Most startups pivot. That’s not new, even if it’s far more common than people realize. What is new—especially in AI—is how soon that pivot has to happen.

In the past, founders might spend years chasing a thesis before making a major turn. Today, that window is shrinking. Companies are scaling faster, and doing more with less. Many breakout AI companies have pivoted to their current idea, and reached unicorn valuations between 3-4 years after founding.

This is just the new market rhythm. Speed is no longer a preference; it’s an essential part of the playbook. The worst thing you can do is waste your life energy on a product that kind of works. You need to be looking for something that really works.

We’ve noticed this trend across geographies, but our Israeli teams seem to have adapted to this environment exceptionally well. Born from leaner capital environments, faster feedback loops, and the high-stakes urgency of IDF training, they’ve turned what others view as painful course corrections into a core operating system.

We want to share that operating system with the rest of the founder community.

The Time-to-Pivot Is Compressing

There is this perception that pivoting is a big deal. That it requires lots of time, energy and thought. This has never really been true and pivots are far more common than people think. AI destroys this myth once and for all.

You can’t afford to waste months on an idea that isn’t really working, because there are ideas that are taking off like crazy. Historically, the time to unicorn valuation in tech was about 7-9 years. In today’s AI environment, the median is 3-4 years. That means you need to be showing signs of both category-leading growth and user retention earlier than ever.

Many companies truly are building great things and reaching growth metrics that indicate a new normal. Some aren’t and are trying to fake their way there. That dynamic just tells us the pressure is on for everyone.

That compressed timeline reframes the startup journey. There is more competition and less time. You either feel the traction or you don’t. And if you don’t you go out and find it in weeks, not months.

The new pivot window is between 6-12 months after founding, or faster – if you’re not seeing meaningful traction. Academic research has shown that early, purposeful pivots tend to increase startup survival, but AI has only intensified this dynamic

You want to build the real thing. To really feel that traction that proves your customers love your product. (Ideas on what that looks like here). The first step is the psychological awareness that you can’t afford to be precious about your original idea. You have to be relentlessly honest about what’s working, and what is kind of working.

A Pivot is Not a Failure, it is the State of Play

How do you prepare your mind for this new market rhythm?

Think about raising your seed round as buying a bank of attempts at product market fit. The best founders we work with see pivots not as failure but as strategic loops, repeated over and over as the terrain shifts beneath them.

The unsaid implication here is that a pivot is not failure. But many perfectionist founders implicitly understand it as such.

You create a lot of psychological baggage by tying change to failure. Some founders are so married to their original idea that they don’t really hear their customer feedback (they double down, assuming the customer “doesn’t get it” … often a red flag). Others know they’re wrong, but are too afraid to admit it, because pivoting can be operationally cumbersome. It requires founder humility, team buy-in, going to your board and saying: we are changing our direction…it’s a lot of moving pieces.

But this is normal, and always has been. Approximately one in every three B2B startups and one in every five consumer startups pivots during their lifetime. But today you just have to make the call faster. The results speak for themselves, and pivot stories always emerge later on, when everyone is happy with the outcome. Most recently, Windsurf pivoted three times en route to PMF – cannibalizing their own revenue in the process.

The best founders either don’t buy into this ego-trip, or remain totally unaware of it. It’s an underrated superpower.

As we’ve written before, it’s just as hard to build a mediocre company as it is to build a great one. You have to have the humility to realize when you’re on the path to mediocrity and have courage to change it.

How Israeli Founders Have Operationalized the Pivot Mindset

In Israel, the concept of a quick change is far more normalized. Part of it comes down to the market environment—Israeli startups operate in a smaller local economy, often with leaner teams and earlier global ambitions. There’s little room for delusion. If something isn’t working, it becomes clear fast. But even more than structural forces, what really sets Israeli founders apart is a deeply ingrained mindset shaped early in life.

The foundation is laid in the Israel Defense Forces, where many future founders spend their early twenties in elite units like Unit 8200 or Matzov. These are high-stakes environments where 20-year-olds are expected to make real-time decisions under pressure.

You’re taught to improvise, adapt, and overcome. And more importantly, you’re taught that changing course isn’t a failure. It’s what keeps the mission alive.

That mindset transfers directly into startup building. Israeli founders aren’t precious about their original ideas. They don’t spiral into ego or indecision when something needs to change.

As I was writing this, I was reminded of a friend of NFX Adam Singolda, the founder and CEO of Tablooa. (Adam spent seven years in Matzov, Israel’s elite military technology unit, so he has the pivot mindset in his bones.) Taboola has reached a $1.1B market cap, with $1M in revenue flowing in every four hours. But it didn’t start there.

Taboola is a pivot story. Taboola began as a video recommendation engine. In 2012, Adam was celebrating $100k in monthly revenue, calling his mom in excitement about what seemed like “a crazy amount of money.” Just two years later, they hit $200M by completely changing tactics. They pivoted from a video recommendation engine to a company focused on recommendations of all types, on publishers, mobile devices and more. Most recently, after pioneering in the native advertising space for more than a decade and driving success for advertisers, primarily in “bottom of article” placements, Taboola has extended far beyond this legacy as a performance advertising engine.

That’s the kind of acceleration that only happens when founders aren’t precious about their original thesis.

When Adam told his team about their latest evolution, he framed it this way:

“I consider this our ‘Amazon moment.’ Just as Amazon started with books and grew to redefine all of commerce native advertising ‘was our books’. Now, we’re taking everything we’ve learned and applying it to this much bigger opportunity in performance advertising.”

I love this story because it encapsulates the trap so many founders fall into: when the product is kind of working. It’s very deceptive. You feel good. You want to call your mom and share the news. But you’re most likely sitting in a local minimum. The hard part is realizing you can be 2x, 3x, 4x more successful by changing tactics.

Many founders only reach the “we have to pivot” realization when things are going wrong. Tough moments are often clarifying. We recently did a great podcast on this with NFX GP Pete Flint, and Russ Heddleston, the founder of DocSend where we discussed this in-depth. DocSend didn’t recognize their key use case – selling their horizontal product vertically to startups – until they were running out of money. That moment forced them to abandon the enterprise sales motion and double down on a new use case that was actually working. (Russ also “panic interviewed over 300 users to arrive at this conclusion, it’s with listening to that approach here).

The key is to ideally never reach that panic moment. It’s about being open to a pivot even when things seem like they’re going right. But you have to realize they’re not going right enough.

This is what our Israeli teams have dialed in on. For Israeli founders, this kind of speed isn’t stressful, or new. It’s normal. The reflex is already there. They expect change, and that’s what gives them the edge.

Pivots as Force Multipliers

A pivot is a reallocation of momentum. You’ve already built infrastructure: a team, tech, customers, and investor capital. The wrong product is just friction on that machine.

Israeli founders intuitively understand this. They treat pivots like vector adjustments: same kinetic energy, new trajectory. They remind us that resilience often looks like flexibility.

It’s not about how clever your original idea is. It’s how fast you’re willing to admit when it’s wrong—and how fast you can reorient your team toward something that works.

Pivoting isn’t a sign of losing, it’s a sign you’re prepared to win.