The Autonomous Business

Mark Pincus Built Zynga on One Rule. AI Founders Are Breaking It. | Mark Pincus (Zynga)

Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, which went from a poker app on Facebook to a $12.7 billion acquisition by Take-Two Interactive. His new book, Life at the Speed of Play, introduces the Proven Better New framework: kill your ego, copy what works, and innovate only the core. In this episode, Pincus explains why AI has made the MVP trap worse, not better. He shares the "failure machine" concept he still hasn't seen anyone build, the white tiger story that turned a Friday night into a hundred thousand dollars, his Sunday Morning Joy ritual, and why he believes AI will make founders work more, not less. He also describes the two Zynga decisions he would reverse today, why public company founders need a wartime board, a thirty-two-year journaling practice called the Book of Life, and why he pulled the plug on a four-year project the moment AI-native startups started doing it better. Guest: Mark Pincus Host: Mickey Haslavsky, Founder and CEO of enso The Autonomous Business Podcast is a joint production of enso and Forbes Israel. Links: Life at the Speed of Play: https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com/ [https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com/] Mark Pincus on X: https://x.com/markpincus [https://x.com/markpincus] enso: https://enso.bot [https://enso.bot] Podcast page: https://www.enso.bot/podcast [https://www.enso.bot/enso-podcast]

Engineers Are Losing Power to Creatives | Ariel Klikstein & Barak Friedman (Elementor / Sticklight)

Ariel Klikstein co-founded Elementor, the visual builder behind 20 million websites and 13% of the top internet. Barak Friedman leads marketing at Sticklight, Elementor's full-stack creation platform for professionals. Ten years in, vibe coding lets anyone build a website by talking to an AI. So what happens to the people who built careers doing exactly that? In this conversation, Klikstein admits he's "one of the late bloomers in vibe coding," explains how he rebuilt his entire workflow around AI (from Cursor to Gemini to Claude), and describes why Sticklight was born from the same DNA as Elementor itself: freeing people from code. Friedman breaks down how smaller teams with broader skillsets are replacing large specialized departments, and how his own marketing team discovered enso through an AI agent running SEO research. Mickey Haslavsky names the shift: the "era of soul." When AI can generate 200,000 songs a day and build a landing page in minutes, the only thing left is taste, vision, and the human touch on top. Both guests agree. Klikstein puts it plainly: "Suddenly the power goes to creative people. People who aren't necessarily engineers. That's the change." The Autonomous Business Podcast, hosted by Mickey Haslavsky (enso), in partnership with Forbes Israel.

When Cybersecurity Becomes an AI Agent's Job - Marina Segal

Cybersecurity solved detection. It did not solve speed. Marina Segal, co-founder and CEO of Tamnoon.io [http://Tamnoon.io], explains why your biggest security risk is not finding the vulnerability. It is the 30+ days it takes to fix it. She breaks down how agentic remediation works, why security is following the self-driving car trajectory, and what every business leader (not just CISOs) needs to understand about protecting their organization in the AI era. From The Autonomous Business Podcast, hosted by Mickey Haslavsky. In partnership with Forbes Israel. Learn more about enso: https://www.enso.bot [https://www.enso.bot]

The Work Force Just Got an Upgrade - Eynat Guez

Eynat Guez is the Co-Founder and CEO of Papaya Global, the leading enterprise platform for global workforce management and payments across 160+ countries. She is the first and only woman in Israel to lead an Israeli-founded startup to a valuation exceeding $1 billion. In this episode, Eynat breaks down what happens when AI agents become an official part of the workforce: who pays the taxes, who keeps their job, and why "use AI" is a slogan, not a strategy. She shares how Papaya is building toward a 2030 vision where humans and agents are managed on the same platform, and why every CEO starting a company today needs to decide which roles belong to people and which belong to agents. 📖 Read the full Forbes Israel article: https://forbes.co.il/e/if-you-cant-generate-roi-youre-an-agent-eynat-guez-on-the-new-rules-of-work/ [https://forbes.co.il/e/if-you-cant-generate-roi-youre-an-agent-eynat-guez-on-the-new-rules-of-work/] Subscribe: https://www.enso.bot/enso-podcast [https://www.enso.bot/enso-podcast]

Your Next Favorite Song Might Not Be Human - Gadi Gidor

120,000 new songs hit streaming platforms every day. Half of them are AI-generated. A quarter billion songs are already out there, and 75% of them never reach 1,000 streams. Gadi Gidor, one of Israel's most influential music executives, has spent 25 years building the careers of artists like Eli Botner, Ran Danker, Idan Raichel, and Noam Kleinstein. In this episode of The Autonomous Business, he sits down with Mickey Haslavsky to break down what AI is really doing to the music industry, and who comes out on top. What we cover: 00:00 Why the music industry will never look the same 00:00 120,000 songs a day and nobody's listening 00:00 The album is dead. What replaced it? 00:00 The Lean Startup model arrives in music 00:00 Why 5,000 superfans are worth more than a million streams 00:00 How virality really works: TikTok first, Spotify second 00:00 AI as a creative partner, not a replacement 00:00 The future: will we even need human artists? Gadi Gidor is a music executive, producer, and artist manager who has shaped some of the most important careers in Israeli music over the past two decades. Mickey Haslavsky is CEO and Co-Founder of enso, an infrastructure platform for autonomous businesses, and host of The Autonomous Business podcast. Previously, Mickey founded Rapid, which was acquired by Nokia.