CEO at SAS | Creating Moonshots

I help founders and organisations navigate moonshot-scale ambitions using a methodology derived from NASA mission design.Most strategies fail because they confuse ambition with readiness. 

Leaders commit time, money, and reputation before they have learned what actually needs to be true. I help them work out what must be learned, so they don't spend years executing the wrong thing.

I spent 25 years building and scaling businesses, mentoring 100+ university spinouts (pre-spinout and many post-spinout) across Oxford, England, and Scotland, and working as commercial lead inside the complexity of deep-tech ventures. I am not just an advisor who parachutes in. I am an entrepreneur who's built the thing.

I am currently leading the Oxford Moonshot Programme, which launched in January 2026 with 18 deep-tech founders. I am also writing a book on how big ideas become reality, using case studies from Deeptech, the Eden Project to SpaceX.

When I work with schools or boardrooms, I bring authentic Apollo mission artifacts, including a lunar module contact light and an SCE to AUX switch, as proof that this methodology is not borrowed. It is rebuilt from the best framework humanity has for achieving the impossible under extreme uncertainty.

This is for Deep-tech founders, academic leaders, CEOs, and institutions with serious capability but foggy direction.

This is not for early-stage founders looking for tips, people shopping for "support," or those wanting validation rather than challenge. If you want navigation clarity, let’s talk.

Mark Zwinderman

Universities are sitting on unrealised value in spinout equity. Very little of it converts to real cash for the universities. How do we change that? By reducing complexity.

The value to cash gap is not about the quality of the science, or the quality of the support. The past ten years have seen a tremendous development in University ecosystem support.

The issue is complexity. Building a business for the first time is genuinely hard, and the distance between world-class research and commercial reality can feel vast for founders who never made that crossing before.

The TTOs and programmes doing the best work understand this. But even the strongest institutional support has limits when founders lack a clear map for the journey itself.

What moves the needle is reducing the complexity of business building for people who have not done this before, and building real bridges of understanding between the science and the commercial world it needs to enter.

That's the work I do. Tested with deep tech founders in Scotland, England and now at the Oxford Moonshot, and designed to sit alongside what institutions are already doing well.

If you are responsible for spinout outcomes and you're thinking about how to close the gap between paper value and real returns, I would welcome a conversation.

International Women's Day. Let's talk about the number that won't move.
For more than a decade, investment into female-led ventures has been stuck at around 2%.

Every year, the same speeches. Every year, more pledges, more programmes, more panels. The number does not move.
Because we keep trying to fix behaviour inside a broken process. Nobody is fixing the process.

The conventional investment sequence runs like this:
Warm introduction → Pitch performance → Pattern matching → Fundamentals

Steps one to three filter for familiarity before the opportunity is ever properly assessed.
A founder who has spent five years solving a hard technical problem in a university lab is not optimised for that sequence. By the time you get to the substance, the decision is largely already made.

This is not a bias problem. It is a design flaw.

The 2% is not just a funding gap. It is an innovation gap.

Every year, technologies that would have reached patients, customers, and communities are lost, not because they weren't good enough, but because the process that evaluates them was designed to find the familiar, not the best.

Healthcare solutions. Climate technologies. New materials. Food security. Education. The hardest problems, in the sectors that matter most, disproportionately abandoned at the point of investment.

Meanwhile, capital flows to propositions that pattern-match. We are all paying the price for this. Every one of us.

The research is unambiguous. When opportunity is assessed before identity, female-led ventures are selected at rates close to parity.

The gap does not exist at the level of quality. It exists at the level of sequence.

So fix the sequence.
Invert it. Assess the technology, the market, and the milestones first. Then make the introduction. Then meet the founder.
The founder still wins or loses on merit. They just reach the room having already established that the opportunity is serious, rather than having to prove the technology, the market, and their own credibility simultaneously in a 20-minute pitch to people who have never encountered their sector.

We call it the Structured Investment Protocol.
No new money required. No new fund. No new procurement.

Pilot it through existing co-investment infrastructure. Two years. One metric: does the percentage move?

If it does, and the evidence says it will, you have a replicable model.

Scotland becomes the proof of concept for the UK. The UK for Europe.

This is not a call for more awareness. It is a call for a Moonshot.

Mercury has flown, the research proves the mechanism works.
It is time for Gemini, build the protocol, pilot it, publish the results.

Happy International Women's Day. Now let's move the number.

