Yonatan Adiri and the trouble with a good idea

A good idea can be a difficult thing to get rid of. It acquires admirers, routines, a budget, perhaps an office with respectable furniture. Eventually, somebody has to ask whether it still fits the world outside. Yonatan Adiri has made that question the subject of a book. He has also, at several points, made it a question about his own job.

There is an appealing complication in his career. He began in public service, worked for Shimon Peres, encountered Silicon Valley, helped imagine a car-sharing company, returned home, founded Healthy.io, and eventually handed over its chief executive role. Today, his public work includes Alenu, a civic movement, and arguments about the relationship between technology and national life. The path keeps crossing itself.

Adiri’s 2026 Hebrew book, Ha’erua Histayem, roughly “The Event Is Over,” gives that movement a subject: the assumptions people keep using after circumstances have changed. It is an awkward subject for anyone with an impressive résumé. Past success is precisely the sort of thing that can make a person reluctant to reconsider.

The adviser who went back to school

Born in Herzliya in 1982, Adiri began studying at the Open University of Israel at fourteen. He completed a degree in political science and international relations in 2000, then earned a master’s in political science and law at Tel Aviv University. His early interests concerned the arrangements people make to live together: states, rules, negotiations, power.

He served as a liaison officer to the Red Cross in the military’s foreign relations division. A research paper published in 2005 examined the legal questions surrounding counterterrorism. His subsequent work at the Reut Institute focused on national security. These were beginnings in policy, with technology still some distance from the centre of the job description.

Then came the presidency. From 2008 to 2011, he served under Peres, establishing the chief technology officer role and working as a diplomatic adviser. The remit connected technological possibilities with relationships between countries. Water, agriculture, and space could enter a conversation that might otherwise have remained within the usual diplomatic vocabulary.

A title like presidential CTO invites an amusingly domestic picture: someone summoned because the printer refuses to cooperate. Adiri’s brief was rather larger. It concerned the things a country could offer other countries, and the collaborations that might follow. Technology became part of the conversation about how a small state finds its place.

That experience also complicates the familiar picture of the entrepreneur leaving government behind. Adiri’s later company building grew alongside a continuing interest in public institutions. The presidency gave him a reason to look closely at invention before he had a company of his own.

A dorm room, then a flight home

In 2009, Adiri joined Singularity University’s first class at NASA Ames in California. He was elected class president. The program brought him into a setting organized around accelerating technologies and the possibility that changes in several fields might combine. For someone trained in policy, it offered a different timetable for imagining the future.

He later recalled arriving as a presidential adviser and discovering that starting a company could be something he did himself. He had previously associated that undertaking with scientists and people more naturally inclined to take risks. The summer loosened his understanding of who was allowed to become a founder.

Getaround was part of that discovery. Adiri helped develop the peer-to-peer car-sharing idea with fellow participants. His account is careful about the distinction between being present at the beginning and doing the later work of building the business. The distinction is useful. A founding story can become crowded once an idea has acquired a name.

He returned to Israel to continue serving Peres and build a life with Maureen. California had supplied an entrepreneurial possibility; it had not settled where he wanted to live. The decision gives the career a human scale. Even a summer devoted to the future eventually ends with somebody choosing a flight.

When the founder changes seats

Adiri went on to found Healthy.io. For this chapter of his story, the revealing moment comes in January 2024, when the company announced that Geoff Martin would take over as chief executive. Adiri would become president, with responsibilities focused on longer term strategy, public affairs, and relationships with financial markets.

The announcement described a change in the company’s needs. Martin brought experience in commercialization and running established operations. The arrangement separated the work of leading the next commercial stage from the founder’s continuing strategic responsibilities. An organization that had grown around one person would now divide the work differently.

Such changes are easy to flatten into a verdict on the person leaving the chair. The more interesting question concerns the chair itself. What does the job require now? A founder’s history with an organization is an asset, but it also makes the decision personal. An operating role can quietly become part of someone’s identity.

