Silicon Valley uses “wartime CEO” to describe a leadership model for tough times. This makes sense. Startups are hard enough on a good day. Running your startup during a time of crisis, pandemic, or downturn can feel like a battle.
But in Israel, it’s literal. Throughout the last 6 months of war, Israel’s founders of startups at every stage have not just led; they’ve done so under circumstances most can scarcely imagine.
These are the real Wartime CEOs – and the leadership lessons we are about to share have been forged in fire.
We’ve said before that a CEO’s psychology is the greatest point of leverage in any company’s success or failure.
That’s why it is my aim that every founder, everywhere, can use the 9 leadership principles of The Wartime CEO to become even stronger leaders. In good times and in bad. Without going through actual war to learn it. Use these approaches every day, and make sure to keep using them in the hardest days when you face a real crisis – be it in your company, your industry, or the entire economy.
To build the leadership principles in this essay, we interviewed nearly a dozen CEOs of Israel’s top multi billion-dollar companies. Their insights reveal not just strategies for business resilience, but also lessons in team unity, personal fortitude, and the relentless pursuit of belonging.
Thank you to the following CEOs: Avishai Abrahami at Wix, Oz Alon at Honeybook, Chen Amit at Tipalti, Tomer Bar-Zeev at Unity, Yoni Assia at eToro, Oriel Bachar at Papaya Gaming, Liron Damri at Forter, Shimon Elkabetz at Tomorrow.io, Zeev Farbman at Lightricks, Eynat Guez at Papaya Global and Shlomo Kramer at Cato Networks.
We at NFX have announced a new program called Restart Startup Nation: FAST. It is an ultra-fast emergency investment track to support early-stage Israeli startups, primarily in artificial intelligence and biotech.
The last year has taken a toll on Israel’s startup economy – judicial reform politics, a global slowdown, then war – all of which caused a slowdown in new companies and funding. But Startup Nation is a country of resilient entrepreneurs like the leaders profiled in this essay, and they are still building during tough times. That’s we’re offering the FAST opportunity to kickstart their efforts. Israel’s next generation of founders: apply here.
One of the biggest differences you can observe about top leaders is that they care deeply – about the company, about their product, about their customers, and most of all about the people on their team.
“Every company claims it cares for its people, but war really puts it to the test,” says Zeev Farbman, Lightricks CEO. “Perks and team fun days during the good times are one thing; caring for those fighting and for their families is something completely different.”
For Wartime CEOs in Israel, their employees have been literally battling matters of life and death. Also at every company there were a number of employees called up for reserve duty, meaning they could not work for long stretches at a time. For Oriel Bachar, CEO at NFX-backed Papaya Gaming (nb: different from Papaya Global) this meant imbalances and bottlenecks in organic and squad teams, along with high stress, low energy levels, and people on edge. For Farbman at Lightricks, dozens of employees were called to reserves, which meant he had to redistribute the workload among fewer people, sometimes with only one-third of the team undrafted and available.
The new norm became more work, fewer people, and unimaginable stress across the board. And yet every single one of our Wartime CEOs prioritized their people.
From the very beginning of the war, Liron Damri at Forter realized they needed to fundamentally redefine their Maslow’s Pyramid: “The sense of personal security both physically and mentally are the very first things we must take care of. It meant that we provided maximum flexibility for our employees so they could put their and their loved one’s personal safety first. We have allowed people to work from home, supported reservists and their loved ones, and allowed the teams to volunteer in war rooms and support centers.”
Shimon Elkabetz, CEO of Tomorrow.io agrees: “Put your people in the center. If your team is strong and resilient, your business has higher chances of going through this. Also, people will remember that in crisis time, the company was a source of stability and sanity for them.
