The founder journey used to be predictable in its unpredictability. You'd code in basements, bootstrap until you couldn't, raise capital, scale teams, fight fires, and if you survived the 90% failure rate, you'd build something meaningful.
After 25 years of this dance, leading teams of 5 people in a basement to 3,500 across 17 countries, I thought I'd seen it all.
Then I picked up coding again after a quarter-century hiatus, and what I discovered fundamentally rewrites the founder playbook.
In 1999, launching a tech company meant assembling armies. You needed developers, designers, QA teams, project managers, and documentation writers. Months to ship an MVP. Years to iterate. Millions in burn rate before you knew if anyone cared.
Agentic coding just turned this upside down.
Over the past 8 months, I've created over 60 apps, or about $10.8MM worth of software, for roughly $10,000 in compute costs. That's it. Period.
That's not a typo. That's a paradigm shift.
What Changes:
🚀 Speed of Validation Old world: 6-12 months to test an idea. AI world: 6-12 days to ship working software. The founder's greatest enemy has always been time. Now we can validate ideas at the speed of thought. "Fail fast" has become "fail instantly," and that's liberating.
💡 The Solo Founder Renaissance: Remember when VCs wouldn't touch solo founders? That bias may diminish. One founder with AI agents can now outpace traditional 10-person teams. The economics are undeniable.
🧠 From Managing People to Managing Intelligence: The skillset shifts from recruiting and retaining talent to orchestrating AI capabilities. Your agents don't need equity, don't burn out, and code while you sleep. But they need precise direction, thoughtful prompting, and strategic oversight.
📊 Capital Efficiency on Steroids: We used to measure burn rate in millions per month. Now? Build first, raise later. Or maybe never. When you can prototype for the cost of a used car, the entire venture model needs rethinking.
🎯 Hyper-Verticalization Becomes Viable: That niche market of 1,000 customers? Previously uneconomical. Now? Build bespoke solutions for micro-verticals. The long tail of software is about to explode.
But Here's What Doesn't Change:
That founder madness I wrote about a few weeks ago. Still essential. Maybe more so. Because while AI handles the mechanical, you still need:
1. The vision to see what others miss
2. The courage to challenge incumbents
3. The persistence to push through the "no's"
4. The wisdom to know when to pivot
AI doesn't replace founder instinct. It amplifies it.
The tools are here. The economics work. The only question is whether you have the founder madness to seize this moment.
After 25 years of building the old way, I can tell you with certainty: There's never been a better time to be a founder.
The future isn't coming. It's compiling.
Carpe Diem.
Mark Ruddock
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member.
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member
Mark Ruddock
Thoughts of an internationally experienced growth stage CEO and Board Member.
Experienced international CEO with three exits and over 20 years of experience at the helm of VC-backed technology and fintech startups. I've founded companies and come in as a later-stage CEO to help existing companies scale. My experience spans multi-country online financial services, mission-critical enterprise software and consumer-focused mobile applications.
Currently CEO of Kontent.ai, the industry's first CMS with native AI capabilities, kontent.ai helps the world's leading organizations generate an unparalleled return on their content by enabling them to create, manage, distribute, and optimize their content at scale with unprecedented speed oversight, and security.
Before that, I was CEO of Nuula (formerly known as BFS Capital), which Nav acquired. At Nuula, we believed there was a better way to help run your small business — so we built it. Nuula is a mobile application that gives small business owners instant access to critical business metrics and innovative financial products anytime, anywhere. It provides small business owners with the tools, content, and capital they need to be successful in a modern, competitive market.
Prior to that interim CEO of 4finance. Agreed to take on an interim role to help clarify strategy, accelerate the critical transformation of the business and set the company on a course for the next growth phase.
Before that, I was Managing Director, International at Wonga, responsible for overseeing all businesses outside of the UK, including consumer lending businesses in Canada, Spain, Poland and South Africa and our eCommerce and product financing business BillPay in Germany. Prior to that was CEO of Wonga Canada.
Prior to that, I was EO Viigo. When Viigo was acquired by Blackberry in 2010, the company had hundreds of partners, won numerous awards, including “PC Magazine’s Editors Choice“, the “Most Promising New Company of the Year” from the CNMA, and the “Wireless Leadership Award” from RIM, signed marquee enterprise customers such as Oppenheimer, UBS, BAT and Scotts and been downloaded over 3MM times, becoming one of the most popular BlackBerry apps of all time.
I started my career as the Founder and CEO of INEA. A software company that was a strategic partner to many of the world's leading financial institutions, INEA had deployments in over 44 countries. Backed by RBC, Ventures West, APAX and Edgestone, the company was acquired in June 2005 by Cartesis. Cartesis was subsequently acquired by Business Objects in 2007, which was later acquired by SAP.
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