No one would hire this entrepreneur after college, so he got busy launching startups

Bosco is SFBI’s latest venture – a “smart parenting” app meant to help parents keep better track of their child’s online activity. Photo credit: SFBI.

Enon Landenberg started his first company because he had nothing better to do. “No one wanted to hire me after college,” he says, laughing. These days, he’s the co-founder of Israel-based company launcher SFBI (Small Factory, Big Ideas), a sought-after business speaker, and marketing advisor to SpaceIL – the Israeli entry to Google’s Lunar X Prize competition for putting a vehicle on the Moon.

His attitude toward work and entrepreneurship did not get him far in job interviews. “Even during the interview I was already trying to fix the company I was interviewing for,” he says. People with an entrepreneurial spirit are always thinking about the next thing. “I think anyone who interviewed me understood that about me,” he adds.

The SFBI team claims to lay out a company’s entire business plan from the first idea all the way to its exit strategy.

Landenberg founded his first company, an interactive advertising agency called E-Dologic, in 1999. It evolved out of a website he started to help young people find apartments, apply to university courses, plan trips, and more. He planned to finance it using advertising, but he discovered there wasn’t a good digital marketing agency in Israel at the time. So he shut down the website and started his own agency to sell advertising online.

After launching campaigns with clients like Coca-Cola, Ford, and Nestle, E-Dologic was acquired in 2001 by French multinational advertising company Publicis. Landenberg stayed with Publicis as chief innovation officer until 2013, at which point he struck out on his own.

Next came a company called Infinity Augmented Reality, an AR software development company where he served as president, before founding SFBI in 2014.

Solving problems he saw around him became a theme. “I’m not sure this was always the reason why I started companies, but today it’s definitely that,” he says.

SFBI has launched businesses that address various human needs. For example, Leo is a mobile bot assistant for personal insurance and Gistit provides CliffsNotes-like summaries and study resources to students.

The venture builder claims to lay out a company’s entire business plan from the first idea all the way to its exit strategy, and only goes ahead with that startup if it’s satisfied with that plan. Its team members join in as co-founders, advisors, or mentors. SFBI also pours in some initial investment in the new businesses.

Smart parenting

SFBI’s latest venture is called Bosco and it’s being rolled out in Asia first. Bosco is a “parental intelligence” app that promises to help parents keep an eye on their children’s online activity so they know when it’s time to intervene.

Focusing on the child’s smartphone as the center of their social and digital life, the subscription-based service tracks location, monitors changes in the child’s social networks (like people following or unfollowing), flags calls from unknown numbers, and more.

The app can also pick up on signs in the child’s voice and determine their mood when the parent speaks to them on their phone. If the child sounds stressed or unhappy, the app will let the parent know.

There are other apps out there that offer inappropriate content monitoring, location tracking, and prevention of cyberbullying, like MMGuardian, SecureTeen, and Norton’s own Family app. Others offer functions like sleep monitoring and limiting of online time. Bosco’s edge seems to be in combining all those different features together and adding functions like daily routine updates about the child’s schedule and voice mood detection.

Written in the stars