A venture investor told an audience of Israeli executives this week that most companies, if founded today, would look nothing like they currently do. Speaking at EY Israel's JOURNEY 2026 conference at the Hilton Tel Aviv, Gigi Levy-Weiss, co-founding partner at NFX, argued that the structural assumptions behind most organizations are already obsolete.
A Question Meant to Unsettle
Levy-Weiss framed his argument around a single test: if you founded your company today, would it look the same? His answer, delivered to the room without qualification, was that for roughly 99% of companies it would not. The world that shaped those companies' org charts, he said, no longer exists. The constraints that justified particular structures and hiring patterns have shifted, and so has the kind of talent organizations need to compete.
He distinguished this from the familiar corporate ritual of tool adoption. Giving teams access to ChatGPT or Claude to write code or assemble presentations, he said, is useful but insufficient - "table stakes," in his words, not transformation. NFX calls the deeper shift "the second founding," a phrase meant to signal that the change required is not incremental. It is a rebuilding of how a company identifies problems and delivers solutions, not a faster version of the old process.
Why Org Charts Are the Obstacle
The core of his argument targets organizational design itself. Departments, he said, made sense when knowledge was narrow and specialized, and when coordination between specialists was the only way to get work done. But every handoff between departments, from product to marketing to engineering, loses information along the way. That friction, tolerable in the past, is now a competitive liability.
His alternative is what NFX calls "pods": small teams holding full responsibility for a problem from the moment a customer need is identified to the moment a solution reaches that customer. This is viable now, he argued, because the nature of individual work has changed. People increasingly function as orchestrators of automated systems rather than executors of narrow tasks, which makes cross-functional ownership realistic in a way it wasn't before.
Automation First, People Second
That shift inverts the usual order of problem-solving. Instead of starting with which specialists are available, Levy-Weiss argued that the first question should be whether a problem can be automated with AI or agents. Only after that should companies ask which people are needed to run, supervise, and govern those systems. Speed, in his framing, should be measured only one way: how quickly a solution reaches the customer. Faster cycles mean more experiments, and more experiments mean more attempts at finding what works.
He extended the logic to roles themselves, insisting that every function, including finance and marketing, now needs to be a "builder" role rather than a purely executional one. He acknowledged, without resolving, the uncomfortable implication: that many current employees may not be suited to the organizations their companies need to become. He also turned the critique on his audience and on himself, arguing that founders and executives are themselves limited by assumptions formed in a different era. His closing instruction was blunt - build a company capable of surpassing its own founders, because competitors eventually will.