Episode #97: Lior Pozin – Co-founder, CEO AutoDS

Life Is a Game

Lior Pozin built AutoDS into a company with more than 200 employees and over $20M ARR before its acquisition by Fiverr.

Listening to him, it’s hard to shake the feeling that AutoDS was never the destination.

It was simply another level in the game.

The kid who questioned everything

Long before AutoDS, before SaaS, before startups, Lior was already looking at the world differently.

His father locked his computer as punishment.

He learned how to unlock it.

He wanted to buy a phone online.

He discovered the exact same phone was being resold for more money.

So he sold it himself-without ever owning inventory.

At 14, he wasn’t asking what he was supposed to do.

He was asking: “What’s the game?” And then: “Let’s just try.”

Gamifying life

One sentence quietly explains almost every decision he makes.

“I look at life as a game.”

It’s not a motivational slogan.

It’s a framework.

Games have rules.

Rules can be learned.

Sometimes they can even be bent.

When eBay suspended his account, he didn’t see failure.

He saw another move – open another account.

When people warned him something wouldn’t work, he didn’t hear a verdict.

He heard another hypothesis to test.

That mindset dramatically changes the emotional cost of entrepreneurship.

Failure becomes feedback.

Risk becomes calculated.

And trying becomes more important than being right.

The question that removes fear

Throughout the conversation, Lior comes back to one exercise over and over.

“What’s the worst case?”

Not as positive thinking.

As practical thinking.

What’s the actual downside?

Will I lose an account?

Waste a year?

Need another job?

Once he answers that honestly, fear loses much of its power.

Because most imagined catastrophes turn out to be survivable.

That question became one of his most useful entrepreneurial tools.

The investment that compounds the most

One of the most interesting moments in the conversation has nothing to do with AutoDS.

It’s the way Lior treats personal development.

Every week he protects time with almost religious discipline.

Executive coach. Personal coach. Therapist. Reading. Meditation. Breathwork. Sports.

Those hours are non-negotiable.

His reasoning is remarkably simple:

“If I elevate myself, the business will elevate too”.

Many founders invest first in their company.

Lior invests first in the founder running it.

Building the founder like a product

Lior recently created something unusual:

A personal brand book.

Not because he wants nicer colors or better social media posts.

Because he believes founders deserve the same strategic clarity as companies.

He wants every piece of content, every interview and eventually even his AI assistant to reflect the same person.

Not an optimized version.

The real one.

He even pushes back on using AI alone for this work.

AI can summarize.

But it can’t tell you who you are.

That still requires sitting in a room, asking difficult questions, and sharpening your own thinking.

Ignore advice-from the wrong people

One of the strongest principles in the episode is deceptively simple.

Don’t take advice from people who haven’t done the thing you’re trying to do.

His parents wanted university.

Many people told him AutoDS couldn’t compete.

Competitors looked unbeatable.

None of that mattered.

His question was always:

“What’s the difference between them and myself?”

And later:

“Why would someone be better than me?”

It’s not arrogance.

It’s permission.

Permission to stop assuming that someone else belongs where you want to be more than you do.

What stays after this episode

Lior doesn’t describe entrepreneurship as courage.

He describes it as a way of looking at the world.

A constant habit of questioning assumptions.

Of asking “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Of refusing to believe that someone else gets to build the future simply because they started first.

Maybe that’s why “life is a game” resonates so strongly throughout the conversation.

Not because games are easy.

But because games are meant to be played.

And the people who keep playing long enough eventually discover that most of the limits they believed in were rules they never had to accept in the first place.