The tech industry has never lacked leadership archetypes. The visionary. The operator. The brilliant jerk. The relentless optimizer. These are the figures that populate the folklore of Silicon Valley and the broader deep-tech world, and for a long time, the dominant assumption was that toughness, intensity, and a willingness to run roughshod over people were not just acceptable in high-performing tech settings but necessary.
Dubi (aka Dov) Katz has a different view. And he has the career to back it up. The one piece of advice that Katz says he repeats most consistently, the thing he recommends to everyone he works with, is deceptively simple: be kind, don’t judge.
As a PhD-trained computer vision researcher and postdoctoral fellow from Carnegie Mellon University, Dubi has spent more than 15 years working at the frontier of artificial intelligence, robotics, and immersive technology. Today, as CTO of Formic Robotics, he is responsible for the company’s technical direction and for building AI systems for autonomous drones in the defense sector.
These are not tranquil environments. They were, and still are, high-stakes, high-pressure technical domains where the work is formidable, the timelines are often brutal, and the margin for error is narrow. And across all of them, Dubi has arrived at the same conclusion: kindness is not a luxury or a nicety. It is a leadership tool, and one that most organizations undervalue.
What Kindness Means in a Technical Context
Dubi is not arguing for the kind of conflict-averse, everyone-gets-a-trophy culture that produces mediocre work and protects bad ideas from scrutiny. Neither is he suggesting that hard feedback should be rendered useless, or that leaders should avoid difficult conversations in the name of keeping the peace.
Kindness, as Katz practices it, is something more substantive. It is the baseline orientation toward the people you work with that assumes good intent, extends generosity in moments of failure, and treats people as whole individuals rather than as resources to be optimized. It is the deliberate choice not to judge, not to write people off based on a bad week or a wrong answer in a meeting.
The Connection Between Kindness and Risk-Taking
The problems that Dubi has spent his career working on, whether in computer vision, autonomous systems, or applied AI for robotics, lack established solutions. Progress requires people to propose ideas that might be wrong, to run experiments that might fail, and to admit openly when an approach is not working. All of that requires confidence that being wrong will not be held against you, and that failure in the service of genuine exploration is understood as part of the process rather than a mark of incompetence.
That kind of safety does not appear automatically in teams. It has to be built up and maintained, deliberately and consistently, by the people with the most power in the room. And it is created through the accumulated weight of small signals: how leaders respond when someone raises a problem, how they treat the person whose experiment did not work, and whether they model the intellectual humility that they ask of their teams.
Kindness and non-judgment are the foundation of all of that. When Dubi says he recommends that everyone be kind and not judge, he is describing a set of behaviors that directly enable the kind of creative, honest, exploratory culture that hard technical work requires.
Teams that feel judged go quiet. They stop proposing unconventional ideas because the social cost of being wrong feels too high. They optimize for looking capable rather than for being effective. In a slow-moving industry working on well-understood problems, that dynamic is inefficient. In deep tech, where the ability to surface problems quickly and think creatively about novel solutions is the whole game, it can be fatal.
Building Teams That Tell the Truth
Dubi Katz has spoken about the importance of building teams where the strongest ideas rise to the top regardless of their source, where people feel genuinely empowered to challenge the prevailing view, and where honesty is valued more than hierarchy. Those are not qualities that emerge from a mission statement. They emerge from the day-to-day experience of working in a place where it feels safe to be honest.
His description of an ideal business relationship is rooted in trust and mutual respect, and his view of what makes a great team is similarly relational. He is looking for people who will sharpen his thinking, not just validate it, and he understands that creating the conditions for that honest engagement requires him to show up consistently in ways that make it possible.
That is the practical work of kindness in a leadership context. It is not about being liked. It is about being the kind of leader whose team tells them the truth, especially when the truth is inconvenient. In technical organizations, the ability to obtain accurate information from those closest to the work is one of the most important capabilities a leader can have. Kindness, when consistently practiced, is one of the primary ways that capability gets built.
What Non-Judgment Looks Like in Practice
The second half for Katz, don’t judge, deserves its own attention. In technical backdrops, negative judgment is often dressed up as standards. The culture that mistakes contempt for rigor and confuses dismissiveness with high expectations is disturbingly common in deep tech. It tends to consolidate around people who are genuinely talented and who have learned to associate their own success with a particular way of engaging with the world.
The problem is that, in this way, judgment is corrosive to the collaborative thinking that certain problems require. When people feel that their ideas will be met with contempt rather than engagement, they stop sharing them. When they feel that asking a question will mark them as uninformed, they stop asking.
Dubi’s insistence on non-judgment directly counters that dynamic. It reflects an understanding that the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds on a technical team is valuable only if people actually share them. And people only share them consistently when they have reliable backing that doing so is safe.
Kindness Across Different Cultures and Contexts
Dubi has worked across a wide range of cultural and organizational contexts throughout his career. He was educated in Israel before completing his graduate work in the United States. He has operated at Meta’s scale in American consumer technology, in the early-stage startup of Oculus, and now in the Israeli defense-adjacent tech ecosystem at Formic Robotics. He speaks English, Hebrew, and some French, and has navigated the genuine complexity of leading teams across different cultural expectations and communication norms.
In all those contexts, he has found the same principle applicable. Kindness and non-judgment are not culturally specific values. They are human ones. The specific behavioral expressions of those values vary across cultures, and a leader who works across cultural contexts needs to be attentive to those variations. But the underlying exposure, the decision to extend generosity and to withhold contempt, translates everywhere.
The Leadership Dubi Katz Models
There is an important distinction between leaders who talk about kindness and leaders who practice it consistently enough that it becomes embedded in the culture around them. Dubi’s emphasis on this principle is not performative. It reflects a set of values that run through his description of how he makes decisions, what he looks for in the people he works with, and how he thinks about himself.
His moral compass, by his own account, places how you treat people at the center of what it means to act well, not just what you produce or accomplish. In an industry that has too often treated people as tools for reaching technical or commercial goals, that distinction stands out.
Katz has built his career at the intersection of some of the hardest problems in applied AI and robotics. He has done it by staying technically sharp, building strong teams, and maintaining a creative and flexible approach to problem-solving. And underneath it all, the consistent thread is the simple conviction that how you treat the people around you matters, and that true kindness is one of the most powerful tools available to any leader.
