Transcript: Navot Volk | GroundUp VC | What’s Really Worth Building in 2026? Inside an Investor’s Mind

Eyal David: [00:04] Hey, this is Eyal, you’re on Product Builder. We’re about to start the episode, but first, please click Follow on Spotify or Subscribe on YouTube and help us reach more ears. Let’s go, starting now. No interesting ancestors, thank God. How are you? Definitely. And maybe we’re also on January 1st today, so, like, maybe we can predict all kinds of things here. Not good, it’ll grow—I don’t know what happened, okay, at Tamar’s house, introduce yourself.

Intro and getting to know Navot

Navot Volk: [00:37] Partner at the Ground Up venture fund, making pre-seed and seed investments in the United States and Israel. The fund is American. Before that, most of my life I was an entrepreneur. I was at Microsoft in several of the organizations, I was at Wix, I built a new business for Wix.

Eyal David: [00:57] Come on, I’ll even add more—so, the operator aspect of Levi, Syono is very interesting. I’ll also add that you have... Also a podcast episode, yes, just here too I’ve had a bit of a chance over the years to listen, actually also on 30 Minutes or Less, and now also on Wicklisync. And alongside that you’re also a LinkedIn wizard. I really enjoy it, at least in the photos, in the posts, very much, and also the predictions—I didn’t mention that by accident. So let’s give me some niceties.

Moving to Ground Up Ventures and pre-seed/seed investing

Navot Volk: [01:25] Talk a little about your role at Ground Up—when did you start, what did it look like? I started in July 23. The fund Pandele offered me to join; I said, interesting. Since then I’ve been at the fund for two years, two-plus years, investing in the startup world. It won’t help me—before that I knew it, it’s my community. I grew up, lived, I was at Microsoft in a senior startup role; I know this world. I see it as natural, and here we are two years later—I’ve made five investments, or six, I already don’t remember, need to count them.

Eyal David: [02:07] That’s it, it’s like interesting—you entered during an interesting period too, to be a VC.

Navot Volk: [02:11] You know what, in hindsight you don’t know it’ll be interesting, you don’t know what was uninteresting—you, like...

Eyal David: [02:20] Tell me, you don’t know—you entered after a huge amount of money during COVID, half a year later you say, and then basically the war started too; it was hard in 23 anyway, but but we knew 21 wouldn’t happen again, that was clear.

Navot Volk: [02:35] The war was challenging for everyone; for me, actually, with all due respect, the war wasn’t challenging at all.

Eyal David: [02:42] Really, like, a pretty small deal flow, a lot of people in reserve duty, less money entering the country, less time for people to deal with this.

Navot Volk: [02:50] You know, like, he wrote me something like, in the first month I didn’t know the flow. But okay, after that people learn to work and live and everything’s fine, like, they get organized. They learn to live the new normal, like it wasn’t some, like, you know, comparing to other people whose lives fell apart or who lost someone. Or who went through some kind of disaster, or lost their house.

Eyal David: [03:18] Absolutely—you entered an interesting period; it’s something, and I also think about us as Israelis, this new normal—how many of these do we have, right? And basically after, and within all this, also a revolution—the one you’d say isn’t a revolution, but it will be a revolution—that maybe you saw in your eyes before. So all of this is happening, and in my opinion it’s a very interesting time to be a VC, basically in these two years, yes, but it’s always interesting to be a VC. I think the reason I chose this profession

Navot Volk: [03:48] is because by definition your job is to meet every day smart people who build normal things—the problem is 90% of it is stuff, but that’s a different problem, but in principle, yes, I work with the most interesting people in the world. The most creative in the world, and they build amazing things. It’s cool as hell, like, what I really love is providing that, but it’s always true, so you touched on it and I’m curious.

What Navot sees in the market: AI, digital transformation and Why Now

Eyal David: [04:11] Tell us what kinds of things you’re seeing now, say, what you’ve seen in the last year or two.

