Jacob Knobel
Emerging Young Leaders Award
Shalom Institute Gala 2013
Jacob Knobel was introduced to Camp JCA Shalom over thirteen years
ago when a longtime friend told him to try the Tiyul (trip) program. Tiyul
spent two weeks traveling, river rafting, mountain climbing, and hiking all
over California before finally coming back to camp in Malibu. Jacob had the most amazing time. After
going on a similar program again the following year, he enrolled in Chalutz program for the Summer of
2002 where, it's safe to say, everything changed. Chalutz was a very physically demanding program - the
campers built camp infrastructure, cooked their own meals and slept outside under the stars. Accurately
noting that Jacob wasn't exactly prepared for a lot of physical labor, Chalutz unit head Sol Lipman - a
veteran JCAer, previous camp director, current Shalom Institute Board Member, and Gala 2013 Cochair - decided Jacob's talents would be best suited to managing the group's supplies. This allowed him
to work directly with the camp staff, creating a unique and strong relationship with Sol and with Camp
JCA Shalom that continues uninterrupted to this day.
Jacob was hired back the following summer, and began building Camp JCA Shalom’s first modern
website, as well as the camper e-mail system and photo galleries that parents still use to send messages
and see photos of their kids. Though it may seem an unlikely place for it, Camp JCA Shalom was also the
birthplace of Jacob and Sol's first tech startup together - a software company called StickyDrive that
made portability software for USB flash drives. Next, Jacob (along with Sol and others) co-founded
12seconds.tv, an early short-form video service which was technically launched one early summer
morning from camp's "White House" office. After a couple years, Sol and Jacob brought seven others to
camp with the challenge to create an entirely new product in one week. That team created Rally Up, a
location based social network for your close friends that was eventually acquired by AOL, where this
same team worked for about two and a half years. While at AOL, Jacob was a key player in several
work retreats which exposed a diverse group of software developers, designers and product managers
on both coasts to Camp JCA Shalom and the unique environment that helped foster Jacob’s success in
the tech industry.
Today, Jacob works as a software engineer at Tomfoolery, a new enterprise software company trying to
make work awesome with innovative and beautiful mobile and web-based apps. It should come as no
surprise that the Tomfoolery team includes Sol and many of the team members who initially created
Rally Up at that first camp work retreat. Jacob is exceptionally thankful to the Shalom Institute and to
everyone he has worked with over the past thirteen years who gave him the opportunity to combine his
passion for technology and his love for camp.