An all-Jewish group of Orange County executives is back from a March “business mission” to Israel. Their aim wasn’t to enhance their spiritual lives, but their material ones.
“The goal was to foster opportunities between business leaders in Orange County and their counterparts in Israel,” said Craig Barbarosh, a senior partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP in Costa Mesa.
Barbarosh serves on the board of the Jewish Federation of Orange County and helped organize the six-day trip.
Eleven executives went. Some didn’t want to be named because they went on their own time. They have senior positions at local real estate, software and investment companies.
Others were Mark Berman, principal scientist at Broadcom Corp., Philip Kaplan, cofounder of Costa Mesa-based VitalStream Inc., Samuel Wyman of law firm Wolfe & Wyman LLP of Irvine, Shalom Elcott, chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Orange County and Mike Zelkind, a semi-retired supply chain manager.
Almost all had been to Israel before as tourists. Some have family there.
Their latest trip was about fostering ties between Israel and OC’s healthcare, medical device, software, chip and defense sectors.
“It was designed for senior executives from OC companies who are interested in doing business in Israel or helping Israeli companies get a start in the U.S.,” Barbarosh said.
He said he expects to see business and investment as a result of the trip.
The group met with entrepreneurs in the tech and defense sectors who were eager to find American investors, according to VitalStream’s Kaplan.
“There is an incredible innovation dynamic, so to the extent that companies there have mature marketing channels that need ideas,it’s a darn good place to go look for them,” said Kaplan, now chief strategy officer of Atlanta’s Internap Network Services Corp., which bought VitalStream in February.
“I really wanted to understand how the U.S. and Israel could leverage their respective strengths and make some specific contacts in my industry,” Kaplan said. “There were some mind blowing activities. What’s missing is money.”
From a business perspective, Kaplan said he was looking for “matchmaking” prospects for Internap, which provides Internet services to corporations.
“I’m interested in any company that’s relevant to Internap,” he said. “I’m willing to help mentor them and capture them into our ecosystem of companies.”
Sam Wyman, whose firm does business litigation and liability defense, met with senior partners at Naschitz, Brandes & Co., the biggest law firm in Israel.
The firm helped with Broadcom’s buy of Israeli chipmaker VisionTech Ltd. for nearly $777 million in 2000.
“I met with three law firms and none of them have formal relationships with firms in California,” Wyman said. “It made me realize the potential of work that could go back and forth.”
Broadcom
Israeli companies approached the executives with ideas, questions and sometimes pitches.
“It was a real eye-opening experience,” Broadcom’s Berman said. “I had sizeable number of (Israeli) executives come up to me and say, ‘You work at Broadcom? I have a great idea for a chip! It took me by surprise.”
Berman said he wasn’t there as an official Broadcom representative. He did tour a Broadcom office in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. It was acquired in the $76 million buy of Siliquent Technologies Inc. in 2005.
“It reminded me a lot of what Broadcom was like in its Westwood days,” Berman said, referring to the company’s earliest days in West Los Angeles. “The unit that I visited in Israel has that same feeling.”
Berman was one of Broadcom cofounder Henry Samueli’s graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1990s. Samueli handpicked students to help run the startup. Berman was among them more than 13 years ago.
Other trip-goers went along to network with fellow OC executives.
“That’s frankly what attracted me, to travel with these people who had phenomenal successes in Orange County,” Wyman said. “I wanted to see how they evaluated businesses and business opportunities.”
The group stayed in luxury hotels and had a tour guide lead them on sightseeing in Jerusalem and to the top of the Masada rock plateau.
Organizers arranged for two chartered planes to tour the country from the southern tip to the war-ravaged border with Lebanon in the north, a ride many pegged as the highlight.
“It was amazing to get the perspective of what an incredibly small country it is and the incredibly huge business contributions it has made,” Wyman said.
At the end of the trip, the group hosted a mixer with graduates of a leadership program run by the Merage Foundation’s U.S.-Israel Trade group.
The program, called the Israeli Executive Leadership program, sends groups of 15 Israeli executives on 10-day trips to OC for a crash course in doing business in the U.S.
Merage Foundation founder Paul Merage is an Iranian Jew who sold the maker of Hot Pockets frozen foods to Nestl & #233; SA in 2002.
In the coming months, backers are looking to create a task force to help evaluate the trip’s success and follow up on business leads, Kaplan said.
“We will be discussing how we can keep the momentum going,” he said.