Navot Volk: [04:18] A lot, a lot, a lot—anyone doing something, of course, says it’s AI, and yes, we’re in a very, very massive digital transformation right now. The world has moved. A few sectors are less digital; there are industries that have gone through a second and third digital revolution. Look at the banking industry, the insurance industry—they started computerization already in the 70s. They advanced, and today they’re already in their third digital revolution. And every industry goes through some kind of digital revolution, and there’s room there—that’s what interests me. And that’s why the investments are also diverse: I have a company that sells to plumbers, and I have a company that sells to builders, and I have a company that sells to IT people. There isn’t one audience; what always connects the companies is I have to understand—wow, now AI is very, very strong. I mean, why now? Why wasn’t this something that existed a year ago, two years ago, five? And the answer is because I thought about it—it’s not correct, like, there’s no chance you thought of an idea that no one thought of before. Oopsy, I don’t know, seven billion people in the world—someone already thought of every idea you’ll bring, like... Something from startup to startup—Paul Graham wrote this. There are no bad ideas, the timing is wrong. And I believe that—I mean, there are tons and tons of good ideas that didn’t happen, of course, right? So now we’re in the right time for a certain set of ideas. An exciting period, and there are a lot, a lot of ideas that are being born now—we’re not born now, we think.

Eyal David: [05:57] That it’s the right time for it, and it’s the right time for it because the technology isn’t there yet, so there’s also the idea; I can even say I was wrong about it, but say. What kind did you talk about, DevOps for example, and you really talked about products that are sold to mountains, products that are sold to builders. Before we continue, click the link to the Product Builder WhatsApp group in the episode description and join the community there you can continue the discussion, ask questions, and be the first to get updates on new Techeles episodes. See you there, and now back to the episode. What other areas do you see? So, first of all, I’d be very happy to hear about trends, but what areas reach you? What cool stuff—I’ve never worked in.

Evaluating areas without locking into a thesis

Navot Volk: [06:42] To sort them out because experience, time, everything—really, I’m looking, I’ll open my calendar. So this morning I was at some company that helps people deal with vibe coding tools. And this afternoon I have some company that deals with mapping the sky for drones. Google Maps for drones—there isn’t something where I say this and also. Until today I also asked Orya about something, I invested in something completely different, what do you mean, explain. I’m very, very noisy, I still think the gaming market is a very interesting market, the biggest activity, the biggest in the world. I looked for companies that do interesting things in gaming, I didn’t find any; in the meantime I did other things, like I think that, like. To build a thesis and then look for companies is very, very hard; the best thing is simply to be opportunistic.

Why gaming is an interesting market — not necessarily a game studio

Eyal David: [07:45] Can you tell us more about gaming? What do you think about those areas? Why? Because it’s more the hard-reward, because there’s still more screen time for it.

Navot Volk: [07:52] I look at trends; I think if you look at how much people are spending, they spend much more. The most popular form of entertainment today in the world is gaming, okay. I look at my kids, I see how much they’re on the Nintendo Switch or on the computer playing games; I see how they talk about it with their friends. Look around you and see everyone on their phone—they’re not writing, some important email, they’re playing Candy Crush. That’s a market. That if I have to say what the thing is that will reduce—I look at 26 and I say what thing will reduce the hours of use of Netflix. It’s GPT-6, meaning if and when GPT-6 comes out. I think it will critically affect Netflix; Netflix—an event of decline. I think we’ll suddenly see an increase in sales of PlayStation and Xbox; it’s an event that will change the world.

Eyal David: [08:59] And that, and it’s fucking a game, so I’m taking two things here, first of all, it’s also interesting, our Switch is strong.

Books, content and the attention economy

Navot Volk: [11:11] Honestly, you know, the last really interesting thing that happened in books was when Amazon bought them.

Eyal David: [11:18] Which is also basically on the same principle, because they’re kind of a big book supplier, so that’s fascinating too, right, absolutely.