I architect Moonshot programmes for leaders, enterprises, and regions

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£17 billion. That is the annual economic reward sitting on the table for Scotland if women-led businesses achieved parity with male-led ones.

Women now start 54% of all new businesses in Scotland. The talent is there. The ambition is there. The ideas are there.

More women are starting. Fewer are surviving. The post-startup attrition rate is 61%.

We need to talk about Sequence.

The conventional investment process runs mostly like this:

Warm introduction → Pitch performance → Pattern matching → Fundamentals

Steps one to three filter for familiarity before the opportunity is ever properly assessed. By the time you get to the substance, the decision is largely already made, on non-fundamental grounds.

Fix the sequence and you recover the value.

This is a call for a Moonshot.

We don't need another programme. Not another pledge. Not more unconscious bias training. They accept the existing architecture and ask under-represented founders to perform better within it.

A structural intervention. A redesign of the investment process itself.

Mercury has already flown.

The research is unambiguous. When opportunity is assessed before identity, female-led ventures are selected at close to parity rates. The mechanism works. 

It is time for Gemini.

Build the Structured Investment Protocol (SIP). A practical framework that puts technical and commercial assessment first, before the warm introduction, before the pitch performance, before the pattern matching.

Pilot it with three investor partners through Scottish Enterprise's existing co-investment fund.

No new money. No new vehicle. No new procurement. Start now.

Run this for two years with one metric: does the percentage of capital reaching female-led ventures move?

If it does (and it will) Gemini is done. Apollo begins.

Apollo rolls it out across the full SE co-investment programme.

Not a pilot. Not a best practice recommendation.

A condition of participation.

Every investor operating with SE co-investment support applies SIP. Results published annually across the full programme. That dataset, the first of its kind in the UK, becomes the evidence base for national adoption.

Scotland becomes the proof of concept for the UK.

The infrastructure exists.

The evidence exists.

What is needed now is the decision to use them.

£17 billion is waiting to be unlocked.

If you are working on any part of this, as an investor, a university commercialisation professional, a policy maker, or a founder who has lived the sequence problem, I'd like to hear from you.

Full breakdown of the three-stage Moonshot plan (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo) on Substack. Link in comments.

Scottish Enterprise Adrian Gillespie

There is no greater mission nor a more important space in which we have to succeed.

Climate change is the big one.

On the 26 March in Edinburgh it is the Venture Cafe that will bring together the talent working to address the No 1 issue.

I’ll be there with the Moonshot Coffee Wall. A new way to connect those with a mission to those who can help.

Because often all it takes is the right introduction, the right conversation over a coffee, and the next level is unlocked. The path ahead a bit clearer.

Register now: 

https://lnkd.in/eF3ZNJjD

Venture Café Edinburgh

The very real launch of Moonshot Factory at B4 at amazing Rhodes House in Oxford.

A group of ambitious B4 members coming together to jointly work out their path to impact and develop their Moonshot clarity over the next six months.

Wonderful to work with Richard Rosser and his B4 folks.

What a morning 🙂

The UK's push to increase university spinouts makes perfect sense. That does bring with it structural risk, which is easy to miss.

World-class research. Deep intellectual capital.

So, the drive to increase spinout volume is understandable. When public funding rewards throughput, institutions will optimise for throughput.

But volume changes the structural risk profile.

When spinout numbers increase, three quiet shifts tend to occur.

Ambition thresholds become less explicit. Support resources spread more thinly. Governance conversations get deferred.

Individually, each one doesn’t sound that dramatic. Collectively, they will create fragility.

The danger is we create more structurally underpowered spinouts. Spinouts launched without clear 5–10 year ambition definition, explicit scale expectations, stage-gated progression discipline, early governance alignment, or deliberate capability mapping.

Volume can unintentionally dilute scale probability.

And when fragility surfaces later, stalled growth, misaligned boards, difficult fundraising, it's often attributed to "market conditions" or "founder capability."

In reality, the weakness was architectural.

Most universities already have strong components. TTOs, incubators, commercial champions, proof-of-concept funding, investor networks. What's often missing isn't capabilit, but integration.

Volume is a metric. Scale is impact.
If we are serious about both, structural coherence becomes more important as numbers increase.

I have been working on a framework that maps and strengthens spinout pathways under volume-driven policy, without replacing what already exists.

More on that soon.

80,000 hours.

That's roughly what the average professional career contains. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years.

