Josef Gorowitz built a company around the value of a click. A search, a survey, a little shopping: put enough of these ordinary moments together and they could become a gift card. Yet his own week included a firm stopping point. In a 2012 essay, he described the 25 hours of the Sabbath as a time to disengage from technology and business. The founder of an online rewards company had given himself a recurring appointment to be unavailable.
That detail makes his career more interesting than a procession of funding announcements. Gorowitz has spent years examining what people receive for their attention. His working life runs from physical commodities to digital rewards, from charitable fundraising to consumer research, and more recently into businesses serving creators. The recurring question is remarkably practical: when someone participates, where does the value go?
Before the click, there was honey
His first commercial education came through family. Gorowitz grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and attended Oholei Torah. After a year of mentoring from his father and grandfather, he started an offline business at 20. Entrepreneurship entered his life through people he knew, with lessons that could be passed across a table.
Before Prodege, he founded MYM Trading, a physical commodities business focused on South American markets. He also described having co-founded a honey export business out of Argentina. This was commerce with something substantial at the center: goods that had to get from one place to another. A browser tab could be refreshed. A shipment required rather more cooperation.
The internet offered a striking comparison. While he worried about moving commodities, Google could earn revenue from clicks. That observation gave him a different unit of commerce to think about. His next business would work with activities people already performed online, and investigate whether some of the money those activities generated could travel back toward the people doing them.
A career that moved from transporting commodities to organizing the value of participation.
A search engine with a collection box
In 2005, Gorowitz founded Prodege. Its early proposition connected internet searches with fundraising. The company built white-label search platforms, allowing other organizations to put their own identities on a service that could help generate revenue. For charities, supporters' everyday online habits offered another route to contributions.
The attraction was easy to understand. Fundraising normally asks people to interrupt what they are doing, find a wallet and make a decision. This model tried to attach a contribution to something already happening. A search box could do a little additional work without asking its user to organize a gala.
The idea also reached beyond charities. Early partners included the Green Bay Packers, WWE and Kanye West. A football team, a wrestling organization and a musician could each bring an audience, even if those audiences had arrived for different reasons. What they shared was an existing relationship with people who might use a branded service.
Gorowitz recognized that partners were interested in marketing and generating revenue for themselves. The charitable beginning had opened a broader commercial question. How could Prodege make an online habit rewarding enough for a person to choose it again?
The small reward that gave people a reason
Swagbucks emerged in 2008, co-founded by Gorowitz and Scott Dudelson. It brought the rewards idea into a central consumer destination. Users could accumulate points through online activities and exchange them for rewards. A familiar action now came with a second possible result: something to redeem.
At its launch, the service used licensed search technology drawing on Google and Ask.com results. The proposition concerned the experience around search rather than a promise to reinvent every result. Early reward possibilities ranged from a Starbucks gift card to larger prizes. The cup of coffee was a useful explanation all by itself.
The range of activities expanded to include shopping, surveys, games and video. Different users could find different reasons to participate. Someone interested in shopping did not have to become a devoted gamer before the product made sense. That variety became part of Gorowitz's explanation of the service.
It also made the business more than a search destination. Advertisers and research buyers wanted participation; members wanted rewards. Prodege arranged the exchange. The model's appeal rested on making both ends of that transaction useful enough to sustain a relationship beyond the first visit.
Growth before the funding announcement
By 2011, Swagbucks was No. 43 on the Inc. 500 list. A business built around small rewards had begun appearing in rankings of fast-growing companies. The unglamorous part of the proposition was doing useful work: people could understand why they might come back.
In 2014, the company announced its first outside funding round: $60 million from Technology Crossover Ventures. At the time, it reported $53 million in revenue for 2013, an increase of 51 percent over the previous year, and said it had been profitable since 2010. These were operating results accumulated before that first external investment.
The money had practical destinations. Mobile products, further development and international expansion were on the agenda. Translating a desktop service into the phone in someone's hand involved bringing more earning activities into mobile use. Gorowitz had already identified mobile as a priority in 2012.
The financing also accompanied a change in his own job. Chuck Davis, already executive chairman, became CEO. Gorowitz became president. The founder was helping build a company that would now be run with another executive in the chief executive's chair.
A partnership assembled over lunch
The relationship with Davis had developed gradually. They met at TCV's offices in 2011, on Davis's first day as a venture partner there. Advice became lunch, and lunch became further conversations. By January 2013, Davis had joined Prodege as executive chairman.
Davis brought experience from Fandango and Shopzilla. Gorowitz brought the company he had created and the experience of finding its customers. Their eventual arrangement gave the business access to both kinds of knowledge. It also required something more personal than a tidy organizational chart.
“It took time for us to build up mutual trust,” Gorowitz recalled. That is a useful detail in a story usually summarized by a funding amount and a new title. The collaboration had a gestation period. A founder and an experienced executive had to discover how to work together before the change could become an announcement.
The company soon began buying capabilities as well as developing them. In July 2014, Prodege announced its first acquisition, polling platform SodaHead. Gorowitz explained that its technology would strengthen the short polls in Swagbucks' Answers channel. The search-and-rewards business was moving further into the business of asking questions.
A beard, a balance, a point of view
Gorowitz also had a straightforward answer to the pressure to fit a conventional business image. A Lubavitcher chossid, he spoke openly about his beard and religious identity. At conferences, being visually distinctive made him memorable. He encouraged other entrepreneurs to take pride in who they were.
His advice on decisions was equally direct: combine instinct with evidence. He also spoke about positive thinking and faith. These were parts of the same outlook, allowing room for conviction while acknowledging the need to examine what a business was actually doing.
In June 2014, he received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award for Greater Los Angeles in the advertising category. Recognition arrived during the year of the financing, leadership transition and first acquisition. Plenty was changing around the founder; his public explanations of his values remained unusually personal.
“You need to have a good balance of gut instinct and hard data.”
Josef Gorowitz, 2013
The philanthropic thread continued too. Members could donate their Swagbucks rewards to nonprofits; by 2012, user-generated donations had exceeded $100,000 during the preceding year. Gorowitz was also listed among the Friendship Foundation's directors. Giving had remained part of the business story after the original charitable search model changed.
The next generation gets a turn
His later interests extend into the creator economy. Creator Growth Group lists Gorowitz as a partner, alongside a team investing in and helping develop digital content businesses. Several names there have Prodege connections, including former CFO Brad Kates and executive Joe DeTuno. Relationships formed in one business can become working capital for another.
There is a family connection in his newer work as well. On LinkedIn, Gorowitz celebrated joining his daughter, Tzivi Samuels, and her co-founder, Leibel Hecht, on their Reco Social venture. The beta product aimed to turn online content into shoppable experiences. His enthusiasm was recognizably that of both an entrepreneur and a father.
Prodege, meanwhile, has continued beyond its founder's tenure as CEO. Todd Parsons took that role on October 1, 2026. The company now describes its work through loyalty, consumer marketing and insights. The underlying exchange between participation and value remains visible in the business Gorowitz started.
His grandfather's example offers a quieter ending. In his essay about unplugging, Gorowitz remembered a businessman who could leave work behind and give his attention to family. For all the accounting that surrounds rewards, that was the return he wanted to keep in view: having time for the people the work was meant to serve.