called General Catalyst. People today know them as one of the top 10 VCs. You know, I think, I don't know, $10 billion that they're managing, billions today. But they were kind of a fund 1, fund 2. And they had said to me, why are you working for an Israeli company? Why not do a startup? And I said, well, startup, you need an idea. I don't have an idea. And they showed me a business plan and they were looking to put a team together, people who came from mobile experience and search. And so started a company in Boston within General Catalyst, within Harvard Square. It's called JumpTap, started as mobile search and mobile advertising. So 2 of the guys that were with me came from Lycos, so they had search. I had the mobile experience, obviously having relationships with Vodafone, Orange, You know, all the telcos around the world and pivot like everything in life. Like '05, '06 was a, we created a white label search engine. But in '07 when Steve Jobs stood on stage and showed the iPhone, most people just saw the first, you know, I, I call it, you know, the first time they haven't seen the CrackBerry, at least certainly for the Canadians. But it was the first time they had a big screen. No, no keyboard. I saw internet. Steve Jobs stood on stage. I said, oh my God, I've been in telecom. This is the first device you'll actually be able to surf and do something because the old devices, Ericsson, Nokia, Just, it was clunky. Couldn't search, couldn't do anything.

Even BlackBerry though.

Even the BlackBerry experience. And so everything changed. The data plan changed, the phones got better. And so we pivoted the company literally overnight from mobile search in '05, '06 to '07, mobile advertising. And so what does that mean? Nobody knew what apps were. Nobody knew what iOS was. So we started really helping publishers, whether it's the ESPNs and the CNNs, to have a good mobile experience because they only had web. whether it's an app or mobile web, and then we would monetize it with ads. And so that business scaled to $100 million in revenues and we sold that business in 2013.

You were the founder, CEO?

Yeah, well, I was, I was there from the get-go. I wasn't CEO. We had a different CEO, but I was always the one head of revenues and the BD on the business development side. At some point we had R&D in Tel Aviv. That's why the connection always to Israel and R&D, because we had a team in Boston, we had a team in Tel Aviv. doing R&D and, and product. But the, the company got acquired. You know, it's public, so I can say it was over, you know, $240 million. And it was a great outcome, certainly for, for a lot of people. You know, for me as a son of an immigrant and arriving in this country at 7 years old, you know, everybody hears that number and they think, oh my God, though, the founders made so much money. We did okay. But I, if you recall, I said that we didn't start the company, the VC started it.

It's very rare.

Very rare. They started with the idea, but we still had great equity and, uh, and it was a great ride. Uh, and then Platters was very different because I owned the equity, me and my co-founder. And so 3 gigs in 30 years, a lot of pivots and a lot of, uh, uh, sleepless nights.

Right. So it's crazy because you told me before you, um, had a couple of massive customers that you got from like obscurity into the most popular games on phones. Did you want to share a couple of those? Yeah.

I mean, again, I, I believe, you know, everyone says I, I, you know, I believe being at the right place at the right time. I think, you know, higher power, power's guiding me sometimes being at that right place at the right time. I was in Norway, Denmark, and I, and I meet a couple of young folks and they actually, at a conference and they were telling me how they blew through their €200,000 that their dad gave them to develop games for Nokia. And they're now down to like, I don't know, €30,000 or €40,000, but they're gonna develop this game for iOS. And I never will never forget this meeting cuz like in a coffee shop, they're showing me on a piece of napkin that the It's gonna be, you're gonna flick a bird and knock down buildings. Like, this sounds like the stupidest thing in the world. Never said it to them. I was like, why don't you gimme the $40,000 and I'll try to get you downloads? So I think you know who I'm alluding to. The company is Angry Birds. It was Rovio. And we helped 'em get, you know, hundreds of millions of downloads. I would say probably one of my worst business negotiations at the time. I never signed with them a contract for the movie rights or the plush, the plush toys, but Who thought there was going to be a Pixar animated movie on Angry Birds? So that was one of our claim to fames. But things along the way were Candy Crush, King.com, and helped get a lot of downloads. And so really, you would go to ESPN and try to see the Raptors score, and you would see a banner there for Candy Crush. If you clicked and went to the App Store and downloaded it, we all made money.

Wow. That's great.

Old school.

So fast forwarding now back, okay, we're on October 7th, right? Of course, it's impacted all the Jews all over the world. Why leave the business? Because a lot of people were impacted. They didn't leave their jobs or sell their business or do any of that.

