Sway Machinery at 6th Street Community Synagogue; courtesy JDub
Venture is aging out of the cohort of Jewish “start-ups”
JDub, an initiative touted as being at the forefront of a Jewish cultural renaissance, has announced it will be closing due to financial pressures. Founded in 2002 by two then NYU students, Ben Hesse and Aaron Bisman, JDub was one of the earliest projects incubated through both Joshua Venture and Bikkurim (2003-2008). In its start-up phase, the organization focused on developing a small group of artists, including Matisyahu, SoCalled and Balkan Beat Box. As time went on, JDub’s artist roster grew to include Israeli hip hop, Biblical indie-rock, Yiddish Punk, Cantorial Afrobeat, Sephardic rock and Jewish Kids music.
Among the reasons stated for closing are “aging out of the cohort of Jewish “start-ups,” a troubling thought to those of us familiar with the exciting and expanding world of Jewish innovation.
Left currently in limbo (see release below) is the future of several initiatives including Jewcy, an online media publication geared to young Jewish adults, which JDub acquired in 2009.
I’m writing to let you know that after almost 9 years in operation, JDUB’s Board of Directors has decided to wind down the organization.
The decision to close was entirely financial, as the challenges facing our business model are too great to overcome. JDUB earned half of its annual budget from mission-related revenue, including album sales, concert tickets, and consulting fees, and the other half from foundations and individual donors. The collapse of the music business in the decade that JDUB has existed, combined with recessionary effects and aging out of the cohort of Jewish “start-ups,” made securing the necessary operating support an insurmountable challenge.
Determined to overcome this challenge, and inspired by our mission of forging vibrant connections to Judaism, we took opportunities to expand our work beyond music beginning in 2005. We co-founded the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, and we adopted Jewcy.com, a platform for the ideas that matter to young Jews, which is the most popular peer-run website of its kind. We also launched a consultancy through which we helped over 30 other organizations including Hillel International, Birthright Israel Next, Nextbook Press, and Tablet Magazine to connect Jewish content, products, and experiences with new audiences. While these strategic moves have dramatically increased our impact, they never yielded a sustainable revenue base.
Just as JDUB modeled what a new Jewish organization could look like and achieve, we will also model how one appropriately winds down. We plan to share as much information as possible, and seek appropriate homes for our successful programs and assets.
We are extremely grateful to all of our funders and supporters, the creative and inspiring artists with whom we’ve had the pleasure to work, their devoted fans, and our innovative and energetic team. We close with heavy hearts, but incredible pride in our collective accomplishments and impact.
As Felicia Herman, Executive Director of the Natan Fund, JDUB’s longest standing funder said, “JDUB’s stakeholders should feel nothing except ‘mission accomplished.’ In addition to the hundreds of thousands of people JDUB touched directly through its events and albums, JDUB also changed the communal conversation, and made the community aware of the need to adapt to 21st-century American realities.”
A final snapshot:
- 150,000 event participants in 472 cities
- 35 album releases
- 3 Gold Records
- 3,500 attendees at The Unity Sessions, the largest Israeli/Palestinian concert in the history of the United States
- 52 songs placed in major films, TV shows, or ads
- 70+ Jewish organizational partners
- 800+ mainstream press stories including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, MTV, CNN, NPR, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Billboard, and Pitchfork
- 26 foundation and Federation funders
- 630 individual donors
- 2.7 million unique visitors to Jewcy.com since JDub’s adoption
- 87.5% of our staff never worked for a Jewish organization prior to JDUB
For responses to JDub’s announcement, see Will We Be Builders and Not Just Buyers? by Sarah Kass; What Will the Jewish Community Do? by Ruthie Warshenbrot; Response to JDub Closing by Maya Bernstein and May JDub Be a Call to Action by Ariel Beery.
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I am very saddened by JDub’s closure purely due to financial issues. Many of us struggling on miniscule operating budgets, even as we run large-scale programs, are well acquainted with the pressure and stress of trying to accomplish so much, without sufficient understanding of, or support for, our operational expenses. I hope that this serves as a wake-up call to the wider community, before we lose additional projects and organizations.
A few issues:
1. It’s no surprise when a fund like Natan’s typical grants are $10k-$70k that the organizations they “support” crash and burn. It’s time to realize these incubator funds are ways for trust fund babies with no experience running a non-profit to take credit for funding organizations while loading them with paperwork and no real support or connections. A large challenge in running a Jewish organization is dealing with the tush-backwards Jewish foundations.
2. JDub went out of business because they were selling something nobody wanted (with the exception of Matisyahu, whom they lost, because they’re not effective managers…you don’t see Scooter Braun losing Justin Beiber)…they were pushing lame Williamsburg hipsters with unremarkable talent to other hipsters with no money to spend on albums. If they had “almost 3 million” unique visitor to their website, it was likely people who landed on their pages accidentally via google search and went right back out. How many *regular users* did they have? How much repeat business? Clearly: not enough.
3. It’s telling that large organizations actually paid these guys to consult. Some experts! If you look at Hillel and Birthright NEXT’s progress in expanding their reach, you can see what they got: lessons in how to crash and burn. (Tip: learn from * successful* people next time!)
What funders need to do is grow a pair and REALLY fund an organization. You’d never see a VC fund a start-up with $50k and call themselves anything but an angel investor, yet groups like Natan have to gall to parade themselves as expert organizations? Well, here’s what Natan creates: Failure.
“We don’t necessarily build an organization to last forever.” Yes, but this was certainly Natan’s attempt with JDub and they failed. These Jewish organizations need to stop patting themselves on the back and realize when they fail or they’ll never learn.
If people wanted what JDub produced, it’d still exist.
