The Israeli who made a huge exit: "I wouldn't send kids to get a degree"
Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44, which was sold to Wix for $80 million, explains how he believes artificial intelligence is changing the job market and what young people should do.
Maor Shlomo, a high-tech entrepreneur who single-handedly founded the artificial intelligence platform Base44, which was sold last year to Wix in an $80 million deal, addresses the changes that AI is causing in the job market and how he believes young people should prepare for the future.
In an interview with Dana Weiss as part of the "Weekend News" on Channel 12, Shlomo said he does not think the traditional academic path is necessarily suitable for the current era. "I wouldn't send my children to get a degree," he said. Instead, he suggested that young people try their hand at practical work at an early stage: "I would send them to experiment, to try to build something."
Shlomo, an 8200 alumnus and a former co-founder of the unicorn company Explorium, has become in the last year one of the symbols of the "Solo Founder" trend. He developed by himself, without employees and without raising capital, a system that allows building entire applications using natural language, and subsequently led the company to a quick exit.
Alongside the business success, Shlomo warns against the broad impact of AI on the employment market. "There is going to be the biggest earthquake we have ever known," he said. According to him, jobs will change, companies will change significantly, some will disappear and new companies will be built.
"When the roller coaster starts and it's in loops, you can't stop it," Shlomo explained. According to him, the way to deal with the change is not to try to stop technological development, but to learn to use the new tools and adapt to them.
"We need to learn how to use this in our lives to help people," he said. "We need to learn to adapt to it, because the jobs of the future, at least for the next decade, will be around this."
Shlomo also addressed the changing requirements in the job market and the skills that he believes will be more significant in the era of AI. According to him, if in the past there was a significant emphasis on deep expertise in a certain field, today there is greater importance in the ability to understand different fields and combine them.
"The requirements today for how to excel are changing. If once there was a need for a very deep understanding of something, in my opinion today it is the ability to understand a little about many things, and to assemble, and to initiate and to build," he said.
According to him, this is also the approach that guides him when recruiting employees for the company. "When I recruit people to Base, I look for people who understand technology a little, but also understand business a little, understand the users and understand marketing," he explained. "And then they can assemble and run alone very fast, because they can use AI to complete that depth."
Shlomo emphasized that the accessibility to advanced technological tools allows many people today to try to turn ideas into reality. From his perspective, it is precisely the rapid change that AI brings that makes initiative and experimentation more important.
"Life is short, and our world is going to change very fast," he said. "We all have some dream that this is the time to do it. I don't know what will be in a decade, and today you have the tools to do it. The first step is always the hardest, but when you start this adventure you have no idea where it will lead."
