"You can't climb the mountain right,
if you're not climbing the right mountain."
How to Move Up When the Only Way Is Down
Judah Taub
PRAISE FOR HOW TO MOVE UP WHEN THE ONLY WAY IS DOWN
Saul Singer
Author of Start-up Nation
“Drawing his vantage point at the cutting-edge of Start-Up Nation and experience inside Israel's elite technology units, Judah Taub has a unique perspective on how to avoid the major pitfalls that everyone from starting entrepreneurs to big companies find themselves in. How To Move Up... offers a refreshing blueprint for tackling the toughest challenges in business and beyond.”
Scott Kupor
Managing Partner, Andreessen Horowitz & author of Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
“How To Move Up serves up an original take for leveraging creative thinking to overcome the decision-making traps we often set ourselves. By flipping the script - and learning from the methods AI uses to push through computational obstacles - the book reimagines how we can all do a better job achieving our true maximum potential.”
Joshua Margolis
James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration,
Harvard Business School
“What got your business here won’t necessarily take it to the next level. Judah Taub guides you with fresh and creative insights from the worlds of tech and military intelligence so you can take your business to new heights.”
James Harding
Editor and Founder, Tortoise Media
“Brilliant and original. Judah Taub reminds us how we are limited by conventional wisdoms and accepted practices; our own minds can be the biggest enemy of invention. He invites us to consider a fast-approaching future when artificial intelligence doesn’t replace human thinking, but reinvigorates it. We learn from the way machines think - or, at least, put the pieces of the puzzle together. Optimistic, contrary and hugely readable, a book for everyone interested in what happens next.”
Baroness Joanna Shields
Member of the House of Lords of the UK, and Founder & CEO, Precognition
“This book is a must-read. Judah Taub presents a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of practical lessons for how businesses and innovators can recognize and surpass the plateaus that hinder progress. By drawing parallels between mathematical theory and real-world challenges, Taub offers a fresh perspective on the importance of courage, ingenuity, and the willingness to venture beyond the known in order to achieve groundbreaking advancements.”
Andrew Feldman, Baron Feldman of Elstree
Member of the House of Lords of the UK and businessman, politician and technology investor
"This is a brilliant and original book which manages to be both accessible and profound. It challenges all of us to think carefully about the ways in which we are trapped in our ‘local maximum’, and how we can escape to reach higher ground."
How To Move Up When The Only Way Is Down
A well-paid executive feels trapped in her very respected but unsatisfying job. A startup founder has paying customers, but knows that unless he ‘fires’ them and pivots the business, his startup won’t make it. A single 30-something has been on dozens of dates and is pondering at what point to drop some of their perfect partner ‘must haves’. A coach, dependent on one star player, weighs whether to allow the rest of the team more field time to develop their skills but risk serious losses. A senior government planner is tasked with undoing the nation’s reliance on outdated infrastructure.
These are all examples of individuals stuck in a Local Maximum: a situation in which we’ve reached a peak, but not the one that fulfills the highest potential. In order to move up in our pursuits, we must first move back down - a realization which can lead to frustration, decision-making paralysis and lost opportunity.
In How to Move Up When the Only Way Is Down: Lessons from Artificial Intelligence for Overcoming Your Local Maximum, Judah Taub draws from his perspective guiding early stage AI startups, his years serving in military intelligence where he developed a new kind of intelligence gathering, and his various experiences leading innovation throughout his career. Equipped with an off-the-beaten track perspective, Judah shares insights into how humans can achieve better decision-making to surpass expectations by learning from the way AI overcomes local maximums.
What tech engineers already know is that with the rise of AI, we’ve developed new ways of addressing these limitations. These techniques, employed to save billions of dollars for global giants like Amazon and Google, are equally applicable to each of us. The trick is to be open to learning from AI instead of just using or fearing it.
To show how, Judah shares a variety of real world examples, involving Olympic high jumpers, the transition of Ethiopian immigrants from gas station attendants to high tech engineers, the evolution of playing cards into Nintendo, the development of ChatGPT, methodology of US sport leagues vs European soccer, ant colonies’ ability to overcome ego, the link between wildfires and hedge fund managers - and much more.
The book explores:
-
How to anticipate and identify Local Maximums
-
How to overcome psychological Local Maximum blocks and biases
-
How to build skills and apply strategies to succeed in complex decision-making
-
How Local Maximum thinking can help overcome major global challenges
The book is equipped to benefit anyone facing complex decisions, or obstacles to their personal or professional goals. How to Move Up When the Only Way is Down is designed to transform readers’ decision-making by recognizing Local Maximums and skill building based on lessons from AI.
Pre-Order Today
Forward by Jonathan Rosenfeld, MIT FutureTech
In the quest for artificial intelligence, it has long been the case that our understanding of learning itself, the process by which we imbue intelligence with capabilities and skills, has looked inwards to how humans and other organisms learn.
In building AI systems our understanding is being afforded newfound tools, as we can pry at the very inner workings of these systems as they learn and perform, we can change them and the way we teach them and assess the effects on their performance.
While our understanding of artificial intelligence learning and improvement remains remarkably opaque (even though we’re the ones building these machines), we are already beginning to gain incredible insights.
Tapping into these insights, How to Move Up When the Only Way Is Down inverts the traditional question “What insights of human intelligence can we apply to improve AI?” and instead asks “What insights from AI improvement can we apply to improve ourselves?”
Excerpted with permission by the publisher, Wiley, from How to Move Up When the Only Way is Down: Lessons from Artificial Intelligence for Overcoming Your Local Maximum by Judah Taub.
Copyright © 2025 by Judah Taub.
MEET JUDAH
Judah Taub is co-founder and managing partner at Hetz Ventures, a leading Israeli seed stage venture capital firm ($300M AUM) taking a thematic approach to early stage investing.
Before founding Hetz, Judah was Head of Data at Lansdowne Partners ($20B London-based hedge fund) as well as advising multiple young start-ups.
In his service in the Israel Defense Forces Judah served as an officer in a classified intelligence unit where he engineered a large-scale project to win the IDF 2014 Creativity Award.
He has lectured widely, including throughout the IDF and at Wharton Business School, on time-management and creative thinking, and wrote a book for new soldiers published by Yediot, Israel’s leading publisher. Judah was also elected as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020.
Judah is the author of How to Move Up When the Only Way is Down.