AI Infrastructure Is Eating Its Own Ecosystem
Daniel Zahavi argues AI has broken the relationship that made the mobile and cloud revolutions so successful. Founders who ignore the shift may not survive it.
Daniel Zahavi was born in Kermanshah, Iran, in 1985. It was the same year the Iran-Iraq war was grinding through its fifth year. He left at 15, arrived in Israel with his family, joined a gifted students programme, made it to the Technion, and eventually earned a doctorate in information theory.
Along the way, he held some of the highest security clearances in the IDF, worked on projects touching the Prime Minister’s Office, built drone interception systems and offensive cyber capabilities, and then sold his first company. Its technology now runs across the United States.
Survival, in other words, is not an abstract concept for him. And when he talks about what it takes for an AI startup to survive the current moment, it carries a weight that most founders pitching in Palo Alto conference rooms can’t quite replicate.
I sat down with Zahavi recently to talk about his new company, Arito, which is building AI analytics tools for finance and revenue teams. But the conversation kept pulling toward something bigger: a structural argument about why this technology wave is different from everything that came before it and why the rules that kept software companies alive through the mobile and cloud eras may not protect them now.
