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A Former Yeshiva
Boy Makes Millions

Marc Belzberg came to Israel to learn Torah. Now
he's running a bunch of hi-tech companies.

STEVE RODAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

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arc Belzberg walks out
of the elevator in a red
sweat suit and stocking
feet.
Following him are two of his
four children and his wife.
He's just come back from an
emergency. Two of his cousins
who had been horsing around in
his sukkah accidentally put their
hands through a plate glass win-
dow. Mr. Belzberg rushed them
to the hospital without his shoes.
As soon as he enters the house,
the phone rings and Mr. Belzberg
is discussing prospects for
a 40-percent investment in
a company.
Three years after he ar-
rived in Israel as a wide-
eyed immigrant looking to
settle down to a life of
learning Torah, Mr.
Belzberg has made his
mark as one of the top en-
trepreneurs in the growing
hi-tech industry.
Today, the 40-year-old
owns several companies
that have rapidly increased
their profit margins
through exports to Europe, the
Far East and the United States.
Being a son of Sam Belzberg,
once one of the richest men in
Canada, helped. The junior
Belzberg, who spent part of high
school in Israel, made millions in
leveraged buyouts in the 1980s.
In his most prominent deal, he
bought the licenses to cellular
phones in Canada, brought in the
hi-powered telecommunications
company Ameritech as a junior
partner and converted a $1 mil-
lion investment into $230 million
Canadian — all within five years.
The memory is still fresh.
"I was having lunch with some-
body in the propane-gas busi-
ness," Mr. Belzberg recalls. "At
the end of lunch, I did what I had
been taught to do at the end of a
meeting, asking him what was
new.
So, he told me he was applying
for cellular-phone licenses. He said
to me, 'We are sitting in a restau-
rant now, eating. In a few years,
we will have a telephone next to
us and can call from anywhere.'
Remember, this was 1984."
Mr. Belzberg returned to his
office, sent an associate to Ottawa
to investigate the Canadian mar-
ket and discovered that three
weeks remained to bid on the gov-
ernment auction of the cellular-
phone licenses.

"The next three weeks were
pandemonium," he says.
His arrival in Israel came dur-
ing the downturn in the United
States. Leveraged buyouts were
no longer the rage and Mr.
Belzberg decided it was time to re-
settle in the Holy Land.
"When I got here, I didn't know
what to do," he recalls. "It was a
new country, a new environment.
Venture capital was my field, not
hi-tech. I was also playing with
my own money for the first time
in my life."

Mr. Belzberg, who becathe Or-
thodox in high school, and his
school chum Bennet Kaplan re-
cruited Jack Winnet, a South
African immigrant who had
worked in the Israel Chief Scien-
tist's Office. Together, they looked
for deals. "He helped us find good
products," Mr. Belzberg says. 'We
figured that software was a fertile
area."
But for Mr. Belzberg, there was
a surprise in the offing. He soon
learned that in Israel he would
have to manage the business as
well as invest in it to ensure its
success. With Mr. Kaplan, he
bought a struggling software com-
pany, Micro-Macro, which man-
ufactured a multilingual
word-processing program for the
Macintosh and a software pro-
tection package.
"Then we realized the compa-
nies we had invested in weren't
properly managed," he says.
`Those who had been running the
company until we arrived were
engineers, not managers. So, we
had to roll up our sleeves and go
to work. I had run a company but
never had gotten my hands dirty."
Mr. Belzberg, the chairman,
and Mr. Kaplan, the president, di-
vided the company into two. The
word-processing program was
produced by a new company
called WorldWrite. The product