Yuval Passov, LinkedIn Top Voice and Global Founder Advocate, shared a clip from a new podcast he recorded with Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners. Akkiraju once led a $2B company and later became a startup CEO, and despite his seniority he still builds products with his own hands.
Why You Should Not Build for Today's Capabilities
Akkiraju's central advice to founders is not to build a product around what AI can do at this moment. Models improve at a rapid pace, and a product that relies only on current capability risks losing its relevance the moment the next generation of models arrives.
This angle changes how founders think about product planning. Instead of fitting the vision to existing capability, it is worth assessing where the technology is heading and building for that future point. That keeps the startup a step ahead of the market rather than chasing it.
How to Recognize an Idea That Is Real Gold
Passov asked Akkiraju how a founder starting today knows they are working on gold and not on something that only looks like gold. This question sits at the heart of every founder's decision, especially when AI makes it easy to produce an impressive product quickly.
Telling durable, real value apart from a brilliant but shallow idea is a skill that separates a startup that lasts from one that fades. Founders who develop this sense of discernment save themselves months of work on the wrong direction.
AI as a Daily Working Tool for Founders and Investors
Akkiraju said that since January, Claude has written close to 100,000 lines of code for him. Among other things he built a tool that recovers hours he used to lose, a concrete example of AI shifting from a topic of conversation to part of daily work.
The fact that a senior investment fund leader still writes code himself with AI reflects a deep change. The gap between those who talk about technology and those who actually use it is shrinking, and that raises the bar for everyone working in the field.
Reading Startup Numbers Correctly
The conversation also touched on startups that came out of YC just a few months ago and already reach a couple million in ARR. Passov and Akkiraju stress that they dig into these numbers before believing them, because impressive figures do not always tell the whole story.
Another topic raised was the decision of when to build your own agent and when to lean on a horizontal platform that already does the job better. For founders in Israel, both questions are especially relevant in a market where it is easy to get excited by numbers and trends before examining the foundation.