I’m getting a laugh out of how shocked the “professional” Jewish world seems to be over this and how wonderful they viewed JDubs efforts (see “responses” to article – not sure why they warranted own space?).
with the myriad of challenges facing the Jewish community – Israel delegitimization, Jewish Identity here in the USA, in the FSU, in Israel for that matter, poor Jews around the world, etc….was music really the answer?
And as for engagement – what’s our measure. So JDub collected a bunch of names. Have any of them got involved in the real issues of the Jewish world (let along give money) or did they just buy concert tickets? 85% of its employees had never worked in the Jewish world before – ok – let’s see where they go and what they do now.
And is true “innovation” really found in creating a Jewish record label?
There is nothing wrong with JDub – but it makes sense to me that a record label start up does not find its place in the funding world when things like schools for abused children in Israel or aid to Holocaust survivors living below the poverty line are seeing their funding cut. Priorities.
And as for cultural yada yada – again – mixing Hebrew or Biblical themes with Reggae music and all of this – I don’t see how that builds Jewish identity. Its fun, short lived but in the end is that really where we thought our futures lie? Perhaps the professionals and graduate programs do…but haven’t they been the ones spearheading our losses……
I would like to clarify a couple of points of misinformation about Natan in Richard’s comments above. (And I’d suggest having a look at any of the other thoughtful pieces being published here and elsewhere for corrections of the misinformation on JDub.)
Natan is not an incubator. We are a grantmaking foundation – we primarily provide financial resources to our grantees. That said, we do try to offer as many other forms of support to our grantees – and to many organizations that pass through our doors – especially through advocacy and connections to other prospective funders, stakeholders, and users.
Natan has never purported to be able to provide the full funding that any organization needs to thrive. We are very realistic about the fact that our grants, which generally range from $25,000-$50,000, are by no means enough to sustain most organizations, nor to take them “to scale.” Best practice for nonprofits is to have a diverse community of funders; and best practice for funders is to work in partnership with other funders. This is the model that Natan strives to emulate.
We are also quite aware that the pressures on even the best organizations are manifold. So, for example, we strive to balance a) the need for our members to fully understand the applicants they are reviewing or the results of the grants they have made with b) a desire to minimize the application and reporting burdens on grantees.
And yes, we fully expect some of our grantees to close their doors (JDub is hardly the first to do so). This is the nature of the risk-tolerant funding we do. Having the wisdom and courage to close when something serious isn’t working – even when your programs and services are in high demand, as JDub’s were – is a rare and necessary thing in the nonprofit world. Isn’t the world full enough of passe, anemic organizations that couldn’t make that decision?
And finally, Natan is primarily made up of what in the funding world are called “earners,” not “inheritors” (Richard uses a more derisive term). But whether a philanthropist has earned or inherited his or her money is immaterial. What matters is the thoughtfulness, intelligence, and humility with which s/he allocates it. Natan members strive to meet that standard in all of their allocations processes – bringing with them, not incidentally, tremendous wisdom from their professional experience. But no one at Natan claims to be an expert in this – Natan is a place for people to learn about philanthropy, to become inspired to give to emerging Jewish and Israeli nonprofits, and to do so together with like-minded peers. Neither Natan nor other funders are perfect, and philanthropy, like all things, is a learning process.
Felicia Herman, Executive Director
The Natan Fund
Felicia@natan.org
There Felicia goes again, “spinning” the truth to cover up failure. However, what she says actually makes Natan’s approach even more of a failure — and one of embarrassingly poor design. If her organization’s primary focus is to fund upstart organizations, then it should come with incubator services to ensure their funding is well-utilized. No VC would fund a start-up and not get involved in the operations to at least some degree. It’s just a foolish way to spend donor money — which was my point about Natan. It’s a misled organization breaking up significant funding into insignificant amounts and having no significance as a result. These kids wouldn’t let the administration of Natan manage their personal finances (for good reason: they’d be broke), so why are they letting them manage their donations?
I know Felicia and her team are passionate and well-intentioned, but intentions don’t equal results. The results produced by Natan are repeated failure.
Whatever you want to call the members of Natan, it’s time they realize the failure of JDub is a wake-up call to replace the leadership of Natan and create an effective model of philanthropy.
This is obviously not a constructive dialogue, so this will be my last post, again just to correct misinformation. Richard, you obviously have an axe to grind – you’re welcome to contact me directly at felicia@natan.org and we can continue this conversation directly.
To repeat, because there is often confusion about these terms, Natan is not a VC firm, nor do we call ourselves a “venture philanthropy,” specifically because of the term’s connotation of providing capacity-building resources to grantees. Natan is a grantmaking foundation that, like many others, provides resources, connections, and advocacy on an informal level to our grantees.
On a formal level, we know that other organizations that are explicitly in the capacity-building business are better positioned to provide such services. Many of our grantees are also supported by incubators such as Bikkurim and Upstart, or support structures for social entrepreneurs like the Joshua Venture Fellowship, ROI, the PresenTense Fellowship, and Jumpstart. We have also been involved with convening these support organizations in order to strengthen their ability to collaborate, coordinate their work, and ultimately to make the “support” system of the innovation ecosystem more efficient and effective.
The use of the term failure is an interesting one in this context. I’d hate for anyone to think that the measure of an organization’s success is its ability to continue functioning as a nonprofit entity. (We certainly know examples of organizations that do continue to function, and yet can hardly be called “successful.”) Its use here definitely reveals an overly simplistic understanding of how one evaluates success and failure in the nonprofit world. (Or probably anywhere, for that matter.) Whether an institution continues to exist as an independent nonprofit entity is but one (and not even the most salient) of the measures of whether it was able to achieve its mission and whether it had an impact on its participants, other stakeholders, or the broader community.