From our AI Founders Masterclass series featuring Ori Eldarov, founder and CEO of Offdeal
Most founders treat AI as a productivity tool. Ori Eldarov treats it as a business model. Offdeal, the AI-powered investment bank Ori founded after years advising on more than $20 billion in Wall Street deals, runs a $10M business with just 13 people. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a deliberate architectural choice. AI isn’t layered on top of how Offdeal operates. It’s baked into how the company was designed from day one.
The Question That Changes Everything
Ori’s framework starts with a simple reframe: stop asking what AI can automate, and start asking what you would do if you had no time or labor constraints. That shift in thinking is where the real leverage lives.
For every blocker his team faces, Ori asks one question: can AI do this? That single habit, practiced consistently across a small team, is how Offdeal stays lean, moves fast, and competes with firms many times its size.
Context Beats Intelligence
One of Ori’s most counterintuitive insights is that the model matters less than most founders think. Context is the real variable. Feeding an AI system rich, relevant context consistently outperforms chasing the latest and most powerful model. This reframe has practical implications for how Offdeal builds workflows, chooses tools, and trains its team.
He also makes the case for voice as the most underused productivity unlock available to founders today — a low-friction way to add context, capture thinking, and move faster without adding headcount.
Building a Stack That AI Can Actually Use
Ori’s approach to tooling has also shifted. Choosing software based on UI and reviews alone is outdated. The new question is whether an AI agent can interact with it. Offdeal builds its stack with that in mind from day one, a small but meaningful decision that compounds over time.
This conversation was recorded as part of our October AI Founders Masterclass series, before agentic workflows had really entered the mainstream conversation. But that’s actually what makes it worth your time. Technology has moved fast. The startup building principles Ori shares in this episode haven’t. If you’re building with agents now, this is the mindset layer that makes them work.
This post is based on insights from Radical Talks, a podcast from Radical Ventures exploring innovation at the forefront of AI. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.