Navot Volk: [11:26] A market for consuming content, or a market that’s always interesting because people always want content. I think it has become very, very concentrated, with very few players and very, very big ones. And the real estate on your phone to reach you is becoming more and more expensive. Look at your phone today on the home screen and tell me how many of the apps there aren’t from the giant companies.

Eyal David: [11:52] Exactly, and I’ll even say something more than that. That percentage has shrunk even more since I also have Gemini and ChatGPT on my phone, so it’s even less searching—I don’t know what. So if we already talked about this real estate, it’s even more significant.

Navot Volk: [12:07] Right, I think that like the economy, there are two conomies, it’s hard, it’s hard, because the big players are playing there and they’re not giving in.

Eyal David: [12:21] They don’t allow built-in minutes, so that’s it. I want to connect this, so basically like you invest in my stage, and now I’m really curious about this, to tell me now about a company. That will basically come into this tension; it’s also dangerous. I don’t want to build a company that invests in it, so I can totally understand why you didn’t enter that event you were thinking about, like you were thinking about gaming, but it’s clear to me maybe why you didn’t go in. There wasn’t, but a little more without that I didn’t do someone who makes games.

Navot Volk: [12:49] I want someone who makes technology that gaming companies will use. If there were, just throwing this out there now, I get emails about a company that knows how to build some kind of game engine or some kind of things for games, in my opinion. That you can speed up game development faster, track players better, know how to transfer—transfer to him—to give him a better experience. Those are more infrastructural things; I would never, but the chance that I’d invest in a game studio is low, because I don’t know. I don’t know if a studio is what it’s called, that same studio, I have no idea, it’s not my field, but if I see a company building some kind of, I don’t know, vibe coding for gaming. You can perform the game very, very well; this game is a good game, it generates engagement, and I’ll talk to game studios, they’ll tell me, yes, that’s a cool thing, I’ll take it, I’ll buy that product.

Eyal David: [13:50] Wow, amazing, excellent. So the first time you said game studio, basically by definition, you don’t, you don’t look for or look at B2C either, I understand.

Navot Volk: [14:01] I did, I forgot that B2C didn’t succeed—what fields can you sometimes do. We forgot an American company that made a browser for kids. It was a very, very good product; there was still a company, but the product was good. What do you generally think about parents, kids, those areas? I think it’s an interesting place to invest. I think I did, I forgot, I talked. One of the founders of that company was a senior at YouTube and said, listen, someone at YouTube, Kite, doesn’t let his kids go on YouTube, Kite. Okay, great. So he’s among—what is it—the product he built? I think there’s an interesting opportunity between children. Today someone controls it; you did it completely—it's Roblox. They made a great product. Someone is making me a movie where at some point I don’t see these Lego-like characters living forever doing things, okay? Like, that also fits certain niches, and there’s also some kind of wrapper there that’s problematic.

Eyal David: [15:14] I know that from home too, so we basically talked about all kinds of industries, you see, in this context, and tell me, I’m leaving this—I’m going now to the founders themselves.

What Navot looks for in founders

Navot Volk: [15:26] Do you still really see solopreneurs? Do you really see what state the founders who come to you are in? What do you see? I’m not looking at solopreneurs; I usually look at teams. I also like teams, I. I don’t like solo founders. I think being a founder is incredibly, incredibly hard; doing it alone is even harder. So usually I don’t say no, because you know, I don’t have a company that we’d invest in, it would be some solo founder, but. People have run into some kind of problem and think they’ll solve it, and the thing I love most in the world is a founder who says, listen, here’s a problem. A thousand others tried to solve it and failed because I understood something they didn’t understand, and that’s what I understood, and that’s how I’m opening this now. Why I understood it isn’t because I’m the genius of the generation; I live this. I know the problem, and this is the solution; amazing victory, bring it, and you see a lot of those now—what state do they come in? They come in all shapes and colors, you just want more of them; there’s not much of an adil flows, that’s something that this time you don’t have too much of, you always want more.