I was reading The Precipice by Toby Ord over the past weeks. Great book. Go find it.

Most of us spend the first 20,000 figuring out what we're supposed to want. The next 20,000 optimising for it. And somewhere around hour 40,000, if we're honest, a quieter question starts to nag us.

Is this trajectory actually mine?

Not the CV version. Not the dinner party answer. The real one.

I spent 25 years building businesses and the last decade working with founders at Oxford and in Scotland, and beyond on exactly this question, applied to their ventures. The methodology works. And I have been watching it work on something else entirely. 

The people themselves.

Something is in the works. A structured programme for senior professionals ready to stop optimising the wrong destination and define the biggest true thing they could do with their remaining 40,000 hours.

More soon. If the question is already in your head, drop me a message.

#Career #Moonshot #Leadership #Purpose

The killer quote:

“No account of what changed, what improved, what failed, and what was learned. A document genuinely interested in accountability would benchmark itself against its own history. This one arrives each year as if the previous one never existed.”

That is the key thing here for me. What went well? What did you improve? How did the founders see this?

£42M is a lot of cash. Any decent Moonshot is achieved by transparency and a learning forward methodology. 

What we could do with £42M…

Open article: Scotland's tech ambition and the numbers that won't add up by open.substack.com

Scotland's tech ambition and the numbers that won't add up

A quick weekend experiment.

If you are been thinking about changing something in your life or business, try this today.

Nothing dramatic.
No major announcements.
Just 30 minutes and a pen.

Go to a café or somewhere quiet and write down the answers to three questions.

1. If nothing really changes, where will I be in 5 years?

Your role.
Your income.
Your lifestyle.
Your energy levels.

Just the honest and likely continuation of the path you are on.

2. What else could I do?

Different industry.
Start something.
Advisory work.
Move country.
Build a portfolio career.
Scale a business properly.

Write down every realistic option that comes to mind.

3. What would I do if I didn’t care what anyone thought?

No reputation worries.
No expectations.
No “but people like me don’t do that”.

Just write the honest answer.

Something interesting often happens at this point.

People realise their current life wasn’t designed.

It mostly emerged from momentum and expectations.

And there may be other trajectories available.

You don’t need to change everything this weekend.

But clarity often begins with coffee, a pen, and thirty minutes of honesty.

Moonshot: Trajectory. The link is in the comments. Sign up to the wait list to say "Maybe this is something I want to explore"

We are being encouraged to increase spinout volume.

Volume is okay. More companies could mean more jobs created and more value created. Could.

Fragmentation is an issue.

Most universities already have:

– Incubators
– Commercialisation teams
– Mentor networks
– Investment readiness support
– Proof-of-concept funding

Individually, these are strong.

But spinouts tend to fracture later and in three predictable places:

Ambition Drift (Navigation in the Moonshot method)
The mission was never defined precisely enough. So every opportunity feels equally valid.

Capability Mismatch (Propulsion)
Founders optimise for immediate traction, not staged capability build.

Governance Lag (Life Support)
Decision rights, equity clarity and board composition are addressed reactively. Problems surface later. Academic control holds back decision making.

None of this is a capability problem.

This is a sequencing problem.

When Navigation, Propulsion and Life Support aren’t intentionally aligned, existing support structures don’t reinforce each other and they operate in parallel.

The opportunity is not to add more programmes.

It is to architect what’s already there so ambition, capability and governance mature in sequence.

Volume with coherence increases resilience.

We can create spinouts that succeed if we get the architecture right.

Books then.

I read an article in December on the beauty of reading. Imagine if you read books in different genres, essays, long form journalism, new writers, that book you would not normally pick up and buy, the type of book you would not normally read. 

How many new ideas you would be exposed to. New language. Analogies. Metaphors. Reasoning. Beauty.

Imagine if you stopped consuming news and social media.

Well, I did and do.

Just finished book 41 since Christmas. 

Not to brag. For some weird reason I read quickly. Always have. Not claiming greatness.

So much better to be absorbed by a book to consuming the 24 hour news cycle.

This might be the best one yet. Go pick it up.

The idea isn't the hard part.
Saying it out loud is.

Most big ambitions die quietly, not from lack of effort, but from lack of permission. Permission to be taken seriously. Permission to be a little bit crazy.

The Moonshot Coffee Wall gives you that permission.

Write down your moonshot. Put it on the wall. What you're building, what you need, who you need to find.