No, it's a great question. I think I don't share with a lot of people, but personally, it took a lot of toll on me and my wife and our direct family. So first and foremost, my wife landed in Israel October 7th. It was the last Air Canada flight. October 6th, she left. She landed at Ben Gurion Airport around 8:30, 9:00 AM. And as we know, everything started around 6:30. By the way, 8 or 9 flights that night in the air, all of them were redirected to Athens or Cyprus or Greece. The only one that landed was Air Canada. So people always say to me, why? And I say, well, it's Canadians. They were clueless. They had no idea what's going on.

Yeah.

And so At this point, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM our time, I'm texting my wife hoping that she's got her phone on. And she had landed and she sees all the messages, call me. And she's calling me from the plane and she said, why are you awake? Why are you sending me all the messages? And I said, where are you? She goes, we just landed at Ben Gurion. I said, what do you know? And she said, well, the pilot said something's going on. We don't know. So she's like, my wife's from the south. Her family's from the south of Israel and we're used to rockets. So she said, what, there's some rockets going on? And I said to her, honey, I think this is way more than rockets. They say the fence is down, there's terrorists in. Do me a favor, grab the rental car and do not head south to your mom in Netivot. Go to my sister in Herzliya. And so luckily, by the time she had taken the rental car, to go south was closed, so nobody could make a left turn to the south. And she made a right turn and went to Herzliya. But from there, it was just a chain of events. Her nephew's in Nova. 11 and a half hours. We have no idea what's going on with him. I get word from my sister Ashley that our cousin, Agam Berger, is taken hostage.

He's your first cousin?

So her dad, Shlomi, is my mom's first cousin. He's my second cousin. And so she was one of the soldiers, the female soldiers that were on the base. And the first images of them was five Israeli women, all bloodied and so forth. And so one of them was a gum, and those were the first images we saw. And we were like, you know, and and and so chain of events, the fighting October eighth. One of our closest friends, his son Michael died. He was shelled. It was in Zderot at the police station. So now my wife's in Israel. She's already in funerals in the first week of being in Israel. My daughter's on campus at Western. She's dealing with all the, can I say bullshit or BS? You can say whatever you want. On campus there. My wife's doing her PhD at one of the universities here and people are texting free, free Palestine to my wife and everything that my daughter's seeing at Western. And we're dealing with family tragedies over there. And so a lot of that kind of boiled inside of me saying, You know, what's going on here? Where's right and wrong? And, um, I, I was just in that mindset to say, I gotta, I gotta go help my country and my people. And so to answer your question, it was a lot of things together, watching what's happening to our country and saying, I think there's a bigger calling for me right now than to serve sandwiches again in offices. And, um, so we sold the company and, and, and, and I walked away from staying with this corporate entity. Where my co-founder is still with them.

And when you say our country, you're talking about Israel?

I am.

Okay. Because we're both in Canada and Canadian, so people can—

Yeah. Look, I was born in Israel and I arrived here at the age of 7. My dad got injured in the Yom Kippur War. It's one of the reasons we arrived here. He didn't want 3 boys, and my sister was born here, to go through the IDF. We talk about post-war trauma of October 7th, that the entire country's in post-war trauma. Every household needs a psychiatrist, but nobody dealt with postwar trauma in Yom Kippur. I lived with a father that, zikhrono livracha, he's obviously passed away more than 12 years ago, but it was almost like a dead man walking. I had a very depressed dad, but because he would never share what had happened in Yom Kippur, I knew about his injury, but certainly about seeing some of his best friends get killed. And so I say that because, yeah, I grew up here till the age of 21. I went to Israel for 10 years. I came back here at 30. I've been here for more than 23 years. Israel's my country. Canada's never felt like home.

Wow. That's interesting.

And a lot more today. It's certainly not feeling like home.

Right, right. I think that perspective is shared by many Jews because it's very easy to abstract the problems Israel faces as a Jew. It's like, oh, it's a tragedy. People feel it. But until it hits you here, it's very hard to have a connection to it, especially if you don't have family in Israel. It's just like news. But when you see, at least in our neighborhoods, these terror-supporting nut jobs that come and harass and intimidate Jews, the synagogues that were shot up, as of the recording of this, this just happened a few days ago.

