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[♪ music ♪] [ELI talks] [Inspired Jewish Ideas]
[Sam Z. Glassenberg] [Can't Buy Jewish Continuity? Sell It Instead]
[applause]
[Sam Z. Glassenberg] [Chief Executive Officer] [Funtactix] Hundreds of millions
of our best philanthropic dollars have been thrown at the problem
of the Jewish community's declining numbers.
[jewish continuity] So in the past decade,
which endeavor has had the most significant, positive impact on the problem?
Hillel? Birthright?
Surprise! It's JDate.
JDate has had by far the most impact on the problem
of any other venture.
The numbers are staggering.
Numbers that very few in the Jewish community
are even aware of, and the crazy thing is JDate made money doing it.
JDate is the most profitable online dating service in the world by a long shot.
[Massive impact...and they made money doing it.]
But JDate is more than just the story of a successful, for-profit business.
When we see the results,
they compel us to ask ourselves, "What other problems that we face
as a Jewish community can be solved with similar thinking?"
Now, before we go any further,
I should disclose I am not, nor was I ever, an employee of JDate.
I also don't work for any Jewish organization.
I make video games for a living, like games for Star Wars and Mission Impossible.
I'm not an investor in JDate either.
I am, however, a JDate success story.
I met my wife on JDate.
In fact, I literally scoured the earth
to find her.
The story goes a little bit like this.
Years ago, I was managing a team at Microsoft in Seattle
designing video game systems, and I was single,
and when you're Jewish and you're single in Seattle,
you go on JDate.
And one day I realized with the vast majority of Jews
scattered elsewhere in the world, why should I necessarily assume
that my bashert also happens to live in the same rainy corner of the earth that I do?
Say hello to wanderingjewSD8.
Two weeks before a business trip I'd list my JDate profile in that city.
And when my business meeting was finished,
I'd go out on JDates searching for the one.
And by the time I'd found her,
I'd been on JDates in 18 cities
on 4 different continents.
And what I learned is when you're Jewish
and you're single anywhere on the planet
you go on JDate.
Denver, Buenos Aires, London.
Within 10 years, JDate has completely changed
Jewish single culture across the globe.
So in the end, how did I meet my wife?
Well, she was doing the exact same thing.
She was in medical school in New York.
She was tired of the New York dating scene,
so she listed her profile in Chicago.
I lived in Seattle. She lived in New York.
And we met in Chicago.
That JDate subscription was the best $300 investment
I've ever made, and it's still generating returns.
[product of JDate]
What a cutie!
Years later, when I was running my own video game company,
I looked back at JDate as a business
and became fascinated by it.
Now, JDate is a publicly traded for-profit company,
so it's all there in their quarterly disclosures.
JDate has 750,000 users a year
across the globe.
About a third of them, a quarter of a million Jews,
pay for the premium service.
To put this in perspective, Birthright peaked last year
at around 25,000 participants.
In the US, there are only 1.8 million single adult Jews,
which means that over 20% of all of them
are active on JDate in a given year.
JDate reverses decades of assumptions about this problem.
As a former president of my Hillel and as a Birthright participant,
I used to think if you want to get young Jews to participate,
you need to give them free food, free alcohol,
free trips to Israel, free honeymoon at Michael Steinhardt's Carribean villa
for marrying somebody on your Birthright trip.
JDate flipped that model around.
The users are paying them.
JDate subscribers pay $30 a month, which is over 3 times
what you'd pay for a non-Jewish dating site.
JDate is making $30 million a year
with a 90% profit margin.
So how did they achieve this?
Well, for starters, JDate wasn't worried about solving issues for the global Jewish community
like intermarriage or continuity.
There were Jews out there
who wanted to find other Jews to date and couldn't.
JDate built a targeted consumer product
to address this problem, a product so amazing
their audience would pay for it.
JDate was started in 1997.
