From EPFL Student to Mentoring at University of California, Berkeley

Sitting in a Berkeley classroom as a 𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗿 felt oddly familiar.

Not that long ago, I was a student at EPFL in Switzerland, obsessing over systems, models, and the future of software.

Last week, I was mentoring founders at University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.

The questions weren’t about which LLM to use. They were about business.

“Who actually pays for this?” “Is this a real moat?” “How do you acquire your first customer?”

I shared what I’m seeing in the market:

The software isn’t the moat. Distribution and owning the outcome are.

We talked about the rise of agencies, like 14.ai. Not just selling software, but delivering the result end-to-end.

Tool → workflow → outcome.

That’s the shift we made.

In AI, customers don’t want another dashboard. They want the problem solved.

And honestly, it’s exciting to see how sharp this new wave of builders already is.

Thank you again Omri Even-Tov for the invitation. I’ll be following the students’ progress with great interest.