Most VCs will tell you they invest in people. Push them further, and you’ll hear the same formula of exceptional team, large market, and right timing. It is recited so often it has become meaningless.
But Yuval Ariav, Founder and Managing Partner of Symbol, doesn’t give me that answer. Ask him what he looks for in a founder, and he’ll acknowledge that integrity and grit matter, but then he sets that all aside.
“If I had to put one overarching theme for us, it’s depth,” he told me. “We like to see that founders went to the validation threshold the capital market requires — and then way beyond it. Because what that tells us is that they are really interested in the problem, that they really understand it.”
Much of the theme of today’s conversation is about depth, and how to avoid “non-deep” thinking (I try to avoid the term “shallow”). For Ariav, the ability to go deep is the willingness to go so far into a problem that you exit the comfortable zone of apparent mastery and enter the uncomfortable zone of knowing how much you don’t know. “We like to see people whose level of expertise forces them to say, on some things, ‘we don’t know.’ Because that’s how you really know they know their stuff.”
Symbol is a $50 million pre-seed and seed fund Ariav co-manages with Racheli Kogan, and bets on founders working outside the mainstream of Israeli venture, in sectors the local capital community has traditionally dismissed. We spoke soon after Business Insider named Symbol to its 2026 Seed 100, the first time an Israeli fund has appeared on a list that includes Sam Altman, Accel, and Greylock.
The ranking’s stated criteria, which highlighted those who identify technologies before they become mainstream categories, are basically Symbol’s entire thesis.
The problem is that depth is vanishing
There’s a paradox at the center of Ariav’s argument: That the quality he bets on is becoming scarcer precisely as building companies gets easier. Because of AI, he notes, “building products has never been easier, faster, cheaper.” When there are more founders, lower barriers to entry, and more buzz, the very environment that Symbol is making a contrarian bet on is becoming full of less intellectual effort.
“The capacity for depth… it’s not just that you understand something deeply,” he said. “It’s that you are fine with sitting on your ass at home and spending six hours diving into god-awful McKinsey super boring reports to understand some fundamental truth. That is a skill set that is rapidly fading from the world.”
Research found that average sustained attention on a digital screen dropped from 150 seconds in 2004 to 47 seconds by 2024. Ariav, who teaches a course at Columbia University on data, AI, and society, watches this in real time. “Our collective attention span is going way down,” he said. “At a time when the world is more complex than ever.”
Contrarianism isn’t the answer
Here is where Ariav diverges from the standard VC contrarian pitch. Being reflexively contrary, he argues, is just as lazy as following the consensus.
“Being reflexively contrarian is also easy. You look at Twitter [X], and you just add ‘no’ in the beginning of whatever somebody says.” What Symbol looks for is different: founders who have gone deep enough to discover something the market hasn’t seen. “When you meet the best founders, at some point they will say something to the effect of: we’ve observed something the market doesn’t understand. At that point, they shine a spotlight on a hidden truth.”
For Symbol, it is about finding the pre-consensus thinking across a world that is no longer operating in the very depths that depend on new discovery. And with a world that changes as AI becomes more embedded in our lives, the ability to think, explore, and innovate is becoming a commodity in and of itself.
