In 1997 I served as chairman of Variety Israel's young leadership. I was young myself. What drew me to that work was not a career plan. It was children who needed help, and a group of people willing to take some responsibility for them.
I was also involved in establishing the Maccabi World Union nonprofit. I use the word "involved" carefully. I did not do this alone, and I have never thought of it as a personal monument. It was a way to take part in a wider community — in belonging, in responsibility, and in the idea that people should have a place to grow together.
I mention these years not as a list of titles. I mention them because they came first. Before there was a portfolio in Berlin, before there was a public company, there was this: the habit of showing up for a community. The habits you form early tend to follow you. They shape how you later think about a neighborhood, a partnership, and a life.
Variety and Maccabi are different organizations. What they share, at least in the way I understood them, is a simple principle. You do not wait for the convenient moment to give your time. If you wait until you are fully established, that moment has a way of never arriving.
Looking back, I can see a line from that early work to the way I later thought about cities. A neighborhood, like a community organization, is only as strong as the care people put into it when no one is keeping score. The same is true of a company. Long-term thinking is not only a market strategy. It is a way of asking, early, who you are prepared to be responsible for.
I am grateful I was given those roles while I was still young. They taught me to measure a life by more than a transaction. They also taught me humility. You never do this kind of work alone, and you never finish it. Other people were there before me, and other people continued after me.
Today, when I think about the platforms I later built, I still come back to those years. The question has not changed as much as the scenery has. What are we building, and who does it serve? If you can answer that honestly as a young volunteer, you have a better chance of answering it honestly later, when the buildings are larger and the room is more crowded.
Community, for me, was never a later chapter. It was the first one.
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