Yeah, 100%. And to a lot of people, certainly October 7th, they said, oh my God, I didn't know there was antisemitism. Oh my God, I didn't know people didn't like us.

I'm a Jew. I didn't even realize that.

Yeah, but I wasn't shocked because I grew up in a small town and I went to the Hamilton Hebrew Academy, a religious school from grade 1 to grade 8. And I'll never forget, I think it was grade 4 or 5, we came in one morning and on the school wall it said, 6 million Jews died in the war. Let's finish the job.

Really?

And so I always knew there was antisemitism. I grew up in a small town. I was embarrassed to call myself Ishai. In Dundas, Ontario. So I grew around antisemitism, but it never bothered me. You marched on. And so when everything happened on October 7th, it didn't bother— it didn't shock me that there's antisemitism. What shocked me is the amount of people that are supposed to be intelligent, academic, right and wrong, like, like couldn't even. see between right and wrong. And that shocked the hell out of me.

Yeah. It's one thing to say Israel is bad for XYZ reasons. It's another thing to say, I support Hamas and murdering and rape and all the things.

100%.

I mean, it is kind of— I kind of learned this very early on. I'm from Israel also. I come from an Israeli family. I did a lot of Hatzbara on campus, all this kind of stuff. So it doesn't shock me in the same way because I used to deal with these campus crazies when I was in university. The first time I dealt with it was Operation Cast Lead, 2008, 2009. The first time I saw it, I was like, these people are actually psychos.

Yeah, exactly.

And they're not stupid. This is the thing. The thing that shocked me the most was I was dealing with people. I was at York University, and the guy that became president of York University Federation of Students was charged by the university for hate crime. This guy, Basically led a riot against the Jews at Hillel. I was in there. I was there. I actually put up a video. I actually found the video recently. Police were called as the protesters crowded the 3rd and 4th floors of the student center and tried to storm the Hillel at York office, to which many of the Drop YFS organizers had retreated. Everybody should leave now.

Yeah, we're not safe here.

These people, a lot of them are not stupid. Meaning they know exactly what they're doing. You have the stupid people that just are brainwashed sheep. But this guy that led the riot against Hillel, he's not a stupid guy. He just said, I was president of Hillel at York, and we used to sit down every so often and talk politics and talk about this, talk about that. What shocked me was how well-versed he was in the conflict, in the history, in the situation. He knows what's going on. So his support of things like the PLO or Hamas or any of these terrorist organizations is not coming out of a place of ignorance. It's coming out of a place of ideology. He understands. He just looks at the world from a completely different point of view, an evil point of view.

I always say that haters, if I know you hate us or you're against us, I'd rather know about it. It's the silent ones that scare the shit out of me, that they don't come out or they don't know. And October 7th, you just saw how many of those there were, the silent ones, the professors that are PhD with my wife and they're going to their social media and saying we're genocide. Have you ever been to a hospital in Israel where I was there when my mother passed away in 2024 and all her doctors and nurses were Arabs? And so it's mind-boggling to me that you're academics, you're smart, you've got everything, but yet you continue to think we're creating a genocide.

They have a shtick of affirmative action for Arabs in Israel. Arab-Israeli citizens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting. Israel has its own problems for those reasons. So you said Israel's your home. When are you planning to move there?

We're not at a stage right now where I would move full-time. I do spend, now I'm in Israel almost every 6 to 7 weeks. Our daughter's finishing university and she's actually moving there. Our son is doing a semester in Israel right now. But Are we going to be spending a lot more time in Israel versus Canada? Yes. I can't tell you tomorrow I'm making Aliyah and I'm closing everything down, but for a whole slew of reasons, I don't want to spend more time here. I'd rather spend a lot more time in Israel.

Yeah, I hear that. I hear that. Antisemitism has increased, just the stats, something like 900%. Especially in Toronto, it's increased like 200%, 300%, something like that. Now most, I think it's like 80% of all hate crimes, to the extent there's such a thing, is targeted towards Jews in Canada. We make up about 1%, 2% of the population. It's kind of, again, not shocking, but just, you don't think you— I don't think it was like that 10, 15 years ago.

