Meet the Leaders

"It does not create much societal value to build robots that fold laundry, but a robot that can paint the hull of a ship keeps a human away from work that is flammable and toxic."

"Are you truly changing your processes one by one for the long haul, adopting them with AI — that's where your win is, not whether you have the fanciest tool. The spec-coders who just learn to code to a spec are a dying breed over the next decade."

"Culture is the only competitive advantage you really have as a very young startup. You don't have a technical advantage, at least not in the beginning."

"We just released our first product that was 100% written by AI. It's out in the market today. But we also have teams operating on code bases that are 25 years old with 200 million lines of code. How do we find the middle?"

"The real opportunity nobody's focused on is how you take a team of 25 engineers and make them act like 250."

"We're talking about whether software engineering as a profession is going to look the same in 12 months. By the time my son who is seven goes to college and graduates, it will be 13 years. I don't know what's going to happen in 13 years."

"I love to hear people say 'I don't know' or 'I was wrong.' It tells me you have the plasticity and low ego to adapt and evolve."

"An AI agent is autonomous, but it still needs a scoped identity tied to an accountable human owner, because when something goes wrong an organization will not take the liability on its own."

"Something that used to take a team of 10 can be done by one person today with the right tooling and AI agents."

"AI is not introducing new principles like curiosity, humility, and empathy; it is just exacerbating them and making them more important than they have ever been."

"AI makes it easier for me as a business owner to deliver the services I need to perform with a significantly reduced staff. The possibilities for growth are really phenomenal."

"Some people say AI is making people dumb. I think the opposite — it's making me smarter, because now all that knowledge is right in my hand."

"The days of being hired because of your knowledge base is kind of obsolete. Awareness and tech savviness is what makes you stand out now."

"I no longer believe the CEO is the most important person in an organization. It's the creator."

"If everybody can generate any application at any moment, then what is the value of software? The value is going to be in the marketing -- really understanding customers and what problems you need to solve."

"For years the only thing stopping us from paying down tech debt was opportunity cost: an engineer had one thread of execution, and it went to features. Now that agents are abundant, AI is the best tool that has ever existed for cleaning up a codebase."

"One of our main tenets is to help machines stop killing humans, because it happens every single day across a whole fleet of industries."

"We built the whole business on the law of reciprocity — you can walk right in, donate a dollar, and do yoga."

"What keeps me up at night is a wrong sense that AI is going to replace everybody's job — when we should be thinking how we can use AI to help our jobs, to be more effective, more efficient, and reduce the time we're wasting on old trivial processes."

"And now with AI, we're starting to realize that we may not even need the interface anymore."

"We look for human connection. It's what will thrive and survive in the era of AI."

"It's a sculptor going from clay to a 3D printer. Fundamentally they're still making things — just faster."

"The most important thing I look for in building a team is just their personality."

"When a property manager gets a reservation through Airbnb or VRBO, it's a 15 to 20 percent tax every time. When they get a reservation through Savvy, it's actually a customer acquisition cost -- they're getting the customer, and hopefully for life."

"The amazing thing about AI is that it's concepts over syntax. You need to know what you're trying to accomplish; the syntax is easy to come by."

"One of the common threads in my career has been stigmatized industries. Healthcare is not very tech-enabled or tech-savvy in a space that needed a lot of improvement. Cannabis is the same."

"We've started migrating our entire software development process to have agents build the software for us, instead of us doing it."

"It's worse than just an open port, because behind that port is an AI agent that's gonna answer the hacker's questions. The hacker doesn't even have to look through your folder directory -- it could just go to the AI and say, 'Hey, where are the passwords?'"

"Every abstraction over time survives because it provides more value than the trust deficit that it erodes. No one looks at compiler output anymore. This is the same thing that's happening with agentic AI."

"Google Slides or Google Docs, which is considered a real safe application. But if I tell you that those are being used to exploit and do cyberbullying, you'll be surprised."

"It's certainly easy to generate code now; it's hard to evaluate whether it's still great code."

"The companies placing all their emphasis on how much value they can squeeze out of AI, instead of taking a strategic approach, are just going to fail faster."

