The Autonomous Podcast

Everyone is being told that AI means smaller teams. Omer Kaplan started his new company believing exactly that, planned to stay at ten people, and then changed his mind.

Kaplan co-founded ironSource, ran its revenue for more than a decade, and watched the company list on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2021 at an $11 billion valuation. Unity bought the business the following year, and he left in January 2024. He is now co-founder and CEO of ZyG, which came out of stealth in March 2026 and has raised $118 million from Bessemer, Viola, Lightspeed and Accel.

He does not argue with the math everyone else is doing. He agrees that one experienced engineer with an army of agents does what ten people used to do. What he disputes is the conclusion. You can take that saving home or you can spend it, and he decided to spend it, because what he is building is thirty startups running at once.

The reason is in the other half of the conversation. For three years the winning move in e-commerce software was to pick one expensive problem and solve it well. Landing page generation. Creative production. Email marketing. Those founders are calling him now, after failing to raise a follow-on round, and his verdict is blunt. Either the customer builds it themselves with Claude, or somebody else does. There is no moat around one problem.

What he thinks there is a moat around is delivering an outcome. A good consumer brand today has two options and neither is real. Amazon will rent it demand without letting it own a customer. Shopify will sell it plumbing. Neither one takes responsibility for whether the brand actually grows. Kaplan wants to be the third thing, and he has run the play before: at ironSource, Supersonic took mobile games from developers anywhere, scored each one on cost per install and day-one retention, and pushed the ones that cleared the bar. Some of those developers were working an oil rig in Turkey. They became multimillionaires.

In this conversation with Mickey Haslavsky, Omer explains the screening machine that decides which consumer brands get scaled and why none of it runs on instinct, what a moat looks like when it turns out to be a sachet of gummies rather than a patent, why he broke with the revenue-share model he helped build in mobile games so the partner keeps the intellectual property, what happens to junior engineers in a market bidding only for senior ones, and why he has no fear at all of the second album.

Every founder knows government is the slowest customer in the market. Naftali Bennett says it moved at startup speed once, and he was the one running it.

Israel's former prime minister was a software founder before he was a politician. His doctrine for AI is two words: constant friction. You cannot forecast ten years out, so you do what a startup does. Ship, touch customers, come back with feedback in short iterations, correct while moving.

His evidence that a state can work this way is the pandemic war room he ran as prime minister, on a daily cycle, with decisions going out the same week rather than through four ministries. He wants a national AI war room built the same way, with a direct line to the prime minister. The catch he names himself: COVID was an event with an end, and this is not.

Also in this episode: why AI is electricity rather than another technology, his five point plan and the dates attached to it, an AI agent for every citizen and a private tutor for every child, why he says Israel is not in the race to build the language models and what he would build instead, why the defense industries need to move at startup pace, and why the juniors lost the first rung on the career ladder.

Hosted by Mickey Haslavsky, Founder and CEO of enso, in partnership with Forbes Israel. Every episode also runs as a feature on Forbes Israel.

(00:00) Cold open (00:03) Welcome, and who Naftali Bennett is (01:15) AI is not another technology. It is the infrastructure for everything (02:52) "My answer is constant friction" (04:27) An AI agent for every citizen (05:00) A private tutor for every child (06:14) The state as the testing ground for Israeli hi-tech (07:20) The gap in pace between government and AI (08:24) Government at startup pace: what worked during COVID (09:34) Israel built the apps. Somebody else owns the models (10:40) Data centers, open weights, and what sovereignty requires (13:30) Defense industries at startup pace (17:41) Why this is not a Manhattan Project (19:05) Four or five years after the discovery of electricity (21:47) The juniors lost the first rung (24:11) A national war room, and mass entrepreneurship (26:00) What he wants to point at by the end of 2027 (28:11) The Jevons paradox (30:25) Closing

Read the Forbes Israel feature: https://forbes.co.il/bennett-says-there-is-exactly-one-precedent-for-government-at-startup-speed/ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TRUogPvtdCM enso: https://enso.bot

Mickey walked into urgent care in Boston with an infected hand. Thirty minutes of treatment. A $250 bill. Then his insurer sent him a form with hundreds of questions, and he decided the money was not worth the paperwork.