No. So I would say to you that, look, for everybody, and certainly in the Jewish community here, I understand the antisemitism and the social reasons. For me, I try to be pragmatic and look at everything. I think the way this country's being run is a complete shit show. It started from Trudeau, and Carney's just continuing in the same path. The economy here is brutal. I don't know why nobody's talking about what happened in Venezuela, what Trump did. Our number one export is oil. Right now there's still— Canada's going to be in deep situation if Alberta doesn't start doing stuff with the US. We certainly see what's happening in Iran. So I think from foreign policy here, the economic state, everything that we're doing here, it leads me like, I don't know if we're on path to socialism or already socialist. So it's not just what's happening on the antisemitism. Yes, that's a big part of it for sure. Do I wear a Magen David? No, I wear a Magen David on the subway, not shootings. But the economy here is brutal. Look, you and I both come from tech. Um, I don't see any innovation here. I come from the world of Nortel, BlackBerry. The last company in this country was Shopify, 2006. It's 20 years. Can you tell me anything else? That's about— so like, where's the innovation here? I don't know if you know, the largest percentage graduating class of University of Waterloo and Toronto computer science, 80% of them took jobs in the US.

Really?

And I've been saying in Canada So there's no innovation. There's, you know, not a lot happening from the government to spur innovation. What's happening on the immigration side, you see, it's a shit show letting, you know, everybody in with no proper qualifications. Um, real estate is horrible, and it's been that way for a long time, uh, for 2, 3 years now. And so there's a lot of things from just not just the social element that I'm not very excited about Canada.

And not only that, I mean, any— as you said, I saw 2 2/3 of entrepreneurs that raise more than $1 million eventually leave Canada. Not eventually, they leave Canada. It's like even the ones, the great entrepreneurs we have, they leave.

Go check if we know that most of the strong VCs in the US, when's the last time US VCs have invested in this country?

Or if they do, they encourage our founder to move there.

Yeah, to move there. That's not a good sign.

Yeah, it's kind of depressing.

Which for me, by the way, I always try to compare it to Israel because we're like, what, over 40 million people? And all investors, people always tell me, it's like, well, how come you're so excited about Israel? Which is, I guess, what we haven't talked about is my chapter today and what I do in Israel. But how do you compare a country? And that's what people always say to me. Well, it's 10 million people. First of all, it's not 10 million that's helping the GDP. You bowl down the thing, they say there's a couple million people that are in yeshiva all day and studying. So how much are they contributing to the GDP? There's 2 million.

I wish there was 2 million.

I don't even know. I want to have— there's 2 million Arabs in Israel.

How much are they contributing?

Then you take the percentage of how many 18 years and under, it's really about 3, 4 million people that are driving all this GDP. And so where's that coming from versus over 40 million here?

With all the natural resources, no geopolitical nonsense, like a border with a global hegemon that's largely friendly. It's like Canada has all the makings of a powerhouse and it's kind of like we're self-immolating. And it's like the Canadians just don't care. 60% of Canadians keep voting for it. It's kind of shocking. Yeah.

So one, it could be, it's certainly the people, but it's just leadership too, right? Look at the leadership here. Look what we've got on municipality levels. Look who we got at the federal level. Let's not talk about, Canadians love to talk about, oh my God, look at whether it's Flint, Michigan or Minnesota or Mondani. I said, when's the last time you've been to Hamilton and seen who's on the city council in Hamilton? They have no idea.

Who's on the city council in Hamilton?

Well, I think they should go check it out, but it's not a lot of people that are friends of the Jews. But it begins with the small towns, and that's what's happening, and it's clearly happening here.

When you say clearly happening, what do you mean?

Oh, you're seeing that, um, you know, uh, either a municipality mayor, uh, a voice in power in that city, uh, more, um, you know, Muslims coming in. And, and again, I'm not against Muslims. I'm okay if you like Jews, you want to live with Jews. Um, you know, my wife was kind enough, she's done— she does a lot of stuff in Morocco, and I've had the chance to spend some time in Morocco, and there's wonderful Muslims in Morocco that love the Jews. We have such a Jewish heritage in Morocco. Yet for some reason, maybe at least some of the Muslims I've seen here in the smaller towns, they just are not big fans or want to kind of run with their own laws in that town. That's some of the stuff that you've seen in the US, and I think it's happening here.

So what are you doing in Israel? I know you have a VC fund, but why don't you walk us through what you're doing, what the VC fund does, all that fun stuff?

We started after after I sold the company. It really started with the fact that I saw a lot of people making donations and helping Israel, whether it was different IDF units or different charity causes and so forth.