I don't know if you remember what the Internet looked like back in 1997,
but I wouldn't have trusted the Internet to sell me a snow shovel
back in 1997, let alone set me up on a date.
I mean, forget Facebook.
In 1997, Mark Zuckerberg was still preparing for his bar mitzvah.
In 1997, the audience of Jews
willing to date other Jews via the Internet was super tiny.
For JDate to grow their business,
they had to build a global brand.
They had to make Jewish dating appealing to Jews
who weren't interested in dating other Jews to begin with.
Billboards in Times Square,
taking over tube stops in London.
The money that JDate earned drove their growth into a massive global phenomenon.
But JDate's positive global impact on the Jewish community
was simply an unintended consequence
of growing their business and selling their product.
That's the approach.
Look past the global problem and focus on the needs of the individual.
[the JDate approach] [1) look past the "big" problem - focus on a consumer need]
Build a consumer product business that is laser focused on satisfying a customer,
a product so awesome they'll pay for it.
And finally, make solving the global problem
a side effect, an unintended consequence,
of growing your for-profit business.
Now on to the real question.
What other problems that we face
as a Jewish community can be solved with similar thinking?
I'll propose one.
Jewish education, making it relevant again.
Now, I happen to make video games for a living,
and when you have a hammer, well, everything looks like a nail.
[example idea: video games for Jewish education]
But I assure you that if you ask an expert in any other consumer-focused industry,
movies, music, restaurants,
social networks, they will come up with even better ideas
to solve even bigger problems.
Video games just happens to be my hammer.
Now, your 8 year old may not know who Bar Kokhba is,
but I'll bet that thanks to video games
they can name 100 Pokemon characters
and relay their complete backstory to you.
You're welcome.
And that's because video games are excellent at educating kids by accident.
Games focus first on fulfilling a need,
providing hundreds of hours of fun and entertainment.
For video games, it's an unintended consequence
that we fill their heads with the game's backstory.
So what if, like JDate, we solve the education problem
as a side effect of building a successful consumer product's business?
[focus on entertainment]
Now, video games, they need a backstory, like the Star Wars universe
or Lord of the Rings.
What if we simply used Jewish history
as that lure?
Now, we Jews have incredible material to work with.
I know this because the most successful video games are constantly stealing that material from us.
Assassin's Creed takes place in medieval Jerusalem.
And when Jewish kids play this content,
they love it for the exact same reason that we all get so excited
when there is a Jewish character on the Simpsons.
We can relate to it. It's ours.
World of Warcraft, the most successful video game ever,
has golems in it.
Pokemon has golems in it.
If I could play a game where I could summon my own pet golem with my friends
and go up against a dark mob of threatening Cossacks,
I'd buy that game in a second.
And so what I'm about to show you isn't an actual product.
It's what we call in the industry a concept video.
Nobody is actually building this.
This is simply an animation I compiled myself
in about 2 weekends to illustrate for you
what a massively multi-player Jewish video game for kids might look like.
[Embark on an epic adventure]
[♪ music ♪]
[Join your friends]
[Explore distant lands]
[Unlock new eras]
[Reveal the secrets of an ancient tradition]
As someone who has built many successful video games,
I can tell you that like JDate,
you can build a profitable product that can compete head to head
for Jewish kids' attention against Pokemon and Skylanders.
And as a side effect, as an unintended consequence,
you would fill more heads and hearts with excitement
about Jewish history than you ever could before
by looking past the global problem
to address a specific customer need
by creating a consumer product that is so awesome
that customers will pay for it, and by building and growing
a for-profit business around it
you can achieve greater reach
and greater impact, and if we look past online dating and past video games,
there is an arsenal of exciting ideas
within our grasp, social networks,
music labels, online services
to connect Israel with a diaspora, to encourage Jewish leadership,
and to address the rest of the Jewish life cycle.
I believe that JDate can do more for us
than address the specific problem of Jewish continuity.
JDate can provide us with the inspiration
to solve the rest of them.
Thank you.
[applause]
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