Elad Schaffer's answer was not that Faye would have made the form shorter. It was that in a few years nobody will fill in a form at all.

Faye crossed $100 million in revenue in 2025, less than three years after launching in the US, and in August 2026 raised a $50 million Series C led by Madrona at a reported valuation of around $500 million. Schaffer describes what he is building as a platform for traveler care rather than an insurance company: a system that sees your flight cancelled before the airline tells you, pays the compensation before you ask, and rebooks you on the next seat it already knows is open.

In this episode he explains why the insurance policy itself was always a commodity, why he wants your personal AI agent to negotiate with his company, and the one thing that surprised us most: the slowest part of any claim is not the insurer. It is the customer.

He also draws the line where the automation stops. If Faye is going to deny a claim, a human reviews it. If you are being hospitalized abroad or evacuated from danger, a human picks up. Everything the machine does is in service of clearing away the parts that are not trust, so a person can be present for the part that is.

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🔗 LINKS

Read the full Forbes Israel feature: https://forbes.co.il/e/ai-can-settle-your-travel-insurance-claim-in-seconds-fayes-ceo-says-the-only-thing-still-slowing-it-down-is-you/

Elad Schaffer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eladschaffer/

Faye: https://www.withfaye.com
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🎧 WATCH TO THE AUTONOMOUS BUSINESS

YouTube: https://youtu.be/jlfnfUufkBI

Micha Kaufman built the world's largest freelance talent marketplace. He sees in real time what people are being paid for, and what they're not. In April 2025, he published an open letter to his entire company telling them AI is coming for every role, including his own. Then he restructured Fiverr from the inside out.

In this conversation, Kaufman lays out his framework for why humans are biological computers, why judgment is the only asset that can't be automated, and why the optimal team size right now is one person. He draws a direct line from the rise of AWS to the current AI moment, and explains why the next five years will produce an explosion of new businesses that have nothing to do with AI.

Mickey Haslavsky sits down with Kaufman to talk about what happens when a CEO of a public company takes his own advice seriously, and what it means for everyone still figuring out where they stand.

Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, which went from a poker app on Facebook to a $12.7 billion acquisition by Take-Two Interactive. His new book, Life at the Speed of Play, introduces the Proven Better New framework: kill your ego, copy what works, and innovate only the core.

In this episode, Pincus explains why AI has made the MVP trap worse, not better. He shares the "failure machine" concept he still hasn't seen anyone build, the white tiger story that turned a Friday night into a hundred thousand dollars, his Sunday Morning Joy ritual, and why he believes AI will make founders work more, not less.

He also describes the two Zynga decisions he would reverse today, why public company founders need a wartime board, a thirty-two-year journaling practice called the Book of Life, and why he pulled the plug on a four-year project the moment AI-native startups started doing it better.

Guest: Mark Pincus
Host: Mickey Haslavsky, Founder and CEO of enso
The Autonomous Business Podcast is a joint production of enso and Forbes Israel.

Links:
Life at the Speed of Play: https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com/
Mark Pincus on X: https://x.com/markpincus
enso: https://enso.bot
Podcast page: https://www.enso.bot/podcast

Ariel Klikstein co-founded Elementor, the visual builder behind 20 million websites and 13% of the top internet. Barak Friedman leads marketing at Sticklight, Elementor's full-stack creation platform for professionals. Ten years in, vibe coding lets anyone build a website by talking to an AI. So what happens to the people who built careers doing exactly that?

In this conversation, Klikstein admits he's "one of the late bloomers in vibe coding," explains how he rebuilt his entire workflow around AI (from Cursor to Gemini to Claude), and describes why Sticklight was born from the same DNA as Elementor itself: freeing people from code. Friedman breaks down how smaller teams with broader skillsets are replacing large specialized departments, and how his own marketing team discovered enso through an AI agent running SEO research.

