Join OurCrowd's VP of Americas, Audrey Jacobs; BlueStar Global Investors Founding Partner, Lisa Weitzman; and Israel Investment Advisors Professor, Shaul Gabbay, for a women's breakfast and discussion on Investing in Israel. This event is co-hosted with Israel’s Economic Minister to North America, Nili Shalev.
RSVPs are required. Breakfast is for accredited investors only. To accredit on our site, click HERE.
Audrey Jacobs is VP Americas of OurCrowd, the leading global equity crowdfunding platform. Based in Israel, OurCrowd allows individual accredited investors worldwide to identify, research and invest in leading startups in Israel and around the world. Audrey oversees the Americas activities, building the investor community and leverages the investors' network to develop the OurCrowd portfolio companies.
A passionate entrepreneur advocate, public speaker and global community builder, Audrey has found equity crowdfunding to be the answer for startups to access capital and use the “crowd” to expand globally as well as a platform for investors to diversify their portfolio and invest in a new asset class. Through her lectures at investment conferences, startup incubators and universities, she educates investors about the risk and reward of investing in early stage companies and entrepreneurs on how to raise capital.
Prior to OurCrowd, Audrey spent 20 years building brands for technology companies with leading global public relations firms like Porter Novelli and launched the US Israel Startup Nations Series to create partnerships and educate about the opportunities of investing in Israeli innovation.
Lisa Weitzman is a Founding Partner of BlueStar Global Investors LLC. Lisa hasmore than 20 years of national market experience in the commercial real estate industry, with expertise in real estate finance, private investment, public/private partnerships, transaction structuring, and risk management. She has had primary responsibility for more than $2.2 billion in real estate transactions in all major asset classes. Her experience includes originating and structuring debt and equity financings, as well as strategic asset management, which includes the repositioning of assets and maximizing long-term value. Lisa’s expertise is in underwriting assets; assessing risk; securing capital; and negotiating, structuring, closing and managing investments through multiple cycles of the market and the multiple phases of an asset’s progression from site development through stabilization.
From 1991 to 2010, Lisa was a Senior Director and then Partner in Hidalgo & Company LLC, a real estate investment and advisory firm providing financial and strategic advisory services to developers and operators, investing its own principal capital in select development opportunities and actively managing the projects. For the last ten years, Lisa was a principal and development partner, providing financial oversight of equity, debt, third party contracts, and the underwriting of physical, economic, political and market risk factors for real estate valued at over $1 billion. From 1991-2000, Lisa was a Senior Director of Advisory Services, leading or co-managing the origination, underwriting, sourcing, structuring, negotiating and closing of $1.2 billion in equity and debt financings on behalf of developers on a broad array of property types. Lisa holds a BS from New York University and an MBA from Columbia University.
Professor Shaul M. Gabbay (Ph.D), after his military service as a Commander in the Israeli Defense Forces, Shaul Gabbay completed a BA at Bar Ilan University and an MA at Tel-Aviv University. In 1991 he received a Presidential Fellowship from the U.S. to continue his studies. In 1995 he completed the Ph.D. program at Columbia University in New York and received an invitation from the University of Chicago for a Post Doctoral program. In 1998 Professor Gabbay returned to Israel to join the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Professor Gabbay joined the University of Denver as the Director of the Institute for the Study of Israel in the Middle East at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies in 2001and completed his work in 2010.
Professor Gabbay is currently a Professor and Senior Research Associate at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies as well as the co-founder and Principle with Israel Investment Advisors LLC in Denver Colorado, a firm specializing in Investments in the Israeli Economy. His research topics focus on social networks in the context of Israel and the Middle East. He has published numerous papers and books on strategic social networks and social capital. He is frequently cited and acts as a commentator in national and international media such as the Associated Press, CBS, NBC, FOX and MSNBC, analyzing Middle East news stories..
Since its launch in February of 2013, Israel-based OurCrowd has invested $100 million into 57 companies alongside its 7000 investors from 94 countries. Investors globally are attracted to OurCrowd’s unique equity-crowdfunding platform to identify high quality, vetted and managed Israeli and global startups and invest a minimum of $10K at the same terms as major co-investors.