By 2026, Adiri’s public biography described him as Healthy.io’s founder and former president. Another chapter had opened. There is a particular relevance here to his later writing: he had participated in a leadership arrangement that changed as the institution changed. The career provides a concrete occasion to consider the question his book would ask more broadly.

The grandchildren have a meeting

Alenu, co-founded with Reuven Taub, brings Adiri back to the public realm. The movement uses the idea of “founding grandchildren” to describe a generation’s responsibility for renewing Israel’s institutions. It asks what should follow the arrangements that earlier generations established. Its invitation is to think, organize, and take responsibility together.

The family language does some work. Grandchildren inherit a world they did not design. They also grow up with a degree of distance from its creators. Gratitude and revision can occupy the same room, although they may require a patient chairperson. Alenu makes that generational relationship part of its argument for change.

Its stated questions concern Israel’s place in the world, its social contract, and its organizing idea. These are broad ambitions. They are also recognizably connected to Adiri’s original interests in political science and diplomacy. The founder has returned to questions that were there before the startup.

Public conversation has become another part of his work. In a 2025 discussion with Dan Senor and journalist Michal Lev-Ram, Adiri described his return to public service in a broad sense. The conversation introduced What’s Your Number?, a podcast about Israel’s economy and its connection to the wider world.

He also introduced himself as a father of four, married to Maureen, who had moved to Israel from Switzerland. The detail belongs in the story because it brings the grand institutional language back to an ordinary unit of time. A generation is an abstraction in an essay. At home, it asks for things.

The danger of being right for too long

Published in 2026 by Sella Meir, Adiri’s book gives a name to the attraction of familiar explanations: “cognitive glue.” His argument concerns the tendency to interpret new events through assumptions that once worked. An exception can be explained away. So can the next exception. A framework can retain its authority even as its usefulness declines.

The publisher’s description ranges across businesses, empires, and contemporary politics. Those comparisons are Adiri’s argument, rather than a settled formula for understanding history. Their purpose is to make readers consider how an institution’s confidence in itself can interfere with its ability to notice what is happening around it.

“When you draw an argument, draw it all the way to the end, right?”

Yonatan Adiri, in conversation with Michael Eisenberg

In an excerpt published in July 2026, Adiri turns to Theodor Herzl. He presents Herzl as someone who recognized a threat while remaining culturally close to the society whose assumptions he questioned. The example is consistent with Adiri’s interest in people who can reconsider the systems to which they belong.

That is a more demanding problem than simply recommending an open mind. Belonging has advantages. It gives someone knowledge, relationships, and a vocabulary others understand. It also creates loyalties. The question running through Adiri’s work is how to keep the knowledge while allowing the underlying explanation to change.

An invention with a foreign policy

His 2026 essay with Shachar Lotan, “The Silicon Dome,” moves the argument into national strategy. They propose that Israel should develop technologies that make it an indispensable partner to other countries. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry supplies their central comparison. They also identify the problem with an advantage that can be reproduced or relocated elsewhere.

The proposal is an argument for a particular direction, not an accomplished outcome. Its interest lies in joining the commercial and diplomatic questions that have followed Adiri for years. What a country builds can affect how other countries behave toward it. The company’s balance sheet and the diplomat’s briefing begin to overlap.

The setting for his March 2026 discussion of the essay made the subject immediate. Before joining Bret Stephens for a virtual conversation, Adiri and his family had to take shelter following an incoming-missile alert. He joined after the all-clear. A discussion about national strategy began with the practical interruption of family life.

There is a temptation, at the end of a career profile, to make all the turns look inevitable. Adiri’s choices are more interesting with their contingencies intact: a policy career, a summer away, a return home, a company, a handover, a public movement, a book. Each involved institutions and people already in motion.

His current wager is that inherited arrangements can be reconsidered deliberately. Whether his proposals persuade is a question for public argument. The personal story explains why he keeps entering that argument: he has spent years close to the point where an idea asks people to reorganize their lives. He is now asking when they should do it again.