Keep Spreading Good Karma

TLDR: After 4 years of activity, 4514 questions, 23856 answers and 6614 appreciations, we have decided to shutdown the Karma app as we know it. Now, we start building the next Karma.

When we started Aleph we spelled out our core mission on the very first slide of our fundraising presentation: to help Israel become the “Scale Up Nation.” We created Aleph to offer support to Israeli entrepreneurs building big companies that could solve global problems. We are still at it!

And, to help further that mission, we built a tool called Karma to help bring the Israeli startup community together. Today I’d like to announce a few changes.

I believe that one of the key reasons for the Israeli eco-system’s success is the network effect of its entrepreneur community. We designed Karma to facilitate and strengthen this network effect through knowledge-sharing, advice, introductions, and peer-to-peer support. With these tools in hand, we could conquer the hardship of changing the status quo.

We turned our love of building stuff and our commitment to scale into building the Karma platform. Using the app, experienced entrepreneurs could more easily connect, share their knowledge, and help one another without needing any further help on our part.

For Aleph, Karma was never about user growth. Our main KPIs were focused on the value the community gained and the benefit that people got thanks to the connections they had made through our platform.

Meaningful relationships were created through the app. Two community members, Itamar Kestenbaum and Avi Zuber, even decided to make Aliya after applying for positions they were exposed to through Karma.

When we launched the app back in 2014, there weren’t many platforms or tools for support and knowledge sharing dedicated specially to founders. No surprise, Karma immediately took off beyond our expectations.

At some point, we realized that strong relationships cannot be based only on in-app interactions, and so we decided to take the community to the real world.

We expanded the Karma activity to include offline interactions with Karmathon, a 24-hour hackathon. At the Karmathon, community members could network while drinking lots of beer and building digital tools to help fellow entrepreneurs (some of those tools are still active). We followed up on the success of Karmathon with other closed community events, offering people the opportunity to meet those they had previously known only as avatars in real life.

As the years went by, the ecosystem matured. Today, unlike in 2014, there are a lot more support and community initiatives, such as Hashavua podcast and the Facebook group, Android Academy, Product Tank, and Machine & Deep learning Israel. There are so many initiatives, communities and FB groups today that you can find support on almost every technology-related topic. Israeli Entrepreneurs are no longer alone.

It’s probable that, as hard as it is to say, Karma outlived its welcome by a few months. The Aleph team is intentionally small, and we scale ourselves through the building of platform and software. By devoting resources to the current Karma, we didn’t invest them elsewhere.

In the upcoming days, we will remove the app from the App Store. However, it is important for us to emphasize that Karma as a concept will not disappear. We still believe in good karma. We still believe in the value of paying it forward and in the power of community. Our Aleph.bet series, Olim workshops, and other community initiatives will continue to run. Most recently, we have announced the “Karma Space” so that entrepreneurs can enjoy some of the space Aleph has in our Rothschild 32 headquarters.

We would like to thank the thousands of Karmists for being active community members that have helped the community get to where we are today. We are so grateful for their willingness to try new tools, for their patience when we sorted out bugs, and for allowing us to facilitate them building a stronger and better community.

I would also like to thank Eran Shir, the grandfather of Karma, Yaniv Kalamitzky, the master of the Karma design for bearing with us through the many sprints, and the talented engineers who built and maintained Karma: Otniel Ben Amara, Pavel Kaminsky, Shimon Shvartsbroit, Ofer Vogman and Sumit Mishra.

As we work on the next Karma, which will include new solutions to meet the current and future needs of the community, we would love to hear from you what tools are still needed and where we can add value. Hit us at karma@aleph.vc to start a discussion.

Thanks Avigail Levine for her contribution to this post, and for spreading good Karma.