Swagbucks

In early 2016, Chuck Davis, chairman and CEO of Prodege LLC, parent company of the brand promotion business Swagbucks, and Josef Gorowitz, Prodege’s founder and president, must decide whether to acquire MyPoints, a competitor to Swagbucks, after the company’s significant cultural transformation. Over the preceding two years, Davis and Gorowitz had grown Swagbucks from a relatively small venture staffed by people from Gorowitz’s personal and professional networks into a professionally managed and rapidly scaling business. This had been no easy task because Davis had to be careful not to destabilize Prodege’s strong culture, which was built around the deeply held religious beliefs of the company’s founding employees, many of whom were devout ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, as he introduced change. The culture had resulted in some unique challenges for a growing technology company, such as a requirement that the company shutter its office on Jewish holidays and every week for observance of Shabbat. By 2016, the company was thriving both financially and operationally. Considering the opportunity to acquire MyPoints, which was an established competitor with millions of members, Davis and Gorowitz must determine whether the company’s culture is sufficiently robust to integrate another business and its employees.