Most companies built before the current wave of artificial intelligence are already structurally obsolete, according to Gigi Levy-Weiss, co-founding partner at venture firm NFX. Speaking at EY Israel's JOURNEY 2026 conference at the Hilton Tel Aviv, he argued that founders should ask themselves a blunt question: if they started their company today, would it look anything like it does now? For nearly everyone, he said, the honest answer is no.
Why the Org Chart Is the Problem
Levy-Weiss's argument centers on what he calls "the second founding," a deliberate rebuilding of a company's structure rather than a set of incremental upgrades. Rolling out tools like ChatGPT or Claude to speed up coding or presentation work is, in his words, "table stakes" - necessary but far from sufficient. The deeper issue, he said, lies in the org chart itself, which he described as an artifact encoding the assumptions of a previous era, when knowledge was narrow and specialized and people were organized into departments to manage it.
That departmental model carries a hidden cost, he argued: every handoff between specialists, from product to marketing to engineering, loses information along the way. His proposed alternative is the "pod" - a small team holding full responsibility for a problem from the moment a customer need is identified to the moment a solution reaches that customer. Such pods are viable now, he said, because individual roles have shifted from doing narrow tasks to orchestrating automated systems that do them.
Automation First, People Second
That shift reorders how problems get approached. In Levy-Weiss's framing, when automation is available for nearly everything, every business problem becomes a technology problem first. The initial question is no longer which person should handle a task but how AI or autonomous agents can handle it. Only afterward does the question of staffing arise - specifically, who is needed to run and govern those automated systems.
This reordering also changes what speed means inside a company. Internal process speed matters less than the time it takes to put a working solution into a customer's hands, he said. Faster cycles allow for more experiments, and more experiments mean more chances to find what works - a logic that favors iteration over long planning cycles.
A Workforce Built on Builders
The most uncompromising part of the talk concerned people rather than process. Levy-Weiss argued that every role in a modern company, including finance and marketing, needs to become a "builder" role, actively shaping and deploying tools rather than operating within fixed procedures. He acknowledged, without softening it, that this implies many current employees may not be suited to the organizations their companies are becoming - a consequence he described as a moral question worth naming, even as he set it aside rather than resolving it.
He extended the same scrutiny to leadership. Founders and executives, he said, are themselves limited by what was possible in the past, and their ambitions were shaped by those constraints. His closing instruction to the room was to build a company capable of surpassing its own founders, on the reasoning that if they do not do it, a competitor eventually will.