If you don’t have a specific impact or a specific reason to do it, don’t build a brand just to have a presence. Someone is bound to use it for themselves and you’ll essentially be building leverage against yourself.
Ronen Menipaz is an Israeli investor, entrepreneur, tech advisor, and founder of numerous business ventures in the entertainment, adtech, and fintech space.
With more than 20 years of entrepreneurial experience under his belt, his keen sense of creativity and passion has helped him produce more than a dozen successful companies. He is perhaps best known for his involvement with Meme Global, Somoto (TASE traded), Real Life Superpowers podcast, and MCM celebrity agency.
Starting his entrepreneurial journey at the age of 16, Menipaz became one of the first Israeli entrepreneurs to incorporate online marketing strategies into his ventures, most notably clubs and restaurants. He was also known as one of the top creative strategists in the country, working for a variety of politicians, organizations, and businesses.
During his career, Menipaz has been involved with over 100 startups in Israel, 30 of which he founded or co-founded. Two of those startups went public, while five were sold and four more are currently privately profitable companies.
As of May 2017, he’s the CEO and founder of M51, a private equity company located in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company’s focus is on tech-oriented investments primarily in the fields of gaming, financial technologies, real estate, travel, martech, and education.
Menipaz is using his company to further his mission: to help and empower Israeli entrepreneurs by investing M51’s time, think power, and network of resources.
Let’s learn a little about you and get to experience what makes us tick – starting at our beginnings. Where did your story begin?
Ronen Menipaz: My first real job was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door when I was 16. I was a short kid so when the door would open, I’d quickly sneak in with the vacuum cleaner, do a brief presentation, and more often than not – make a sale. I soon realized I was onto something potentially great. From there on, I rented a chicken coop in a kibbutz north of Raanana (the city I was living in at the time), for parties. A few months later, it became the first mega club outside Tel Aviv. The business was growing, so I founded a production company called LIMBO TI in 1998, and things kind of snowballed from there. I owned a few clubs and generally became good at what I did – enough to be recognized as a nightlife entrepreneur. My success encouraged me to branch out and try new things, and I did – but not without a few failures along the way. In no small part thanks to those failures, I’m a better entrepreneur today, dabbling far beyond the entertainment industry. I am an investor too, mostly focused on tech-based segments such as adtech and fintech, but also real estate.Was there somebody in your life that inspired you to take that specific journey with your business?
Ronen Menipaz: I’d first have to point out the entire system – the educational one. I had a rough path to success. My family emigrated from Canada to Israel when I was 14. To say I had trouble fitting in would be an understatement. I didn’t know Hebrew, I didn’t know the culture. I was thrown out of four different schools, even though I wasn’t a bad student or even violent. Teachers just didn’t understand me and didn’t know how to contain me. I was socially ashamed, feeling disconnected from everything. No one cared. To the entire system, I was destined to be a street cleaner. When I realized I had to help myself, I began to challenge myself. If people say that you’re something, it doesn’t mean you are. You just have to get out of that box and do your thing. Sometimes, the hardest things you ever have to do become the biggest prizes. The worst thing that happened to me was also the thing that empowered me the most and provided me with all the motivation I needed – because if I wanted to make something of myself I didn’t have a choice but to be self-reliant. In retrospect, I’m now thankful (even though I’m still angry) for the difficulties I experienced and the “advice” I received because they made me a better person, privately and professionally. I also have to thank my parents. They trusted and supported me, even coming to the aforementioned late-night parties just to be there for me when I was starting my entrepreneurial journey. They have my eternal gratitude for never giving up on me.Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons you learned from that?
Ronen Menipaz: When I was starting my business with nightclubs, I had no grasp of what business really means. A kid doesn’t really know what to do with money because, in school, no one teaches you how to open up a business, what cash flow is, and stuff like that (yeah, I’m fed up with the system). So at the age of 17, when my co-op-turned-club was booming, and there I was, not knowing there was such a thing as a receipt or taxes. At the end of the day, I would take the cash in a garbage bag, say to myself “wow, great day”, and go home. I simply didn’t know better, nor did my kibbutz partners who were old farmers – not really their thing. This actually went on for a while, until I brought in a partner who had some superficial experience in “accounting”. I say “accounting” because he’d set aside ticket stubs and make note of how much we sold them. When I asked ‘why?’. he said it was for the government. In my clueless mind, the government was subsidizing something, which was super cool and nice on their part. I asked him about the details, and just like that, I was educated by a 21-year-old on what a receipt is. I wanted to pay taxes (or more acutely, I wanted to abide by law), so I asked around (as the Internet wasn’t all that relevant in 1998) about what I had to do and calculated my tax. Here’s the really funny part (if the whole situation until now seemed ‘normal’): I came into the tax office with a garbage bag of money (70% of it was in coins) to pay my dues. The entire office was looking at me in bewilderment because something like that never happened before. They asked me about my company to which I replied: “What company?”. Still, they were really nice to me, and the office manager even sat with me and explained, in a very literal way, what everything meant. That’s how I learned about taxes.Resilience is critical in critical times like the ones we are going through now. How would you define resilience?