This is like post-October seventh.

Post-October seventh, I'd be pulled into a you know gathering in somebody's house and everyone's throwing money around. What's this for? Oh, we just raised ten million. Galani needs socks. Like you guys know if they do you even know what Galani is? Do you know if they need socks? 2 weeks later, I'm in another event. You know, Dov Dahan needs vests. I'm like, anybody know Dov Dahan? Right? But there was this outpour of love, which is great, and nobody should stop anybody from tzedakah and philanthropy. But I kept saying, like, are you doing this for the tax receipt or are you doing it because you actually care about the country? And, you know, a lot of people would say to me, well, I care about the country. And I said, well, there's other ways to help. You know, Israel can't survive with agriculture and Rafael making the Iron Dome. You know, 38% of the GDP is high tech. I said at that point, we're not high tech, we're high dreck. You already had foreign capital leaving Israel because of the judicial reform. Now we have October 7th. Who the hell's going to invest here? And if our brave young men and women fighting, smart kids coming into universities, they're going to leave Israel and start their companies outside, we're fucked. And so I literally just said, if you care about Israel, there's another way to help. Why don't you go help create jobs? And invest in some of these brave young men and women. And so a lot of people had an appetite, and I said, "I've been on the other side, getting money from venture capitalists." Certainly, my first company was American venture capitalists. The second one was Israeli venture capitalists. And I said, "Maybe it's time for me to go to the other side and deploy capital into startups." So I have a fund called Clarum Ventures, named after my late parents, Claire and Chaim. If you remove the C, it's Leharim, to elevate and scale. If you remove the C and the L, it's Harim. We will move mountains for these kids. And we invest in Israel. We've got a team in Tel Aviv, and it feels great because beyond capital, we're just helping them. And I've got over 70 investors, Jews and non-Jews, that believe in them and help them open doors in North America if they need a meeting. I always say great Israeli companies will get funded. What they don't have is our network in the diaspora. So if we can help them open up a meeting with a bank, with insurance, what have you, that's sometimes more valuable. So that's what I'm doing today.

That's great. What's the thesis of the fund aside from like what type of businesses are you looking for?

So we are early stage. We try to do seed stage. We've done a few pre-seed. We're really focused on vertical AI, a lot of SaaS, not so much, you know, Not doing agrotech and climate tech or biotech. Consumers, not our stick. But we also have done cyber. And so our, our, our thing at the end of the day is certainly like most venture early stage, we're investing in the jockey, not the horse. And you have a generation right now that that resiliency that they have, you're never going to find. I've invested about 8 months ago in a 29-year-old kid. He got a bullet in Gaza, in the shoulder. He was Maglan.

What's Maglan?

One of the top commando units. Spent so much time in Gaza, in Lebanon, but he was in the hospital for 4 or 5 weeks and he went back to the field. And I said, how did you even do that? And he says, well, I don't leave my soldiers behind. And so going back after you've already been shot, Being another 12 months in reserve with your younger soldiers, right? Not letting them be by themselves. And during that time, to whiteboard with your other IDF colleague on a whiteboard in Lebanon. He told me at a house that they were just like, it was abandoned and they were there for a mission. And they were whiteboarding in that house their idea. What did they want to do when they get out? They started this idea and company's close to $3 million revenues in 11 months.

Wow.

You can't explain this resiliency. We talk about curveballs and how do you knock down buildings? This generation is relentless. And so I want to invest in that.

Wow. I hear that. I'm a religious guy. I believe Torah. I believe Torah comes from God and all that stuff. So I have an answer for this, but I want to ask you, because I think a lot of Jews look at this and— let's say you run a thought experiment. Let's say you put Canadians in the exact same situation that Israel has faced. Will they become like Israelis or will they collapse? Is there something unique to the Jewish spirit or to Jews in general or to Judaism that allows Israel within those conditions to thrive like it has? Or is it just, no, any people has a good chance within those conditions to kind of build that muscle and create those companies? If everyone goes to the army, you can create a great startup ecosystem. So what do you think? Where do you think that uniqueness comes from? Or that special resilience, like that X factor that Israel has?