Eyal David: [16:45] Like any panel, but I’m asking now just randomly—do you feel that if before people used to come with a presentation, I don’t know, maybe they come to you with a presentation because you’re. Seems to me like a different kind of fund, but they come more prepared. I’m not even talking about the product itself; I’m talking about around the problem, around research, around really coming and saying, as you say, I’m a domain expert and I know how to say what—I expect them to come.

What founders should do before raising money

Navot Volk: [17:08] Everything that can be done without raising money. Research, understand whether this product succeeds, doesn’t need money for that, ask, bring design patterns, you don’t need money, talk to people, understand that the problem exists. And that they’ll come.

Eyal David: [17:23] No, I agree with you. I’d also like to see those. I’m asking whether that changed in the two, two and a half years that you’ve been running the fund. No, I don’t think so; you still do. To me, that’s amazing. Tell me, what’s missing for them, for those founders who come to you—money later, that’s for sure—but probably they’re missing something else too. What’s missing? What would you like to see more of that you don’t see? How connected are they to the events, for example.

Navot Volk: [17:53] I don’t think they’re connected at all. I don’t see it; this tier doesn’t care. What matters is value — bring value. And what’s missing there, like, if you wanted to see that they’re not getting there today, explain it to me clearly. What’s the value for someone, the person whose product is there, because entrepreneurs are always undervalued. You know, it’s not that the product is there and people will use it; if it doesn’t give them value, they won’t use it. But it won’t be fast, and it won’t be clear. If they don’t use it, nobody has the energy now — like, nobody wants to work hard to get mediocre value. Like the genius of, I don’t know, the biggest consumer product that’s come out in recent years, ChatGPT, but it’s really fast. You ask a question, you get the same answer, like, okay, it’s clear to me in a second what can be talked about, I’ve covered it, but okay, never mind, never mind. I asked a question, got an answer, fact. I don’t know how many people use it, and look at this amazing thing because ChatGPT taught us two things that before ChatGPT seemed irrational: first, sometimes the answer is not correct. We forgive it, and second, it takes time. Like Google for 20 years taught us they provide an answer within 0.01 seconds. Even if you cite it, write it, and I asked, it said no.

Value, product experience and ChatGPT as an example

Eyal David: [19:15] It takes time, and sometimes the answer is not correct, and still we went along with them. And more than that, it’s the first absolute answer versus a lot of results, and that’s true. You really threw me off with that milliseconds number, and there was always Google’s, basically, the number of pages in the pagination. So okay, who’s looking at that? How is that an example of a good product, you say. So basically you’re talking about wanting to see a very good experience, if I understand correctly.

Navot Volk: [19:42] I think they’ll understand it if it’s there. They’ll understand what the product says, what the user experience is. What they get, what, what, what their product is, and I don’t care whether this user is a DevOps person or a gamer, a Crash player. But it has to be clear.

Distribution, design partners and why classic marketing erodes

Eyal David: [20:01] Sure, and how much are you talking about distribution, how much traffic comes in, what’s the direction there? Usually they come in with zero, where. And then, if I connect that for a second to the past, operator was something you brought to the table.

Navot Volk: [20:14] I don’t know, I bring ideas about what distribution will work; nobody knows. What you thought: experiments, experiments, experiments, and it turns out it works if you have a product with product-market fit. It doesn’t matter how much marketing you do; your users will be the best agents for your product. That’s for sure, but they come to you even before that stage, so like you need to bridge exactly the setup you’re coming to take it with. If I’m okay, but do a design partner — a design partner will do it. I think nothing helps, like, a good product. Wins everything. Sure, in the new world, in the world we’re in today, marketing doesn’t really work anymore. Classic marketing — yeah, not really working. And agents doing cold calling don’t really work either, because I think your LinkedIn — I have a hundred messages there written by AI bots. In my banners too, and all of that doesn’t work. What does work is value.

Eyal David: [21:16] I think it takes us back again to the spam issue you mentioned — how much spam do I have, but also, like, as a necessity, but also... You wrote all kinds of trends for ’26, I remember, and one of them was that the vibe is changing direction; that connects a bit for me to the world becoming much more agent-driven.