That's it. No stage. No slides. Just your idea, in your handwriting, in a room full of people who showed up because they have one too. 

Someone will stop. Someone will read it. Someone will say "me too."
Come find your people.

Register for the next Venture Cafe Edinburgh: https://lnkd.in/eF3ZNJjD

Venture Café Edinburgh March 26. Launch of the #MoonshotCoffeeWall
by The Moonshot Factory 

#Scotland #Innovation

How do you tell your story?
I was at the The James Hutton Institute in Dundee yesterday to satisfy the Environmental engineer in my head. It all combined quite nicely with Moonshots.

It's a wonderful place and with some great people. I loved the micro plastics removal technology. A future partner of SAS Environmental Services Ltd? I hope so.

Some excellent discussions around how we get Scotland's innovation to have an impact at home and abroad.

My take then.

1. More female led businesses funded. The Structured Investment Protocol will lower the hurdle for women looking to raise money. 

2. The system must stop measuring success only. All the public funding for innovation requires, if not demands, success numbers. Founders need to fail, stop, move on, recombine, learn. Failure must be a required element of funding.

3. Get to London. Or, at least, get out of Scotland. There is money. Go to London. Spend a week meeting investors.

Thanks to Rachel Clark and Zachary Sorrells for the invite. They are amazing at what they do. 

Zach converted the 54 slide PPT on microemulsion technology, interfacial surface tension, and molecular structure we had for SAS into a single slide with this image here. In fairness, he suggested no slides, 17 years ago 😃. 

We kept just this one slide as it tells the story of what SAS does for our customers. We take oil waste and we separate it.

Today is Men's Day across much of Eastern Europe.

Not just Father's Day. Not just for heroes. For all of them.

The man who shows up without being asked. The one who listens more than he speaks. The friend who drives three hours and never mentions it again. The brother who makes the call when things get hard. The son who's quietly becoming someone you're proud of.

Today, think about the men in your life who carry things without complaint, who show up, and who make the people around them feel steadier just by being there.

And let them know. A message. A call. A drink raised in their direction.

It’s a happy day. And I always liked how it it is for all men, not just Father’s Day. Sons, brothers, friends, uncles, dads, husbands, partners.

Have a toast. Have a great day.

Elon Musk says he approaches everything from first principles.

Most people nod along. But what does that actually mean in practice?

First principles thinking is a form of intellectual demolition. You strip away every assumption, every analogy, every "this is how it's always been done", until you hit bedrock. 

The irreducible truths. Then, and only then, do you build back up.

SpaceX asked "what is a rocket, fundamentally, made of?" The answer changed everything.

The reason most deep tech breakthroughs never reach the world is not a lack of funding. It is not a lack of talent. The reason is that the entire system surrounding the founder is built on assumptions that were never questioned. 

Assume the research is enough. Assume IP protection comes first. Assume a business plan is the bridge between lab and market. Assume equity ownership is the most valuable.

Strip those away and you are left with a harder, more honest truth. This is a brilliant founder with a world-changing idea is standing at the start of a mission with the wrong navigation system, insufficient propulsion, and life support that was never designed for the journey ahead.

They have a map, but it's a road map. And you can't navigate an ocean with a road map.

They have momentum, but it's pointed in the wrong direction, or not nearly powerful enough to escape gravity.

They have support, but it was built for the academic environment they're leaving, not the commercial one they're entering.

That's not a funding problem. That's a systems problem. And systems problems require first principles solutions.

If you are a Scotland based business or founder I can not urge you strong enough to register on GlobalScots.

The global network of people happy to help, talk, guide, or in some way just assist you is one of the most valuable resources I have used over the years.

Register. It's free. Free! What is free these days? Then, search by sector, geography, etc.

When you register on the GlobalScot platform, you can connect with experts from around the world 🌏

There are over 1,200 GlobalScots across 68 countries around the globe, and they are all willing to help you boost your business 📈

So if you're looking for expert advice, global connections, and fresh perspectives, GlobalScot is here to help. 

Sign up today ➡️ https://ow.ly/JCJx50YiaJh

#GlobalScot #Business

David Equi carousel.pdf

Women's day is over for another year. That means 364 days to not worry about all that stuff. Right?

We keep going. The world is full of talent and the world is full of problems needing solving. We all have a stake in the success of half the world population...

AI then. How do we apply AI in creating a more equal investment climate?

