Tasks Can Be Automated. You Cannot.

After three years in venture capital, I'm leaving to do the only work that was ever really mine.

May 26, 2026. Two years to the day.

Two years ago today I went full time at LeverageVC. And today, on this exact date, I sat down with my GP and partner David and told him I’m closing this chapter to pursue something that feels like me.

I want to tell you the whole story, because the anniversary matters, but so does everything that led here.

Before I broke into venture, I had just shut down my company. I was questioning every decision I had ever made, from bouncing between jobs trying to figure out what I wanted, to going to college and feeling like I got nothing out of it. I had no confidence in my past and no vision for my future, and that combination made just existing feel miserable. I was lost in a way I had never allowed myself to admit before.

But something happened when I finally said it out loud. I was lost. For the first time in my life I actually said those words, and instead of feeling worse, I felt something I didn’t expect. Relief. Like the admission itself was the first solid ground I had stood on in a while.

So I pulled out a piece of paper and I wrote down who Yehuda Atzmon actually is.

I pursue knowledge obsessively. I understand what makes people tick. I’m drawn to founders who are on fire for a problem. And I’m a good guesser.

When I looked at that list, the answer was right there. Venture capital wasn’t a pivot or a compromise. It fit the actual shape of me.

Breaking in wasn’t easy. It took months of networking, meetings with founders, outreach to VCs, and a lot of rejection. But every no just made me chase harder. I wasn’t trying to convince people to give me a job. I was trying to convince them to bet on someone who would show up every single day as their fullest self. I believed that if somebody bet on me, it would be the greatest bet they ever made.

Eventually I met David. We sat at a coffee shop near Penn Station for 45 minutes. I came with a plan and I told him straight: I want to work full time at LeverageVC. He said they were a small fund and couldn’t pay me. I told him I would triple their deal flow on day one, laid out exactly how I would do it, and said I’d start for free. A few months later, after I had shown what I could actually do, he hired me full time.

The next three years were some of the most exciting of my life. Real autonomy. Real trust. Four investments sourced. I was finally in an environment where the thing that makes me me was the actual asset.

Then the fund started winding down toward the end of Fund One. Deal flow slowed. The one thing I had been hired for, the one thing I loved, was no longer needed at the same pace. And I felt something I recognized immediately, the same feeling I had when I shut down my company. Lost. Uncertain. Waking up without knowing what I was doing.

What confused me was that nothing had collapsed on paper. I was still at the fund. But the feeling was the same. And that told me something important: the fulfillment was never fully in the vehicle. It was somewhere deeper, still waiting.

This is the thing nobody talks about. Most of what people call their desires aren’t even theirs. We grow up watching our parents, seeing someone successful in finance or law or business, and we tell ourselves we want that. We want their happiness, their success, their life. But that is not your essence. That is borrowed power. And you can run on borrowed power for a long time before you realize it was never yours to begin with.

We are also living through a moment that is making this more urgent than ever. AI is automating tasks at a scale and speed we have never seen before. Jobs that people have clocked into for decades are disappearing. And the people most affected are not just losing their income. They are losing the thing they used to answer the question of who they are. When you have spent your whole life clocking in, doing tasks on repetition, and clocking out, and then that disappears, you are not just unemployed. You are lost in the exact way I was lost. No confidence in what came before. No vision for what comes next.

Tasks can be automated. You cannot.

You were born into this world with a purpose and an essence that only you can carry. But most people have never had to find it. And now, suddenly, they have no choice.

So I went through the deepest excavation process of my life. Every single day I was begging to be shown what my actual purpose was. Not the purpose that looked good. My own.

While I was searching, I kept being put in positions to help other people find theirs. I had built a consulting process where I would give people deep questions and use their answers to create a manifesto, a North Star document they could return to whenever they felt like they were straying from who they actually were. I was doing this for others before I had ever fully done it for myself.

Then came Lag BaOmer. The 33rd day of the Omer, the death anniversary of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Every year on this day something significant happens in my life. It was late afternoon, the kind of light that makes everything feel slightly more open than usual, and I walked into that day more open than I had been in months.

I ran into a woman named Yael. A year ago to the exact day, in the exact same spot, we had spoken about her art studio, Raz Land, her vision of combining spirituality with art, her dream of studios all over the world. A year later she was telling me the same thing in different words, still scattered, still hoping someone would fund her vision, still unable to explain clearly what Raz Land actually was.

I stopped her. I asked her three times: what is Raz Land?

The first two times, same scattered answer. The third time she said something different.

Raz Land is me.

I asked her who she was. She got defensive, said she knew, and moved on.

And I felt it before I understood it. A pull. Like I needed to help this person get to something she was standing right next to but couldn’t see. I couldn’t walk away from that.

I went home and built The Atman Method.

Within 48 hours I had the MVP. Before I sent it to anyone, I ran myself through it. I asked myself the hardest version of the question: what is my actual purpose in building this? What came out the other side was my own manifesto. And it said this:

You are someone who sees people, not the mask, but the truth underneath. You’ve carried that gift your whole life, often alone, often waiting for others to catch up, often standing on a podium where no one could meet you where you actually were. That waiting cost you. Not everything, but something. A specific kind of loneliness: being surrounded by people who couldn’t name what you gave them, who came to you again and again but couldn’t reflect back what made you rare.

You learned to be patient. You learned to trust that people would come around. But patience became a way of surviving invisibility, and invisibility became the price of your gift.

What you’re building now is not just a way to change the world. It’s a way to stop waiting. To finally be met. To have people stand with you, not behind you. What you’re really after isn’t impact. It’s true love. Connection. The experience of being seen the way you see others.

And underneath all of it, the method, the mission, the years of holding truth alone, there’s a version of you that feels like a child. Pure. Unhidden. Present. Not performing, not proving, just being. That’s who you’re coming home to. That’s who you already are when no one’s watching.

The Atman Method is your gift to the world. But it’s also your way back to yourself.

This is your compass. Not who you should be. Who you already are.

Only after I had that did I know what I had built was real.

I sent Yael a questionnaire and asked her to answer each question by voice note. When I listened back, I heard her brush past her truth five or six times. So instead of sending her a manifesto I knew wasn’t right, I told her the truth: I would be doing her a disservice. I wanted her to be the first person outside of me to go through the full Atman Method. We scheduled an in person session at her studio.

I showed up at ten in the morning. I didn’t say a word for the next forty minutes. I just ran the process. By the end of it she had her manifesto. She read it out loud and started crying. I started to tear up too. Not because I had built something impressive but because I watched someone look at herself clearly, maybe for the first time. She didn’t need the funding. She didn’t need anyone else’s framework. The truth was always there.

The name came from a mistake. I was building the business plan and I misspelled my last name, Atzmon, as Atman. An AI told me that Atman is a Sanskrit word meaning self, or true essence. I hadn’t chosen the name. It had chosen itself.

The biggest form of love I have ever given myself is the search for my own truth. What I’m building is the chance to give that same search to others.

That is why I’m leaving.

I’m not closing a chapter because I failed. I’m closing it because I finally know what I came here to do. And I’m already doing it.

Two years to the day. Same date. The work has already begun.