When the web is written for agents

Navot Volk: [21:34] Do you want me to talk for a second about that trend? Wait, I think in a world where our browsing starts with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. Then the entry point will also start happening inside those bots. People will do a lot on their site, which is more common now, because most of the people reading that site are agents and not humans. And then you’ll build websites differently; you think websites will be much more informative and much less pretty. The agent doesn’t care about your colors or your logo or that stuff; it just wants the data and it gets out. Meaning a lot of companies will become a database and be okay with that.

Eyal David: [22:25] Yeah, and I think what I’d also try to connect here is how important my value story really is versus the competitor’s, basically, so that the AI there knows how to pass it on and also knows how to compare me and position me. I just found myself on our landing pages writing lots of question marks and answering them to actually create that differentiation. Honestly, that also opens up another direction for me for a second — it opens a big direction for a lot of startups that can be founded in this area, right, because suddenly the person’s decision-making process becomes very different, and they may arrive at a very different buying experience, right, yeah, there’s also There’s also a gap here between the users who came to me, because once they used to come from Google and I knew by how, by what level of intent or readiness they were coming, suddenly maybe they had a conversation about me. Maybe my product with the agent, like, over an hour, and you get to know much more, and I need to jump between very different experiences, right? Absolutely, because the agent is beautifully, extremely smart, and it has a memory agent.

Navot Volk: [23:26] And it can, it can ask you, you can talk to it about what you remember from last week I talked about jeans. There’s a 50% discount at Levi’s now, like, Kisha, because last week, right, you said she asked what, so like, there you go.

Eyal David: [23:44] Basically, in the field I’m going to become a bit of a basis for the experience, like, that exists today. I’m an ACIP, I enter you basically into the pipe, like, this whole event where I need to keep waiting all the time—I think about you, it’s probably going to change a lot.

How SaaS and UI could change in 2026

Navot Volk: [24:01] Very immediate, sharp answers tailored to me, yes, depends on the SaaS, but yes, I think a lot of the SaaS products as you know them today. Will be irrelevant in 26. I think all the SaaS like Salesforce is the father of SaaS. The question in Salesforce today is always how many shoes did we sell in 25; I think the question now will be how many shoes originated in 26. And all kinds of questions like, based on what you learned in 25, summarize 26, and also don’t show me all your events—I don’t need that; I asked a question, give me an answer. And if I want to dig deeper, I can dig deeper, but give me that whole interface—it’s not relevant. What we will definitely see in 26 is a lot more interfaces that are personally built. The reason today I also want to say one of the most complex things in the world is Excel; the reason Excel looks the way it does. It’s because it’s really hard for them to know what the user intent is, who the user is, what they want to do—if they knew who you are and what you want to do, Excel would look completely different.

Eyal David: [25:18] Exactly, so open up a lot of directions for me—I don’t want to slog through the conversation; you see companies around these areas. A thought-provoking point: how do you see the VC world now compared with 5 years ago. It will change too; that’s no secret. It also seems that your expectation is to receive companies that are much more ready, as you say.

The VC world after the 2021 years

Navot Volk: [25:44] It’s not that important; don’t you think it actually kind of came back before something about five years ago, that was a period. Of 20 21, with free money and not going crazy, which kind of messed up the world a bit, but but it’s over—if someone is still living in 21, good luck, no, that doesn’t happen anymore; I’ll take that, so okay, I’ll take a few things, one. I—I do hear about a lot of small teams that are moving fast and need less money, so that’s one thing that’s changing, but you know, like, if they need less money now but in the future they need the money, it doesn’t matter, like, I look at a company. I didn’t look here—things are needed at the start, I think like not every company in life needs the money to be built. The basic magic of VC is I buy for 10 shekels, sell for what—is the magic—and it won’t be used, like.

Eyal David: [26:37] On one hand, on the other hand, when you see companies like Veebee, like Base, and the action was taken from Veebee a year ago.

