Embracing uncertainty: original mistakes with Benny Buller

Mistakes are inevitable when building a company, especially in the industries we intersect — where founders are building novel technologies and tackling ambitious problems that not long ago were considered unsolvable. But after years of supporting companies through the early stages of growth, we’ve found that not all mistakes are created equal. Many mistakes are common and possible to avoid with the right insights and industry expertise, while some mistakes are wholly original. These are the mistakes we strive to understand and learn from.

An original mistake is not only unique to a particular company or situation but, sometimes, wholly new to an industry. These mistakes may evolve with an industry, surprising even the most seasoned entrepreneurs.

In this series, we’ve invited industry disruptors and entrepreneurs to share their original mistakes — the stories behind them, the lessons learned, and the wisdom gained. By sharing these experiences, we hope to provide insights for current and future founders, entrepreneurs, and technologists.

This week’s guest is the founder and former CEO of Velo3D, Benny Buller. Benny spent ten of his formative years in the technology unit of the Israeli Intelligence and followed his service with a number of technical roles before taking an investor position and ultimately, becoming a founder himself.

You’ve shared that you grew your career in the Israeli Intelligence Unit, which produces an incredibly high number of talented founders and entrepreneurs thanks to its structure and focus on innovation. What was that like?

I grew up in the technology unit of the Israeli Intelligence. Most people join this unit after university, when they are 21 or 22, and complete five or six years of service. After that, they will leave and either start a company or join the company of other alumni. There is a constant outpouring of people who become involved in startups. Israel in the 90s, when I was a part of the unit, was very entrepreneurial. Everyone around me was doing this.

I was young and managing very critical national activities. You were thrown a problem very quickly and expected to figure it out. So, in some ways, it felt like a startup. It was this very entrepreneurial place that incubated and prepared us to build startups.

My first sons were born when I was 27 and 29, and I was still in the army. I ended up serving for ten years. By the time I left the unit, I was ready for a startup, but there was too much at stake family-wise. But when the kids were older, I had my chance. I call it my second window.

Reflecting back on that time, who helped you the most? Were you given any advice that really helped you accel?

We had a few principles in this unit. One was, “who dares, wins.” This was big. You have to take risks and do innovative things unconventionally.

We were also constantly faced with impossible problems. You quickly learn that it’s almost impossible to think about an “impossible” problem. You have to reframe and understand that all problems are possible with the right approach. When you bring people together with different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences, they will solve problems together that none of them could alone. It’s very difficult, but it’s doable.

I had a boss in this unit who was a big inspiration for me. From him, I learned the idea that the workplace is like a puzzle, where everyone fits, and the boundaries between puzzle pieces are precise. That’s not how workplaces work. The reality is that every person is a circle. Some circles are small, and some are big, and the big circles overlap with others. Jobs only get done when you have enough big circles overlapping, communicating, and understanding far beyond their scope of responsibility.

An assembly line of responsibilities (where I do only my job and then pass it to someone else) doesn’t work. The only way to get things done, as we say in Hebrew, is to “be a big head.” You have to think big, ask big questions, and be encouraged to go beyond your boundaries. And from a very young age, early in the unit, I adopted this attitude. I ran around all the time between people and worked to align things and coordinate. This was early on in computing and systems. This focus on initiative and curiosity was key to the rest of my development.

After leaving the military, you went into a number of technical roles before becoming an investor and entrepreneur. As someone who has experienced so many facets of technology and startup life, what’s your perspective on the challenges of being a founder today? Do you think these challenges are different than when you began your career?

I definitely think the landscape and the difficulties are changing. Today there are a lot of systems to simplify running a company. You can automate more functions and you need fewer people to do things. There are more coordination and communication systems. At the same time, other aspects are difficult.

What defines a startup is a high level of uncertainty. You live in a world of obscurity and fog, and you can hardly see what’s next to you. That hasn’t changed. On one hand, you have to have a copious amount of vision and conviction. On the other hand, you have to adapt to new information. That’s actually quite hard to do because people often confuse having high conviction with rigidity. You may have high conviction about where you’re trying to get, but the path might change. You have to be flexible and admit your mistakes when you’re making them. That’s a hard aspect of being a founder entrepreneur.

Managing people and creating a cohesive place where people work with a sense of mission and connection is also hard. Building such a culture that will be a good place to work and contribute is really important as well. I have things I’m very proud of, but I also made some mistakes in this area.

Lastly, every founder has to have an element of a salesperson in them. They need to sell to investors, customers, and they need to sell to employees. For a lot of people, salesmanship is not easy. For me, it wasn’t easy.

Let’s double click into some of these mistakes and subsequent lessons learned. I also appreciate what you shared about high conviction vs rigidity…

We are all humans with emotions. As a founder, you’re very passionate about this baby that is your startup, right? So you have strong opinions about a lot of things.

So, tempering your passion and conviction about things that are not as strategic in nature so you can allow other opinions and suggestions to come is very important. Now, at the same time, I made a lot of mistakes where I knew in my bones that something was the right thing to do, but I wanted my team to have the opportunity to learn and explore. It’s hard to get it right. In a lot of ways, it can be like raising kids — you battle being too lenient and too rigid as a parent.

And each kid, much like each startup, is so different. So, taking what you learned at company X and applying it to company Y doesn’t always work.

And even situations within a company are different. But I try to be open-minded and I admit mistakes. I’m very proud of that. At the same time, I come off as high conviction, passionate, and set in my mind. So people are shocked when I’m shown data, and am able to change my mind.

Aging helps. Many of the mistakes that I made with people were simply because I came out too excited, too emotional, too caring, and too passionate.

So, if you had to distill a piece of advice from that, what would it be?

The founder cares. And I’ve been considering this and thinking of what structural solutions could help. For my next company, I think a solution is to have the right number of equal founders. I’ll explain…

I’ve been a co-founder in an unequal founding partnership. I consider it a mistake that I founded a company with one co-founder who wasn’t a full-equity co-founder and, therefore, didn’t have the same level of commitment from day one. It builds an autocracy.

Going forward, I want three co-founders of equal rights. So, no matter how important a decision is, if two of us oppose the third, it’s done. If the CEO wants something and the two other people don’t, we don’t do it. So you have this internal balance that prevents autocracy.

I think that balance is really important. Autocratic cultures aren’t inherently bad, but they can result in suboptimal culture and suboptimal results.