Building on the Structured Investment Protocol (more on my Substack) that Scottish Enterprise should trial. 

Blind the evaluation process where humans can't. The most immediate application is using AI to strip identifying information from initial pitch materials and score them on business fundamentals. The first gate. An AI system that ingests a pitch deck, anonymises it, and scores it against a structured rubric (market size, unit economics, defensibility, team capability framed as skills not pedigree) would force every deal that clears the threshold into a human meeting on merit. The critical design choice is that the AI doesn't make the investment decision. It controls what gets through to the humans. That's where the current bias sits. In who gets the meeting.

Analyse the question bias in real time. That Harvard research showing investors ask men promotion questions and women prevention questions. AI can monitor pitch meetings (with consent) and flag the pattern live. Imagine a dashboard that sits alongside a Zoom call and shows the investment committee in real time: "You asked three prevention-framed questions in a row. You asked the previous male founder zero." People change behaviour when they can see it. This could be deployed in any accelerator demo day or VC partner meeting tomorrow.

Model the counterfactual portfolio. I wonder if you take the last ten years of UK VC deployment data and use AI to build a model. Then ask if the same capital had been deployed gender-blind based on business fundamentals alone, what would the portfolio returns look like? 

There's evidence that female-founded companies deliver better returns per pound invested. An AI model that can demonstrate, with real UK fund data, that gender bias isn't just unfair but is actively damaging LP returns would change the conversation. I would hope. 

AI trained on historical data will replicate historical bias unless we are deliberate about the training set and evaluation criteria. If we train a "good founder" model on ten years of UK VC-backed companies, we will get a model that thinks good founders look like the people who already got funded, which is overwhelmingly male. 

The design principle has to be that AI evaluates the business, not the founder's resemblance to previously funded founders. That's a fundamental architectural choice, not a fine-tuning problem.

Who will step forward?

More on my substack

Open article: The 2% Moonshot by open.substack.com

The Moonshot Coffee Wall is coming soon.

Keep your eyes out at an event near you 😀 

A new way to connect people with great ideas to people who can help.

A Moonshot passes four tests. Number four is where people really struggle. 

1. Is it Specific? There is no way two people could understand the goal differently.

2. Is it Time-bound? A defined horizon. Not "one day", not eventually.

3. Is the Scaling explicit? Not incremental improvement. That's a milestone.

4. Is it Costly? There are trade-offs. Something meaningful must change.

Do you have a Moonshot?

There is an architecture that enables the successful creation and growth of spinout companies.

Not a tool. Not a stage-specific programme. A spine that runs from the first definition of a mission all the way to scale, and holds under pressure at every point in between.

I spent years developing it and using it. I call it the Moonshot Architecture.

It applies at pre-spinout. When you're defining the mission before the company exists. It applies post-spinout, when you need to sequence capability before the gaps become crises. It applies at scale-up, when growth pressure tests whether the original mission still holds.

And it applies to the people designing the pathways. TTOs, commercialisation teams, programme leaders asking whether their support arrives at the right moment, in the right order.

This year I will be running a small number of pilot workshops at universities. Three hours. Mixed cohorts, pre-spinout, post-spinout, scale-up in the same room. That mix is deliberate. Seeing the same architecture hold across all three stages is the point.

If you're leading a deep tech programme, running a TTO, or building a commercialisation pathway, then I'd like to bring this to you.

DM me or drop a comment below.

Cosmin Rusu

Transforming Visions into AI MVPs & Products | Founder @Duty Ventures | Ex {Google, Apple and Amazon}

Hi, I’m Cosmin, the Founder and Lead Engineer of Duty Ventures. 

After some experience as a software developer in companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon, I decided to launch my project.

With several former colleagues and college friends, we launched our own startup specializing in software development for entrepreneurs and customers needing software development services. 

Duty Ventures is all about developing software products from start to finish, thanks to the experiences we have all acquired in the past years.

One of our most successful services is aimed at entrepreneurs and early-stage founders, for whom we provide an MVP-builder service getting their product from 0 to 1 within weeks!

However, our services are not limited to that. The teams we create do much more than just create MVPs and are able to adapt to the different technologies requested, all of this in an agile way.