Yeah. And so Harley Finkelstein from Shopify always uses the word chutzpah, and he loves to talk about all the, certainly the older generation that started incredible companies coming to this country. to this country with nothing. And Izzy Sharpe, Heather Reisman, like so many people, right? But he talks about this chutzpah. And yes, the Jewish people have chutzpah and so forth. But if we're talking today about the generation today, there's a lot of Canadians today in that generation, let's call it the 25 to 35-year-old, that that generation here in Canada, they might already be coming from family money or family wealth. So are they second generation, third generation? In Israel, you still don't have a lot of third generation, fourth generation. of wealth. Let's begin with that first and foremost. And then you have this, like anybody who's gone through the IDF, it's a totally different mindset. How can you explain to an 18-year-old kid that's at Western partying versus an 18-year-old starting the IDF what they're going through? That level of maturity. You're such an adult at 20, 21, whether you're a female or a man versus them at third year of college. That's first and foremost, right? Certainly, people always say to me, how come there's so many startups in Israel? I talk about the IDF as a flywheel. You leave the IDF, you start a company, but there's already an 18-year-old coming into the IDF. So that flywheel never stops. So that's one aspect. The second aspect to your question is that mentality. Best analogy I always like to say is there's a wall in front of you.

What do—

what will most Canadians try to do to go through the wall? Bang their head through the wall, try to get through the wall. What is the Israeli doing to get through the wall? He's already dug 5 feet under the wall. He's already thrown the rope over the wall. So we used to use, and I used it with some of my culture in my companies, a word called kombina. And kombina, the translation is think outside the box.

It sounds like corruption.

It's not corruption. Kombina is cutting corners. That's really the thing. It's cutting corners. But so there's something inherent about Israelis, like just figuring it out. They're cutting corners. They're going to go a different route. Everybody's tried this route. I'm going to try this route and see if it works. That for me is the people that you invest in.

I'm going to ask again, just me, but I want to get your perspective really, because it's really a question. It is really a question a lot of people— I have it as well, again, but I've answered that for myself, which is what makes the Jewish people unique, if anything? Because again, if you put any other people in those conditions, will they become like Israelis or is there something unique here?

Look, there is clearly history that we carry with us and grandparents, whatever generation. And so that's inherited in all of us. It's inherited in all of us. And I think it just carries us to continue to succeed and win. And a lot of people take that chip on their shoulder to just continue to win, to be the best that we can be. I always say, where would we have been after October 7th if we weren't top of our game? Real estate, entertainment, sports. You know, like, look, we understand why also we can't really accept it, but the hate comes from jealousy. So much of the hate comes from jealousy, right? They think we control the world. We don't control the world. We just happen to be successful.

But that's what you would want to tell people, even if we did control the world, right?

We're successful in so many different verticals, owning sports teams, banks, CEOs, tech companies, whatever it is.

So how does someone not conclude we own the world, control the world? I would, unless I believe there's something special about the Jews, I would assume that there's a conspiracy.

So in their point of view, they're conspiracy. In our point of view, it's just we're hungry, we're driven, and we're going to continue to win.

We'd have to be so uniquely driven that it's like on a— it's just, there's no way to explain. I don't think there's a way to explain it naturally. I mean, there is no way to explain it naturally.

It's hard to explain. It's really hard to explain.

You would have to assume that there is a conspiracy. And there is a little bit, there's some conspiracy. If you go to a synagogue, for example, you're part of a Jewish community, you just have an inherent network built in of people that are successful and people that are connected themselves. There is a little bit of that, but you can go to church and get the same thing.

But it's no different. It's the same ignorance that people say to you when Mark Zuckerberg is successful because he had a hand in helping him. He was a Harvard dropout that was just trying to get a date. There was already Friendster and MySpace. He started this thing and it took off. Larry and Sergey, we already had all these other search engines.

All Jews, by the way.

All Jews.

Not a conspiracy.

But it's like, anywhere you go, there will be ignorance to say like, oh, somebody helped them, gave them their first money. Not going to win that war.

So what do you think are some of the lessons that entrepreneurs here can learn? Is it just maybe go to the army first before you start a business? Because ultimately a lot of the people that are watching this are probably Canadians, Jews, whatever.

Look, you can't tell a Canadian, hey, go enlist in the army. In Israel, it's mandatory. If it wasn't mandatory, how many people would actually do it?

I don't know.

