Gigi Levy-Weiss, co-founding partner at the venture firm NFX, told founders at EY Israel's JOURNEY 2026 conference in Tel Aviv that most companies would look nothing like their current selves if built today. Speaking at the Hilton Tel Aviv on Tuesday, he argued that the constraints that shaped existing organizations have largely disappeared, and that clinging to old structures is now the primary risk facing growing companies.
A Question of Design, Not Adoption
Levy-Weiss framed his argument around a simple test: would the company, founded today, resemble what exists now? For the overwhelming majority, he said, the answer is no. He distinguished this from the familiar advice to adopt new tools. Using AI systems to write code or draft documents, he said, is "table stakes" - useful, but not transformative on its own. The real marker of change, in his view, is whether the entire path from identifying a customer need to delivering a solution has shifted. NFX calls this deeper shift "the second founding," a rebuilding of how a company operates rather than a set of incremental upgrades.
Why Org Charts Are the Obstacle
The core structural critique concerns the traditional organization chart, which Levy-Weiss described as an artifact of a world where knowledge was narrow and specialized. Each handoff between departments - from product to marketing to engineering - introduces loss, he argued, whether in information, speed, or intent. His proposed alternative is the "pod," a small team holding full responsibility for a problem from discovery through delivery. He said this model is newly viable because individual contributors increasingly function as orchestrators of automated systems rather than executors of narrow tasks themselves.
This reordering also changes how companies should approach problem-solving, he said. Where teams once began by asking who should handle a task, the new sequence starts with automation: can the problem be solved by AI or software agents first, with human roles defined only afterward to run and govern those systems. Speed, in this framework, is measured only by how quickly a solution reaches the customer - and faster cycles mean more experiments, which mean more chances to find what works.
A Workforce and Leadership Reckoning
The most difficult part of his talk addressed people directly. Levy-Weiss argued that every role, including finance and marketing, now needs to function as a "builder" role, and that this shift will mean some current employees are not suited to the company's future shape. He acknowledged the moral weight of that statement without resolving it, treating it as an unavoidable consequence of the broader argument rather than a separate debate.
He extended the same scrutiny to leadership, including himself. Founders and executives, he said, have had their ambitions shaped - and limited - by what was possible in an earlier technological era, making them part of the problem they are trying to solve. His closing instruction was blunt: build a company capable of outgrowing its own founders, because if it does not happen internally, a competitor will force the change regardless.
