Building People Before Building Products - A conversation with Uri Poliavich
Journalist: You have built technology businesses, led engineering teams and invested in innovative companies. Yet your story began very far from the technology world. When you look back today, what part of your early life do you think shaped you most?
Uri Poliavich: When I look back, I don't think about a single defining event. What I remember is an environment.
I grew up in what was then the Soviet Union, and it was an environment where very little felt guaranteed. As a child, you don't analyse these things politically or economically. You simply absorb the atmosphere around you. Looking back, I think what stayed with me was an awareness that opportunities are not permanent and that circumstances can change much faster than people expect.
That lesson probably influenced me more than I realised at the time. Later, when I entered business, I found myself relatively comfortable with uncertainty. Entrepreneurship requires a willingness to move before all the answers are available, and perhaps that comes partly from those early experiences.
The other thing that stayed with me was curiosity. I was always interested in understanding why some people seemed capable of changing the course of their lives while others remained trapped by circumstances. Years later, I realised I was asking exactly the same question in business. Why do some teams succeed while others fail? Why do some organisations create opportunities while others destroy them? In a sense, I have been exploring different versions of the same question ever since.
Journalist: You later moved to Israel, which is often described as one of the world's most entrepreneurial societies. How much did that experience influence your ambitions?
Uri Poliavich: Enormously.
Moving to Israel was not simply a change of country. It was a change of mindset. Suddenly I found myself in an environment where initiative was almost expected. People were encouraged to solve problems rather than wait for somebody else to solve them. There was a strong culture of responsibility and action, and I found that very inspiring.
One thing I noticed quite early was that people were not particularly intimidated by failure. In many places, failure carries a social stigma. In Israel, especially in the technology and business communities, people tend to see failure as part of the learning process. That creates a very different attitude toward risk.
I think that environment helped me understand that entrepreneurship is not really about taking risks for the sake of taking risks. It is about being willing to act despite uncertainty. Those are two very different things.
It also taught me something about ambition. Ambition is often misunderstood as a desire for status or recognition. The most successful entrepreneurs I have met were rarely motivated by those things. They were motivated by the desire to build something meaningful. Israel introduced me to many people with exactly that mentality, and it influenced me deeply.
Looking back, I think the move broadened my understanding of what was possible. It encouraged me to think less about limitations and more about opportunities. That was a very important shift.
Journalist: Your first formal education was in law rather than technology. Looking back, how much of that legal training still influences the way you think today?
Uri Poliavich: Much more than people might imagine.
When I was studying law, I certainly did not think I was preparing myself to manage engineers or build technology companies. At the time those worlds seemed completely separate. Yet over the years I discovered that they share many similarities.
Law is ultimately about understanding systems. It is about understanding how incentives work, how decisions create consequences and how complex structures function over time. Technology companies are not very different in that respect. They are also systems, although the components happen to be people, products, markets and organisations rather than legal institutions.
Legal training also teaches discipline. It teaches you to examine assumptions, distinguish facts from opinions and think carefully about consequences. Those habits proved extremely valuable later in business.
One thing I learned quite early is that leadership is often less about having the right answer than about asking the right questions. Legal education encourages exactly that way of thinking. Before reaching a conclusion, you learn to examine multiple perspectives, identify risks and understand unintended consequences.
I have often found that technology leaders become so focused on innovation that they underestimate structure. Yet structure is what allows innovation to survive. The most successful organisations are usually those that combine creativity with discipline, vision with execution and ambition with responsibility.
In that sense, my legal education has remained surprisingly relevant throughout my career.
Journalist: You have spent much of your career building technology organisations. What is the most underestimated aspect of leadership in technology?
Uri Poliavich: Without question, people.
Technology attracts attention because of products. We talk about software, artificial intelligence, platforms and innovation. What receives much less attention is the human challenge behind all of those things.
Over the years I have become increasingly convinced that building organisations is far more difficult than building products. A product follows logic. People are more complicated. They have ambitions, fears, strengths, weaknesses and very different ways of seeing the world.
One lesson I learned relatively early is that talented people rarely need motivation. What they need is direction. They want clarity. They want to understand why their work matters. They want to know that the organisation is moving toward something meaningful.
This is particularly true in technology. Strong engineers are usually not impressed by hierarchy. They are impressed by competence. They want leaders who can explain decisions, not simply announce them.
Peter Drucker famously observed that knowledge workers would become the defining resource of modern organisations. I think we are now living through exactly that reality. In a knowledge economy, leadership becomes less about control and more about creating conditions in which talented people can perform at their highest level.
That sounds straightforward, but in practice it is extraordinarily difficult. It requires trust, communication, discipline and a great deal of patience.
The longer I have worked in technology, the more convinced I have become that leadership is fundamentally about people. Everything else follows from that.
Journalist: Many people assume that building a successful technology company is primarily about products. Why do so many technically brilliant teams fail?
Uri Poliavich: Because intelligence and organisation are not the same thing.
Throughout my career I have encountered exceptionally talented people working on projects that ultimately failed. At first this seemed surprising. How could teams with so much intelligence struggle to succeed?
Over time I realised that technical brilliance is only one component of success.
A successful organisation requires alignment. It requires trust. It requires communication. It requires leadership. Most importantly, it requires a shared understanding of what problem the team is actually trying to solve.
One of the dangers highly intelligent teams sometimes face is that they become fascinated by complexity. They fall in love with elegant solutions, sophisticated architectures and technically impressive ideas. None of those things are inherently bad. The problem arises when they lose sight of the customer.
Clayton Christensen spent much of his career explaining that markets reward usefulness rather than technical sophistication alone. I think that remains one of the most important lessons in business.