Right, but it's mandatory. We need it for the security of our country. So you're not going to tell a Canadian, go enlist in the Canadian Army. But the thing that I've always used to tell my culture, my staff, and so forth, that if you're coming to work for me, this is not 9 to 5. You want a 9 to 5? Go to Royal Bank. They're hiring. I don't believe in the punch clock. If you're punching in and punching out, you don't fit my mold. So for me, I tell entrepreneurs, it's this whole debate all the time, work-life balance. What the fuck is work-life balance? Like, you think an Israeli at 5:00 PM is like, well, I got to get on the golf course and I'm going to— there is no work-life balance. One of my CEOs is an F-16 fighter pilot. I sent him a message, I'm thinking of you. I hope you're doing okay. As everything in Iran started, he messaged me after 4 days, we're giving them hell. We're doing what we need to do for the safety of our country, but don't worry, I'm serving clients in between.

Like, what?

When are you finding time to serve clients? Okay, so, um, what, what I would tell Canadians here, at the end of the day, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, like, that's your life, and that's the culture you better set for your company and employees. Um, that's not to say that people need to work like 20-hour days, um, but they should, um, treat the company as if it's their own.

Yeah.

And put in the time and the effort. If not, why are you going to be an entrepreneur? This has to be your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Yeah, I agree largely. That's the way I work, at least a little bit. There's no set time and end time to work. Your life is about a certain thing, and that's just the way it is. If you don't want to do that, go get a 9-to-5 job. And some people are happy with that, and that's good. They're not meant to be entrepreneurs. Good luck on Canadians that, by and large. But I guess the ones that are starting businesses have to really look at it that way. That's one of the things I tell entrepreneurs is like, go in with eyes wide open. Like, your chances of success are very small. You're going to have to work for a very long time. It's going to take years before anything comes out of it financially. And maybe you'll succeed. Like, that's the path.

Entitlement. There's a generation here that everyone feels entitled. You're not entitled. And if you're starting something, that's the same thing. You better build for your culture. A lot of times I tell people on an interview, well, I was top of my class at whatever, Ivy, whatever. So what? Who cares? Come and prove yourself. I'm not going to pay you anything for 2 months, but if you're good, you don't think we're going to keep you? I'm not saying hire somebody for free and not pay them. That's not— but nobody has that mentality. Come work your ass off. The generation before us and before that worked their asses off to get where they at. So you're going to have to work your ass off. It's not an overnight success to go do some crypto and Bitcoin and I'm going to be a millionaire. Some people can do it.

Yeah. We're still hoping. I don't know. We'll find the next fart coin. We'll make some money.

Exactly.

Not financial advice. Exactly. Talk to our ad guy. Yeah. I can't believe fart coin was a real thing. Just do anything. You could just do things.

Do things.

Just do things. Okay, great. What are some major main lessons you learned from Your time at Platters and really your entrepreneurial journey, if you were to give over 1, 2, or 3 lessons that someone could take away?

Look, I think one of the things that— the biggest thing I had to work on myself, certainly after what I experienced in COVID, that control what you can control. I didn't create China virus, as people like to call it. I didn't create the financial recession. Control what you can control.

Well, you're Jewish. I don't know if you can.

You never know. You never know. But I took a lot of that close to heart and it took a toll on my physical health. I gained a lot of weight. I wasn't healthy. And so one, control what you can control. 2, for me, I always say, people have this question that they always say, well, what is success to you? And everybody measures success in a different way. For me, I think in 30 years of business, what I've realized success is, quality of my relationships.

With money.

No. For me, it's the quality of relationships with your kids, your spouse, your friends, your colleagues, your CEOs. What's the quality? You don't want to be the one that, God forbid, at your funeral, somebody's saying, that guy was the biggest dick. He screwed me. And so, yeah, we all want to be mensch and we all want to do good in this world. But for me, I just want to know, I want to go to sleep at night knowing I didn't screw anybody over. I wear my feelings on my sleeve, and if I'm upset, you'll know I'm upset and stuff like that. But the quality of my relationships today is very important. Certainly today too. Life is too short. And you could be mad at somebody, but it's not that big a deal. Brush it off, move on.

So it's obviously a great message. I want to maybe push back, not push back, but did that change as you developed and matured? Because let's say you take your earlier statement of if you're becoming an entrepreneur, that's your life. And that a lot of people perceive, I think it's also true in a lot of cases that that impacts all your relationships. You can't spend as much time with your kids. You can't just spend as much time with your spouse. That's your life, the business. So how do you reconcile those 2 perspectives?