Our most recurrent services are the following:
- MVP creation
- Custom Software Development
- Blockchain Development
- Mobile Development
- Checkout pages
- E-Commerce

And our most used technologies are:
- Ruby on Rails
- React
- React Native
- Java
- NodeJS


If you want to learn more about how we can help you, head over to: https://dutyventures.com


Phone: (+1) 669 200 9568 / (+40) 754 973 314
Email: cosmin@dutyventures.com

Founder & Lead software engineer

I'm leading a software development agency focused on fast iterations. Most of our clients are shipping more features, responding faster to support tickets, and have accelerated growth because of us.

We focused on HealthCare a lot lately due to the accelerated digitalization in this industry. I am a strong believer that we can make healthcare more technically advanced via pure software. 

In terms of technologies, our previous projects involved Ruby on Rails, React, React Native, Scala, Java, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS (ECS, RDS, AKS), Stripe Connect, HIPAA compliance.

Some of our previous clients: 
- Spotify
- Colgate
- Go4Ellis (incl. HIPAA compliance)
- KindBody (+1 HIPAA)
- NXT Sports
- Noom (Healthcare)
- Mochila Fulfillment
- 3Step
- Mylk Guys (YCombinator)
- NLV Productions
- SH Technologies
- One Step Software (Techstars)
- Ergodic Labs
- Med Prep
- Testing Psych
- Abundance Digital
- Tookitaki

Everyone is cutting juniors.

AI writes code. AI reviews code. AI tests code.
So why would anyone hire a junior developer in 2026?

I'll tell you why. Because I do it. Every quarter.

Here's what the "AI replaces juniors" crowd doesn't understand:

AI doesn't build culture.
AI doesn't grow into your next team lead.
AI doesn't challenge your senior engineers with fresh perspectives.
AI doesn't stay loyal for 5 years because you gave them their first real shot.

The data says junior positions dropped 20-30% in some regions.
The industry says "juniors are obsolete."

I say that's short-sighted and dangerous.

If we stop training juniors today, who leads your engineering team in 2030?

We'll face a competence gap worse than any talent shortage.
A generation of engineers who never learned to think... because a machine did it for them.

At Duty Ventures, we pair every junior with a senior + AI tools.
They learn faster. Ship sooner. And they bring something no LLM ever will:

Hunger.

The companies cutting all junior roles to save money?
They're eating their seed corn.

Cosmin Ionut

AI-forward engineers. Embedded fast. Delivering from day one. | Founder @Duty Ventures | Ex {Google, Apple and Amazon}

Stop paying for ngrok. There's a better alternative.

Meet zrok - an open-source tunneling tool built on zero-trust networking principles.

Why I switched:

1. Free subdomains - no paying for stable URLs
2. Open source - self-host it or use their free SaaS tier
3. Built on OpenZiti - actual zero-trust security, not just marketing buzzwords
4. Supports public AND private shares
5. Auto HTTPS/TLS out of the box
6. Custom domains supported

If you're a developer who regularly needs to expose local services (demos, webhooks, testing) - ngrok's free tier feels increasingly restrictive.

zrok gives you what you actually need without hitting a paywall every 5 minutes.

The setup is straightforward. The docs are solid. And because it's open source, you can inspect every line of code handling your traffic.

In a world where we're tunneling more and more traffic for dev and testing, having a free and secure option matters.

Check it out:

zrok.io

Home - zrok by NetFoundry

Unpopular opinion: most people using AI to build apps have no business deploying anything to production.

A 20-year sysadmin just quit his job this week. Not burnout. Not pay. His company offered bonuses for the best "vibe coded" app and got a tsunami of shadow IT - unsecured apps, unvetted AI agents on corporate machines, and a team of THREE sysadmins drowning under "innovation" built by people who can't explain what their own code does. When he raised security concerns? Debated. Overruled. Approved anyway. Because a VP saw a demo and got excited.

Copying ChatGPT output into production doesn't make someone an engineer. It makes them a liability with a deployment pipeline. A CTO in the thread admitted his marketing team had secretly built 11 apps - one storing customer data in a public S3 bucket. Eleven apps. Zero reviews. This is where we are now.

The predictable response: "That's just gatekeeping. Engineers are afraid AI will replace them." No. Good engineers use AI daily. The difference is they can read it, debug it, secure it, and explain it to an auditor. AI didn't lower the barrier to building software. It lowered the barrier to building dangerous software. Most organizations can't tell the difference until something breaks, leaks, or lands on a regulator's desk.