The strongest teams I have worked with never assumed that intelligence guaranteed success. They remained curious. They listened carefully. They were willing to challenge their own assumptions.
In many ways, a technology company resembles an orchestra. Exceptional musicians are necessary, but exceptional musicians alone do not create exceptional music. What matters is whether they can perform together.
The same principle applies to organisations.
Journalist: You have spent years recruiting and managing engineers. What have those experiences taught you about technical talent?
Uri Poliavich: They have taught me that the best engineers are rarely defined by technical ability alone.
Technical ability is obviously important, but many people possess technical ability. What separates exceptional engineers is often something else entirely. It is curiosity. It is discipline. It is intellectual honesty.
One characteristic I have always admired is the ability to explain complexity clearly. Truly strong engineers do not hide behind technical language. They understand difficult concepts so thoroughly that they can make them understandable to others.
Another lesson is that exceptional engineers usually care deeply about purpose. There is a stereotype that engineers are interested only in technology. In my experience, that is not true. The best engineers want to understand why something is being built and what impact it will have.
That is why leadership matters so much. Talented people want context. They want to feel connected to a larger mission.
I have also learned that recruitment is often misunderstood. Many organisations hire primarily based on credentials. Credentials matter, but they are not everything. Some of the most impressive people I have worked with did not necessarily have the most impressive résumés. What they possessed was curiosity, resilience and a relentless desire to learn.
Those qualities are often far more valuable over the long term.
Journalist: Is leading engineers fundamentally different from leading other kinds of professionals?
Uri Poliavich: Yes and no.
The basic principles of leadership remain the same. People want clarity, fairness, competence and trust regardless of their profession.
Where engineers are somewhat different is in their relationship with logic. Engineers are trained to think systematically. They tend to question assumptions. They want to understand how decisions are reached.
For a leader, this creates both opportunities and challenges.
The opportunity is that engineers often improve the quality of decision-making because they ask difficult questions. The challenge is that they are rarely persuaded by authority alone.
I have always found that engineers respond best when they are treated as partners in solving a problem rather than simply executors of a decision.
In that sense, leadership becomes an exercise in credibility. You need to explain the reasoning behind decisions. You need to provide context. You need to create an environment where intelligent disagreement is possible.
Some of the strongest organisations I have seen were not organisations where everyone agreed. They were organisations where people could challenge one another constructively while remaining committed to a common objective.
That balance is difficult to achieve, but it is incredibly valuable when it exists.
Journalist: Over the years you have also invested in technology ventures and supported entrepreneurial projects. How does your experience as an operator influence the way you evaluate founders?
Uri Poliavich: It influences almost everything.
When you have spent years building organisations yourself, it becomes difficult to evaluate a company purely through financial metrics or presentation slides. You automatically start imagining the reality behind the presentation.
You think about hiring. You think about culture. You think about execution. You think about how the team behaves when things become difficult.
One of the biggest advantages operators have as investors is that they understand how messy reality can be. Every business looks coherent in hindsight. Very few businesses feel coherent while they are being built.
That is why I tend to focus heavily on people. Products evolve. Markets change. Strategies adapt. Teams endure.
When evaluating founders, I often find myself asking a simple question: would I trust these people during a difficult period? Success is easy to manage. The real test comes when growth slows, competition increases or assumptions prove wrong.
Those moments reveal character.
In my experience, character is often a better predictor of long-term success than any spreadsheet.
Journalist: What qualities separate exceptional founders from average founders?
Uri Poliavich: The first quality is the ability to attract talented people.
Many founders assume their primary responsibility is developing a product. I think their primary responsibility is building a team. Products are ultimately created by organisations, and organisations are created by people.
The second quality is intellectual flexibility. Exceptional founders possess conviction, but they are not prisoners of their own ideas. They can change tactics without abandoning their mission.
The third quality is resilience.
Business literature often romanticises entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship can be extraordinarily demanding. There are periods of uncertainty, disappointment and pressure that never appear in public narratives. Exceptional founders are able to continue moving forward during those periods.
I also admire founders who remain curious. Curiosity keeps people learning. The moment a founder believes they already understand everything, growth usually begins to slow.
Finally, exceptional founders understand responsibility. They recognise that companies affect employees, customers, partners and communities. They understand that leadership is not merely an opportunity. It is also an obligation.
That perspective becomes increasingly important as organisations grow.
Journalist: Looking back over your own journey, what advice would you give to the next generation of entrepreneurs and technology leaders?
Uri Poliavich: The first piece of advice would be to invest in people.
We live in a period where technology receives enormous attention, and understandably so. Technology is transforming industries, economies and daily life. Yet behind every important technological breakthrough are people. Teams create products. Organisations create teams. Leadership shapes organisations.
Never lose sight of that reality.
The second piece of advice would be to remain curious. The world changes too quickly for certainty. Curiosity allows people to keep learning, adapting and improving.
The third would be to study broadly. Technology matters, but so do history, economics, psychology and law. Many of the challenges leaders face are ultimately human rather than technical.
Finally, I would encourage young leaders to think carefully about what they are building and why they are building it.
Success is often measured through valuation, revenue or growth. Those metrics matter, but they are not the whole story. Over time, what matters most is whether you have created something valuable, whether you have helped talented people succeed and whether you have left behind organisations that continue to create opportunities for others.
Looking back, those are the achievements I have come to value most.
Uri Poliavich is a technology entrepreneur, investor and builder of engineering organisations. Over the past two decades, he has founded and scaled technology businesses, led large technical teams and invested in innovation-driven ventures. His work focuses on leadership, organisational design and the role of technology in shaping modern economies.