Mickey Haslavsky names the shift: the "era of soul." When AI can generate 200,000 songs a day and build a landing page in minutes, the only thing left is taste, vision, and the human touch on top. Both guests agree. Klikstein puts it plainly: "Suddenly the power goes to creative people. People who aren't necessarily engineers. That's the change."

The Autonomous Business Podcast, hosted by Mickey Haslavsky (enso), in partnership with Forbes Israel.

Cybersecurity solved detection. It did not solve speed. Marina Segal, co-founder and CEO of Tamnoon.io, explains why your biggest security risk is not finding the vulnerability. It is the 30+ days it takes to fix it. She breaks down how agentic remediation works, why security is following the self-driving car trajectory, and what every business leader (not just CISOs) needs to understand about protecting their organization in the AI era.
From The Autonomous Business Podcast, hosted by Mickey Haslavsky. In partnership with Forbes Israel.

Learn more about enso: https://www.enso.bot

Eynat Guez is the Co-Founder and CEO of Papaya Global, the leading enterprise platform for global workforce management and payments across 160+ countries. She is the first and only woman in Israel to lead an Israeli-founded startup to a valuation exceeding $1 billion.

In this episode, Eynat breaks down what happens when AI agents become an official part of the workforce: who pays the taxes, who keeps their job, and why "use AI" is a slogan, not a strategy. She shares how Papaya is building toward a 2030 vision where humans and agents are managed on the same platform, and why every CEO starting a company today needs to decide which roles belong to people and which belong to agents.

📖 Read the full Forbes Israel article: https://forbes.co.il/e/if-you-cant-generate-roi-youre-an-agent-eynat-guez-on-the-new-rules-of-work/

Subscribe: https://www.enso.bot/enso-podcast

120,000 new songs hit streaming platforms every day. Half of them are AI-generated. A quarter billion songs are already out there, and 75% of them never reach 1,000 streams.

Gadi Gidor, one of Israel's most influential music executives, has spent 25 years building the careers of artists like Eli Botner, Ran Danker, Idan Raichel, and Noam Kleinstein. In this episode of The Autonomous Business, he sits down with Mickey Haslavsky to break down what AI is really doing to the music industry, and who comes out on top.

What we cover: 00:00 Why the music industry will never look the same 00:00 120,000 songs a day and nobody's listening 00:00 The album is dead. What replaced it? 00:00 The Lean Startup model arrives in music 00:00 Why 5,000 superfans are worth more than a million streams 00:00 How virality really works: TikTok first, Spotify second 00:00 AI as a creative partner, not a replacement 00:00 The future: will we even need human artists?

Gadi Gidor is a music executive, producer, and artist manager who has shaped some of the most important careers in Israeli music over the past two decades.

Mickey Haslavsky is CEO and Co-Founder of enso, an infrastructure platform for autonomous businesses, and host of The Autonomous Business podcast. Previously, Mickey founded Rapid, which was acquired by Nokia.

A16Z partner Bryan Kim sits down with Mickey Haslavsky to unpack how AI rewrote the rules of venture capital, why polished products no longer matter, and what happens when agents start rewriting their own programs.

Bryan leads consumer AI investing at Andreessen Horowitz. His portfolio includes ElevenLabs, Function Health, Captions, and Cluely. Before A16Z, he was an early operator at Snap and later served as CFO at Bungalow.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

1:08 The Pre-ChatGPT vs. Post-ChatGPT Moment

4:54 The New Founder Archetype A16Z Is Backing

8:13 Can You Even Evaluate a Startup Anymore?

12:32 Horizontal vs. Vertical AI

17:55 Is SaaS Pricing Broken?

21:29 How to Price AI Agents

26:31 Competing When Everyone Has the Same Tools

30:20 Which Industries Will AI Erase?

33:09 From Cow Sensors to AI Bodyguards

36:56 The Metrics Crisis: What Does Retention Even Mean?

43:23 Intelligence Is the New Electricity

47:10 The Future of Innovation Funding

52:39 Closing Thoughts

Subscribe to The Autonomous Business Podcast:

https://www.enso.bot/enso-podcast

Visit enso: https://www.enso.bot