Navot Volk: [26:45] They were bought very quickly, so like investors may also be looking for that magic now, but that’s not it—there have always been startups that get bought quickly.

Eyal David: [26:54] But I don’t think there’s been such a concern like now, that Figma feels very threatened or.

Navot Volk: [27:00] Wix feel very threatened, so they buy the small player; they always feel threatened and hear the answer—there’s always something coming to kill their business, everything’s fine, that’s it. Take it, and disruption too—now you know, at first it happens faster and then it balances out, like I think we’ll see more of these kinds of application-level deals being acquired. But it’s not something I’m saying is the trend now—let’s wait, maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, like it’s still too early to mark it as something that’s happening.

Eyal David: [27:30] Interesting in 26, I actually think you’re very right—it seems to me it’s really heading in that direction.

Navot Volk: [27:35] Also that it will pour a lot more money into the industry; you wrote about that too in the trends you see, basically a reason for impact—it seems to me maybe it could be a big year of liquidity, with money from companies going to the public market or.

Eyal David: [27:51] To other interfaces, right? And then I think a lot will come in as a result of the burden year, a lot of money will enter the industry. And it also seems to me that really around opiensionsi a lot of money is going to come in; it has to come in.

Navot Volk: [28:04] It seems to me that a lot of these companies will also be founded, also bought; there’s also the fear basically among big companies that they’ll have—yes, but that always happens, I think, like the liquidity is something else; it means there are a lot of companies waiting. There are a lot of employees working at very, very successful companies who want to make money, and there’s a good chance they’ll make that money.

The tools Navot works with

Eyal David: [28:22] A little game on them; in the meantime, good luck. One second, what are you working with—GPT, Gemini, with what. What's your favorite.

Navot Volk: [28:33] Very good for the task. Perfection for research. GPT for writing every sentence I say for every communication is over why GPT edit it for me and GPT it. Every text I’ll be this this this naturally I don’t even. Gemini isn’t for playing, really, but the game between these three tools.

Eyal David: [28:57] Let me go back for a second to why it’s an interesting product around this, because in a world where ChatGPT can do almost everything, that’s how I feel. So what what remains to make it a truly good product, what would you be looking for?

What AI still can't do

Navot Volk: [29:11] I think it doesn’t know how to do anything; I think all it knows how to do is write. I think that every time there’s something that What they do is take the whole world and turn it into language and text. And that’s a nice theory, but in practice it doesn’t really work because not the whole world is language. And suddenly in computer science tasks, with a calculator, it falls short, it fails. I mean, I locked it into my home automation program; I asked it how many outlets there are. First, so don’t give me a different number of outlets now, because it’s not language, it’s a computer, it needs to count. Those things it doesn’t fail on. And that’s exactly the point of their weak spot, that it doesn’t remind me in those moments of a real computer, it’s not in that direction. If you tell it. It also has hallucinations; it invents features it knows how to do. I asked it, “How are you doing?” What is it, to do for you some sound lines? It said yes, I don’t know. You know, I’ll ask it... in my own words, I asked it. My kids ordered pizza; can it say that this is a reasonable price for pizza? It tells me yes, that’s a price, it’s a bit high. Then I asked, do you want to do a price calculation for a pizza? I said yes. Where did it bring me dollar prices for something completely different, like it keeps suggesting things it doesn’t know how to do.

Eyal David: [30:43] Yes, but we’re planning products here, right? We’re planning products here for the coming years, for that matter. In the end, probably it’ll be solved.

Navot Volk: [30:50] It has to be solved, especially—I’m not an outsider; this will be solved by them. We’ll discover; we keep discovering what Gem can do. It knows how to write really, really well, really, really beautifully, knows how to please you very, very nicely. Lots of things Gem can do amazingly. So take us to tech companies and code—what do you think about that, listen.

AI, coding and what it means for juniors

Eyal David: [31:10] How well it does it; how do you see that going forward? I mean, there’s some shift happening if I put two archives. There’s a very big shift toward let’s write as much code as possible and deliver as much code as possible with AI.