First of all, those lessons learned are certainly stuff I had to go through. We didn't talk about 10 years running a company in Boston when there's 2 small kids and the company's in Boston and my wife and kids are in Toronto.

Oh, really? They were still in Toronto?

Right. So I'm flying every week for 9 years back and forth and coming home for the weekend.

Oh, wow.

It takes its toll. So of course, 30 years, there's sacrifices to be made. In living on a plane, living in a hotel, being super elite for life, over 1.7 million miles.

My gosh.

That takes its toll on a lot of things. And so yeah, some of those lessons are certainly what I've gone through and trying to put things in perspective of what's important and what's not important. There's a lot of people I hear post-exits that made a lot of money and how depressed they are. Why are you so depressed after the exit? Because they actually realize they're not in it for the money, right? They're in it for the ride and the journey, but that ride and journey is gone. And so trying to put everything in perspective, not taking everything to the heart and enjoying life. There's other pressures that I have today and stresses in my life that now I'm responsible for over 70 investors and their money and my money and to make sure we do well. But try to put everything in perspective. I can't control what's going on in Iran right now. Is it affecting my companies in Israel?

Yes.

Do I think they're going to be stronger because of it? Yes. Are they going to be better? Yes. But I can't control. Everyone's saying, when's it over, Ishay?

Well, I don't know.

I got to call Donald Habibi. I don't know when it's over. And so, but I still believe in your 20s, In your 30s, in your 40s, you go through that maturity level. A lot of things that I did wrong and I wish I did differently along the way. There's a level of arrogance along the way at some way, some point along the way, right? You grow both companies over $100 million. I always say there's a fine line between arrogance and conceited or self-confidence. Was I more conceited? Was I just confident? And so those are things that today I try to bring to my founders who are younger. You're not the best AI tool. Chill. Okay? Chill. You're maybe executing better, but let's stay humble, stay focused. And because we have this tendency to like, well, we just closed the next round.

Who cares?

I've been there. I closed a Series B. What happened to me a few weeks later?

Zero.

Exactly.

Zero. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. That's great. Do you have any final words for entrepreneurs, Israelis, Jews, people in Canada or the US for that matter?

No. Look, I still believe that with, first of all, for Canada, I hope the right leadership here can get things back on track here. There is still so much good in this country as well. We keep trying to talk about negative, but there's still a lot of good things about this country. And like every country, there's pros and cons. People wanting to go back to Israel, there's pros and cons to being in Israel.

Right.

That's the reason a lot of us are still in the— a lot of people are in the diaspora. So we need the right leadership here. We can learn some lessons certainly from the States. I know I don't want to make this political, but a lot of people are not, supporters of Trump. I am a supporter of Trump for not just my Israel hat, but a lot of the policies regarding immigration and how to handle things. And I think if we did some of those things, certainly for Canada, then we still have a lot of potential here. We have great universities here and great minds, but you got to incentivize them to stay here and start companies. And so this is not me telling everybody, go move to Israel.

No. No.

But if you want to start a tech company and you want to build a culture around you of people that give a fuck, want to work all day, if you don't have it here, then move the company to Israel because there no one's going to work 9 to 5. There's no such thing out of tech.

Are you running for prime minister eventually?

I don't think politics is my calling. I think it's just to continue to do good, continue to promote Israel in a different light and make people understand that a strong Israel, certainly a strong West, and the technology that's being developed there. We don't talk about the longevity and aging, how much stuff is coming out of Israel to help people. And we started with the phone, but those were things years ago. The things that we are doing today to help humanity and the things that are coming out, my job is to be that spokesperson for promoting Israel in tech and business. And I'll leave it with this, right? Bill Ackman, when everything unfolded, what did he do? He pulled $100 million out of Harvard. What did he do 2 months later? He bought 4 or 5% of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. People thought he's the biggest moron. He's up 500% in 2 years. I'll leave it with this. Safra Katz, I was with her at IAC in Washington a few months after October 7th. I'll never forget the line that she used on stage. When everybody runs out of the fire, I run in. And at Oracle, we're doubling down on Israel. We're going to open up another data centers. So our job is to tell people like, yes, we got our bumps and bruises. We're going through it right now. We pick ourselves right back up and we're stronger and better.

Well, everyone, thank you, Yishai. That was—

Thank you so much.

We're gonna leave more information about Yishai and Clarum Ventures down below. Cheers.