That sysadmin isn't the problem. He's the canary. Companies will keep ignoring people like him until they're explaining to a regulator why customer data ended up on the open internet because Dave from accounting "had a great idea for an app."

Stop handing out innovation awards. Start asking who's going to maintain it, secure it, and answer for it when it fails.

Open article: From the sysadmin community on Reddit by reddit.com

A friend of mine had his first meeting with a potential client in Germany.

He didn't prepare a pitch deck. Didn't try to "understand the project." Didn't walk through his company's services.

Instead, he asked one question:

"If I fly from Romania to Germany on Friday, can we meet face to face?"

They said yes instantly.

That was 5 years ago. They're still working together.

Here's what most agencies get wrong: they lead with capabilities. "We do React, we do mobile, we do cloud."

Nobody cares.

What founders actually want to know is: will this person show up when it matters?

The best business relationships I've seen didn't start with a scope of work. They started with someone proving they gave a damn before the contract was signed.

If you're choosing between a partner with a perfect proposal and one who'll get on a plane for you — pick the plane.

Hot take on vibe coding:

If frontend is mostly about calling APIs, and those APIs should be secure by default - does vibe coding make the most sense on the frontend?

Think about it. The frontend is essentially a curl wrapper. A UI layer. Less security risk.

Here's where I think things are heading:

Senior engineers will migrate towards building secure backends. Modular, composable backend "components" that can easily interact with each other.

Open-source microservices you can plug and play.

Need auth? Spin up your own Auth0-like instance. Need user-generated content? Spin up a UGC microservice - posts, comments, likes, replies, threads. The same patterns we use on LinkedIn, Facebook, X.

You reuse what exists. Then you generate your own microservice for what's specific to your product.

And once you become big enough? You open source it.

The frontend becomes the place where AI can truly shine - generating UIs, connecting to secure APIs, iterating on design fast.

The backend stays the domain of engineers who understand security, data, and system design.

Vibe coding isn't replacing developers. It's splitting the role in two.

For years, I thought the best way to create more value for clients was to charge less.

Lower rate = more value for their money. Simple math, right?

Wrong.

Here's what actually happened when I charged less:

→ Clients treated the work as disposable
→ My team felt undervalued, so they gave B-level effort
→ I attracted price-shoppers who churned the fastest
→ We couldn't invest in better processes, tooling, or talent

The moment I started charging what the work was actually worth, everything changed.

Clients were more engaged. More committed. More respectful of timelines.

My team felt ownership because the stakes matched the effort.

And the clients who stayed? They became long-term partners, not one-off projects.

If you're a founder evaluating dev partners and your main filter is "who's cheapest" — you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

The most expensive mistake isn't paying too much. It's paying too little for a team that doesn't care enough to get it right.

Stop hiring 10 developers when 2 + Claudes can do the same job.

I know. Controversial. Especially coming from someone who runs a dev agency.

But here's what nobody in outsourcing wants to say out loud:

The old model is dying.

1. Junior positions in outsourcing dropped 20-30% last year
2. Clients are asking: "Why pay for 8 devs when 1 senior + AI does 80% of the work?"
3. McKinsey predicts a 20-30% reduction in the global outsourcing market by 2030

And yet... most agencies are still selling headcount.
Still billing by the hour.
Still pretending nothing changed.

Here's the uncomfortable truth from someone who runs an agency:

If your only value proposition is "cheap developers" - you're already dead.
You just don't know it yet.

At Duty Ventures, we made a decision 2 years ago:
Stop being a code factory. Start being a product partner.

Don't sell hours. Sell shipped features.
Don't sell headcount. Sell outcomes.

The agencies that survive 2026 won't be the cheapest.
They'll be the ones who embraced AI, specialized in complex domains, and aligned incentives with their clients.

The rest? They'll be replaced by prompts...

Heroku just entered "maintenance mode."

Except this time, it's not your app - it's the entire platform.

Salesforce announced Heroku is transitioning to a "sustaining engineering model." Translation: no new features, no new enterprise contracts, just keeping the lights on.

If you've been a developer long enough, you know what this means. Standing still in tech is the same as moving backward.

Here's the thing though - Heroku's ideas won.

Every git push deploy. Every platform that "just works." Vercel, Render, Railway, Fly - they all carry Heroku's DNA.

The lesson for anyone building software products:

Your product can pioneer a category and still lose if the parent company stops investing. Innovation without sustained commitment is just a head start for your competitors.