Navot Volk: [31:23] So I think it’s something like this, and it’s true not only for code; it’s also true for books, articles about atomic energy. When you’re a professional and you understand the field and you’re an expert in the field, then then it’s prompts and it does amazing things. And if you don’t understand it and you ask it to help you, then it does nonsense. This week I started playing with Claude Code. I even put some water of how I felt. I felt like a chimpanzee that gets fed so it can pee next to me; I do things, it writes code for me, and then I run it, it runs, but it’s not software.

Eyal David: [32:07] It’s a prototype in the best case. So what do you think will happen in ’26? All these companies ran very, very hard, everyone, and me too.

Navot Volk: [32:17] I think it’ll continue in the same direction, that it’s superpowers—you understand what you’re doing, and if you don’t understand, then

Eyal David: [32:23] you, through assistance, there’ll actually be some kind of shifting back, back to writing code, back to testing code, not continuing like this. Today senior developers

Navot Volk: [32:37] use Cursor, but it gives them super amazing, and it’s nothing, and it doesn’t make me a programmer. So I ask you a different question: what future do you currently see for juniors in these fields?

Eyal David: [32:48] Very tough. What do you recommend to them?

Navot Volk: [32:51] Not your role, but still, I think the only chance for a junior to find a job is to be in practical open source, to volunteer, to learn to do as many practical things that reach production as possible, and only after some period of work. I think it’s very, very, very hard to be a junior right now, and I don’t see that getting solved in the coming years.

Eyal David: [33:15] Basically, as much product-side as possible, completely. And in your opinion, what are the most important product skills today in product people?

Product Sense and product people

Navot Volk: [33:25] I think it’s always the same, product sense is a task, it’s... I always have a regular argument with myself about whether this is something that can be learned. Either it's something you have as a skill or you don't; I still don't know. But product sense, meaning understanding why they made things, why things are built the way they are. And you know, I can give you an example. I interviewed a product person, and whenever I ask, as a product person, tell me a classic question: tell me about a product you like and why you like it. And some guy, a product person, told me, listen, the product I like most is my grill, my barbecue. And he said to me, how do you improve it? So listen, it has one problem: when I prepare the meat, there’s nowhere to put the finished meat so it stays warm. So I built, I built some kind of barbecue shelf, I put it there, and it works. I mean, the person knows the product and he knows. He knows what the problem is, he knows what it’s good at, he knows what the issue is, he solved the problem. Too bad the barbecue company didn’t hire him and get in on the action.

Eyal David: [34:34] Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m a little hungry. Tell me, if you look two years ahead, really, what do you think? We talked about product, we talked a bit about development; in your view, in companies— In general, tech companies, what do you think are the three, I saw they asked you this also in interview questions, we’ll put a link to that too—what do you think are the three roles that will be most important in the next five years?

Navot Volk: [34:58] I think product is not going anywhere. I think it will do the levers, I mean, I don’t see any change. There are still exits, I have the product of, there are still exits that people are building the product.

Eyal David: [35:19] Tell me, and in a world that is expected, and probably possible, to deliver 2x faster— Do we need more product people or the same amount?

Navot Volk: [35:28] The amount there is, there’s some need for more, and in your opinion, is the craft the same or does it change, because it changes all the time; it’s not like what it was when I started 20 years ago, and it changes all the time, that— That’s true; your industry is in an industry of constant change, and if you don’t change, you know. There’s a line from the rapper Nes that I really, really like: “Slippy,” it opens like that.

Eyal David: [35:55] Like, and that’s the situation, and what do you think about this whole thing now of developers becoming product managers—everyone is a product manager.

Navot Volk: [36:07] It doesn’t work; developers don’t know how to be product managers because they do. It’s great to make things in a prototype and show that something works, but there is prototype work and there’s also research. There’s an understanding of the users; it’s not just “draw me a screen,” and then draw some screen in purple. That’s the whole point—there’s work here; I mean, you know, everyone is builders today. But it will balance out, forget it, the hype will end.