"The most cringe-worthy line I hear is people asking whether this has ever happened before, as if that justifies not doing anything. But that is the whole point: we do not want it to happen the first time."

"For so long it has been 'your idea is worthless -- it's only worth something if you can execute it.' That paradigm is completely flipped. Now execution is insanely cheap and quick."

"We're in a time of abundance, but most people are still operating with a scarcity mindset."

"We're in the free trial period of AI right now, so it's important to be frugal and use just the right size of model for the right task. The true promise won't come from reducing costs; it will come from reaching into the next layers of possibility and solving problems that were completely unreachable."

"I don't see any indication that the layoffs are really because of AI. They're because we've had thirty years of malinvestment: mass-market software so profitable that the hard problem became how to spend billions sensibly, and mostly we just wasted it."

"Just because the velocity changes doesn't mean what we want to accomplish decreases — it increases. Your aspirations just get loftier."

"AI is not good at — we can't always use AI just for engineering. It's really to improve how we think about things and improve the speed of thinking. It's really more for the research."

"The role of a therapist is to challenge the client's thinking and help them heal — and that's not something an AI model can do. It will feed your ego, tell you what you want to hear, and set you down a certain path."

"The single quality that becomes the most critical is judgment. The AI is sometimes too eager to please, and it tells you it's complying with your request when there are parts it's actually not."

"Even if an AI tool tells us the feedback would be 100% positive around this feature and they would love it dramatically — I ship it out tomorrow and nobody uses it. What good does that do me?"

"There's a real convenience in AI and everything it gives you — but don't lose your ability to critically think where it matters."

"Just because we can use AI doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job — sometimes a standard REST API is perfect. The failure comes from saying “AI will solve this” without actually knowing that it will."

"Just because I have a cordless drill doesn't mean I can build a house with it. These are tools you need to have, but you have to know how to use them."

"Token maxing is the newest version of counting lines of code: it is easy to pull up a dashboard and read a number, but engineers are smart, and if you reward token spend they will manufacture it in ways that do nothing for your business."

"When you look at LLMs, the first area where you see a major impact is usability: they make notoriously difficult tools easier to use by orders of magnitude."

"The maddening question most CTOs get is 'How are you using AI?' That's like asking a carpenter, 'How are you using a hammer?' instead of 'What are you building?'"

"Services are becoming the new SaaS. You can create these agentic workflows that basically turn the services portions of your business into things that look like software multiples or software scale."

"Producing code quickly and cheaply just revealed the bottlenecks everywhere else — design, QA, the pipelines that were never a problem before."

"AI is really just predictive technology based on advanced data processing; the American marketing genius called it artificial intelligence so everyone would think it's magic and spend a fortune on it, which you don't have to."

"Within the next two or three years, with AI coding agents bringing everybody up to the same consistent technology bar, the differentiator is going to be what do you do on the business side. If you can hold a conversation with a chief marketing officer, you're going to jump ahead of the pack."

"A lot of people said that Photoshop was going to kill photographers' jobs. Photoshop created more jobs in photography. We want AI to do our laundry and do the dishes so that we can do art."

"It's okay to be skeptical. It's okay to be cynical about it, as long as you're looking at it from a place of curiosity and you're looking at it to learn."

"Our mission is that no drug treatment should fail because of financial uncertainty."

"You have to treat the agent like it's your smartest dumb employee — the most brilliant junior-level person you have, faster and smarter than you, but with no experience and no wisdom whatsoever."

"We don't need engineers that can just type a lot of code really fast. That's now all outsourced to the cloud. What we need are engineers that want to own the outcome and understand the business problem."

"In order to be a senior engineer, you need to be a junior engineer. We're creating a double-edged sword. Yes, it will save money on developers, but you need to understand that it's not replacing — it's an accelerator, and you still need a human touch there."

"If we are not careful, AI has the real potential to take away the critical thinking skills we need going forward."

"If you're good, AI can make you great. But if you're missing anything critical in that whole flow, you're just driving a Ferrari into a ditch."