If you're still running on Heroku - your apps are fine for now. But start planning your next move.

The platform that taught us what great developer experience looks like deserved better stewardship.

"We spend $XX,XXX/month on LLMs" is the new "we hired 200 people in 6 months."

Both sound impressive until the board asks: what did we actually get for it?

The smartest teams I see aren't spending more on AI. They're spending less, and ACTUALLY shipping more.

Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup:

You have exactly 2 tools - stock options and vision.

Stock options they'll tell you aren't worth anything. So it really comes down to vision.

The best founders can explain how the world is going to look in a way that's so compelling, people leave Google and Microsoft to build it with them.

It's essentially sales. Selling to employees.

But here's the part most founders miss:

Hiring is also a self-selection process. The best companies are polarizing on purpose. They give a stark picture of what they are and what they aren't.

"We work 18-hour days - if that's not you, don't come."
"We go home at 5 every day - if that frustrates you, don't come."
"We do yoga as a company - if that's weird to you, don't come."

The founders who try to be everything to everyone end up hiring people who leave in 3 months.

The ones who are radically honest about their culture? They attract true believers.

Running a staff augmentation agency, I see this daily. The clients who know exactly what culture they're building find the right talent 10x faster.

Hot take: If your outsourcing partner can't deliver the same result with fewer people... they're the WRONG partner.

Let me explain.

I've been on both sides of this.

As a founder of a dev agency, I've seen clients pay for:
- 6 developers sitting in standups for 3 hours/day
- 4 QA engineers manually testing what AI can do in minutes
- A project manager whose only job was "translating" between client and devs

That's not a team. That's a payroll.

The smartest clients I work with in 2026 don't ask:
"How many developers will you assign?"

They ask:
"How fast can you ship this feature, and what does it cost?"

That's the shift:

OLD MODEL: Pay per seat. Vendor profits when project takes longer.
NEW MODEL: Pay per outcome. Vendor profits when they ship faster.

We moved to milestone-based pricing at Duty Ventures years ago.
Result? Our incentives match the client's: ship fast, ship right, move on.

When AI makes a 3-person team as productive as a 10-person team was in 2023 - the billing model has to change.

If your vendor is still charging you by the hour in 2026, ask yourself:

Whose interest are they serving - yours or theirs?

The outsourcing industry is worth $618 billion.
Most of it is still billed by the hour.
That's a $618 billion misalignment of incentives.

So I guess Claude is OOO today

https://status.claude.com/

So if AI will write code, and we treat that as a commodity, and as a pure blackbox inputs / outputs type of thing - what's next? Maybe we fully automate QA? Maybe we fully automate a simulation on how that code would interact with actual users? So we "simulate" a real world usage of an app / a website over time to find bugs / issues? Then, what next?

There are two types of early-stage technical decisions:

Type A: Decisions that get your product in front of users.
Type B: Decisions that prepare for users you don't have yet.

Most founding teams spend 80% of their time on Type B.

Kubernetes, microservices, auto-scaling, blue-green deployments... all Type B.

A $10 VPS with your app deployed on it? Type A.

And here's the uncomfortable math:

3,000 users paying $30/mo = $1M ARR.

A single server handles that without breaking a sweat.

Every week you spend on Type B before you have paying users is a week you're not learning whether anyone even wants what you're building.

Ship boring infrastructure.
Build interesting products.

Someone replicated Monday.com's core features in 60 minutes using AI.

Cost: $15.

Monday's stock took a hit. People panicked.

But here's the thing nobody's talking about:

Code has been getting cheaper for 20 years. AI just made the trend impossible to ignore.

If your entire business defensibility is "we built an app," you were already vulnerable. AI just made it obvious.

The real moat was never the code. It's:

→ Deep understanding of a specific customer problem
→ Product decisions that reflect real usage, not assumptions
→ An architecture that actually scales when users show up
→ A team that iterates based on data, not vibes

I see founders still spending months planning features that an AI tool could scaffold in an afternoon. And I see Silicon Valley founders shipping AI-generated MVPs that fall apart the moment real users touch them.

Both are missing the point.

The winners will be the ones who combine fast tooling with sharp product thinking.

Code is a commodity. Product judgment is not.

monday.com

monday.com | Outpace everyone with the best AI work platform

I think we're gonna start seeing a lot of these in the following month, if not even weeks!! Not sure where this is going but we re getting there 200mph 🚀🧨

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