Will everything really be conversational?

Eyal David: [36:38] We talked, like, about LLMs, and I’m kind of tying that to product work—basically everyone says there’s a shift, that everything won’t be conversational.

Navot Volk: [36:50] People need a button. I did say that the UI became adaptive, that you and I won’t get the same UI, but there’s a good reason why there is UI. UI helps us understand what needs to be done. People don’t remember, but we started with DOS—it was a black screen with a cursor; type in what you want to do. The simplest, yes, exactly: we moved to Windows and Mac, and still people need—

Eyal David: [37:26] A screen to explain to me what needs to be done, what am I doing here, because there are experiences you can’t manage in a conversation. Most experiences can be managed in a conversation.

Navot Volk: [37:37] If I want, because a lot of times I don’t even know what I can do.

Eyal David: [37:43] Saying, tell me what I am—what, what, what are my options? So here’s an example of several like that I’m thinking of as I go. If I’m connecting to my bank, I don’t—I want to see an interface, I don’t want to talk to anyone, and certainly not to them; I want to see the status and what’s going on.

Navot Volk: [37:58] In everything, in every dashboard, any information is easier to consume visually than to mess around and do things. Knowing everything I don’t know, small app—there’s almost, there’s an app where I can say, forget it. Bring it in text, organize it only in text—not not something that exists here, interesting, you see a lot, a lot.

Eyal David: [38:27] Products that are not— that are not traditional industries, right, after place everything. Say it roundabout, I keep coming back to this because I really think that, and we’ll wrap up the episode. If now you had to recommend to those juniors we talked about, or to more founders, or someone who wants to know what areas are most worth getting into right now in your opinion.

Where it's worth building now

Navot Volk: [38:51] Products. We talked about Shopify, by the way; you asked products of what. Let’s think about it as cash cow, forget it, even something for a valuation fail. Dexit, because I think the rule for making money is: the closer you are to money, the higher the chance of making money. Shopify is close to money; it’s very easy to show love, positive. I’m starting from money, it’s harder to sell more money sectors; build some plugin for Shopify. A store that sells vibrantles, cashka, and DI seems like basically I know, and people live like that nicely.

Eyal David: [39:27] That’s it, that’s interesting. I thought about it a bit just now when we were talking about it at The Stevious’s house; I’m curious how hard.

Navot Volk: [39:33] How hard it is to get in, I don’t know how crowded it is, interesting, I don’t know, I mean if they do it like that, great, I don’t know.

Eyal David: [39:40] Didn’t get into it before, and if you thought, I challenge you if you thought of something that. It could also be invisible at some point, so it’s not cashka, it’s a different business.

Navot Volk: [39:52] Less that it starts like that, no no, it’s a completely different business, as a business, I mean. I want to understand how you disrupt something big; I need to understand how it can be something worth a billion dollars. Cashka, give me, build me an app that lets you add handwritten annotations. For Shopify they’re doing it now for returns, interesting.

Wrap-up

Eyal David: [40:20] Cool, well, it was an interesting episode. This seems like an unusual episode too; I did a lot of questions, so it was less of a conversation and more. I’m curious what you wish for yourself in a year.

Navot Volk: [40:38] You know, health, what else, I don’t have, I’m a modest person, so yeah, that everything important to me will be healthy and that it’ll be interesting—what more do you need in life.

Eyal David: [40:52] Normality, wait, that seems right. Wonderful, well, Navot, thank you very much. Gladly, it was fun, come every day, come on, bye-bye, bye-bye, friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe and follow us, of course, for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other app. Of course, if you didn’t find us on some app, I’d be happy if you wrote to us; we’d be very happy with five stars on any platform and for you to follow us so that more listeners can be exposed to us and find the podcast. You can also find the previous episodes on any app or on the YouTube channel; we have links in the description, so until next time, come on, be efficient, and bye-bye.