Ronen Menipaz: Being self-reliant. I have a very strict rule: I don’t go into businesses where there are tangibles that are not in my control. You can’t control every situation, especially in a fast-moving world of entrepreneurship. People disappoint all the time, not because they’re bad people but because there are so many variables you can’t affect. So, I always think about the worst-case scenario, and I solve it first. That’s the most important scenario in any business ordeal. By getting it out of the way early, I can make decisions without being in panic mode. There’s far less stress that way, even if things go south because you’re prepared. That’s why self-reliance is the epitome of resilience for me.When you think of your company, 5 years from now, what do you see?
Ronen Menipaz: I see M51 being the leader of the ‘zero exits’ movement in Israel. You can never know for sure how you’re going to evolve and what you’re going to become, but you do know what your company wants to stand for. The vision I have for M51 is empowering Israeli entrepreneurs to believe and succeed in building companies that are self-reliant, private or public, and not selling them. It’s a loss to sell because a company is your baby, de facto, one you raised. It’s a win to grow it and be globally big (SodaStream and Check Point immediately come to mind), and most importantly – live out your dream. It’s our dream to make an entrepreneur’s dream come true so that more people can aspire to make a bigger impact. I firmly believe we’ll be there in 2026.What do you consider are your strengths when dealing with staff workers, colleagues, senior management, and customers?
Ronen Menipaz: It’s very natural for me to see other people’s points of view. Early in my career, I tried to be everything. I was a staff member, colleague, senior manager, even customer. Hence, I learned how to make relationships as an entrepreneur. I do it because I love it, I don’t perceive it as a business. So, I tend to ask a lot of human-centric questions to get to know the people I work with. I want to know what makes them tick, what motivates and bothers them, what their endgame in life is, and so on. In other words, I do due diligence on the human side instead of the business. For me, team chemistry beats talent any day of the week. I find willpower more important – how much people want to work with me and other team members – than focusing on how good they are at what they do. I thrive to be very approachable and think with the team. I also give them the freedom to make errors. I know it sounds cliché but that’s how you show trust and get respect in return. You may get burned once or twice but there is no other way if you want to be a leader that your team looks up to in every way.What have you learned about personal branding that you wish you had known earlier in your career?
Ronen Menipaz: That it’s a war on reputation. You’d be surprised how much envy and competition there is. It took me a while to truly understand that when you make money, you’re actually taking it from someone else. If you haven’t pissed off anybody in business, you’re probably not making money. As soon as you make some, there are bound to be people who are pissed off at you because you are the reason they can’t make money. Everything is a megaphone today, every word on the Internet. That makes you not want to make decisions, something I’m fighting with myself. If you’re not specific about your personal branding, it’s not worth it. You don’t need that responsibility. In the beginning, you really want to enlarge yourself, leverage every possibility to make your personal branding better. That’s fine. But – you don’t need external feedback. Those who need to understand will understand – the real people that, in the end, you do business with. Not the social media likes, PRs, and the like. If you don’t have a specific impact or a specific reason to do it, don’t build a brand just to have a presence. Someone is bound to use it for themselves and you’ll essentially be building leverage against yourself.How would you define “leadership”?
Ronen Menipaz: Responsibility. It’s that simple. Leadership means taking full responsibility for the happiness and success of a group of people, company, organization, or family. People are actually placing their future in your hands so as a leader, you have to put ideals, endgame, and everybody else over you so that you can succeed with other people. Consequently, a leader who plays the blame game and avoids owning and addressing the issue is not a leader worth following.Do you think entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with or something that you can learn along the way?
Ronen Menipaz: You’re definitely not born with that entrepreneurial vein. I’ll admit that you can be born with an advantage, like a natural affinity for creativity, but even then, you have to learn how to hone it into a tangible advantage. That is the most you inherit physiologically and it can’t guarantee you any chance of success. Why? Because being an entrepreneur is something you have to learn. It’s a demanding and unconventional gig, not a gift. It’s the will to do the hard work, to sacrifice a lot of things so you can make an impact. Perhaps more so than anything, a really good entrepreneur is sort of a jack of all trades, a person who possesses a little more than a superficial understanding of everything related to the success of a business. That’s not something you can be born with.What’s your favorite “life lesson” quote and how has it affected your life?
Ronen Menipaz: I’ve heard so many inspirational quotes over the years that it’s hard to pick just one, but here goes: “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” – Albert Einstein. There is a lot of logic to that sentence because when you’re having fun, you’re brainstorming and really engaging your neural pathways. The quote is how I learned to lean heavily on my creative skills and to seek that creative spark in others, especially entrepreneurs. Successful people are free thinkers – never be afraid to let your imagination loose when trying to solve a problem or innovate. This interview was originally published ValiantCEO.
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