Few are the VC players with the charm and marketing abilities of Shlomo Kalish. Even those who flinch at Kalish’s ultra-Orthodox garb make an immediate recovery when confronted with his cleverness, his lucidity, and his very American demeanor. The aura of the retired pilot about Kalish doesn’t hurt either.
Kalish, a former lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Leon Recanati Graduate School Of Business Administration, founded investment house Jerusalem Global in 1994, hoping to become the Goldman Sachs of Israel’s business technology community, as well as to engage in private rounds of financing, public issues, and mergers and acquisitions. Later on, Kalish was called on by two pilots at Concord Venture Management, Matty Karp and Yair Safrai, and he joined Concord I as a partner. At Concord, he has a few shares in companies such as Saifun, considered by many to be Israel’s most promising private company. While at Jerusalem Global, Kalish was the force behind successes such as Picture Vision and QXL, a British auction Web site.
But it hasn’t been all up and up for Kalish. The scent of the Internet, e-trade, and the success at QXL had him believing that the Internet would yield billions of dollars for Israeli companies. With that in mind, Kalish formed an investment company called Yazam.com, where he served as CEO. Yazam.com executed countless investments in Web-based companies. After the Nasdaq crash, doubts were raised regarding Yazam’s ability to continue to raise capital (initially, the plan was to issue it on the Nasdaq). Later these doubts turned into pressure from investors to break up the company and return its cash to their pockets.
The Yazam saga ended in its cheap sale to an anonymous US company, and currently Kalish is focusing on his VC fund - Jerusalem Global Ventures - a seed fund worth $200 million, born of the uniting of Jerusalem Global’s technological incubators. Kalish and his fund partners do promise one thing: “We have not invested and will not invest in a dot.com.”
Published by Israel's Business Arena on September 16, 2001.