Disrupt or Defend

Airtable sold to Bending Spoons. The founders walked away ultra-high-net-worth, and the employees who gave the company three, five, or ten years walked away holding something worth zero.

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Daniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup, sits down with Sebastien Stanley-Jones of Flippa, the world's largest M&A marketplace for digital assets. Around 15,000 transactions a year run through that marketplace, and Sebastien thinks most founders are missing the same thing. They know how to build. They have no idea what their exit ramps look like.

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The conversation covers what makes a business genuinely sellable, why the preference stack decides who actually gets paid, and why fundraising is like walking through a desert. Sebastien gets spicy on VCs, explains why a business built in a weekend with no defensibility sells for a fraction of revenue, and lays out what he would look at with 500K to spend on an online business.

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👤 Guest Bio

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Sebastien Stanley-Jones leads global strategic M&A for EMEA at Flippa, where founders sell SaaS, e-commerce, content, apps, and domains into a global buyer network. He is Canadian, based in Amsterdam, and his career runs through investment banking, private equity corporate development, and fintech: managing director at Two Roads Advisors, global business development at Accel Club, corporate development at Moonshot Brands, and head of enterprise at Clearco in Toronto. He also mentors founders through Plug and Play.

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📌 What We Cover

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• What Flippa requires before its brokers will push an asset to the buyer network: two years of monthly financials, taxes in good standing, and an API call into Stripe, Adyen, or SumUp to confirm the revenue is the revenue
• Why the Airtable sale is a preference stack story, and why the employees absorb the loss while the founders and most of the VCs do not
• Sebastien's own version of it at Clearco, scaled fast to multi-million status, options now worth zero
• Fundraising as walking through a desert: fill the canteen when you find water, go one and done, and stay the person dictating the next terms instead of taking the price
• Why he thinks most VCs are not very good, and what daily mark to market has to do with judgment
• The three-part test for whether to sell: are you having fun, do you have line of sight on growth, are you making money. On the way up you have control. On the way down you are a passenger
• Defensibility as the only question that matters for AI-built businesses, and why how you built it is irrelevant if the revenue is durable
• The 500K playbook: entry price first, the SaaS apocalypse is overblown, e-commerce hard assets are cheap, and key-person risk gets solved with SOPs and deferred payments that keep the seller answering the phone

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

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• Flippa
• Airtable, Bending Spoons, Meetup, komoot
• Constellation Software
• Clearco
• Stripe, Adyen, SumUp, Shopify
• Wayflyer, 8fig
• Atlassian
• Lovable, Claude, Cursor
• Plug and Play
• Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Craft Ventures
• Sebastien Stanley-Jones on LinkedIn

Most law firms bill by the hour. Bennett B. Borden built one that almost never does.

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He tells Daniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup, that conservatively 80% of what a lawyer does today is better done by AI. The 20% left over is very high stakes. So he took his team out of DLA Piper and started Clarion, a firm that practices AI law and builds agentic systems for clients at the same time.

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Bennett calls gen AI the most transformative technology since electricity, and he has a reason for the comparison: every prior revolution was additive to knowledge workers, and this one competes with them. His framing for clients is Iron Man, not the Terminator. You don't unplug a person and plug in a bot.

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The conversation gets into the layer most companies skip, which is the sensors and metrics that prove a system behaves precisely as intended. Daniel pushes on whether a vendor can credibly govern its own AI, where liability actually sits when something goes wrong, and why data sovereignty turned urgent in the space of a few months. Bennett's split on adoption: 20% technical problem, 80% psychological.

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👤 Guest Bio

Bennett B. Borden is a lawyer and data scientist, and founder and CEO of Clarion AI Partners. His career started at the CIA in a new data analytics division in the early '90s, work he describes as understanding, predicting, and influencing behavior from digital data. He went on to Georgetown Law and a graduate degree in analytics from NYU Stern, then spent years in big law focused on automated decision-making systems: the algorithms behind credit approvals, hiring, social feeds, and ads. He was Partner and Chief Data Scientist at DLA Piper, where he led the global AI practice, and founded Clarion in 2024.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why gen AI is the first technological revolution that competes with knowledge workers instead of adding to them
• The 80/20 split in legal work, and why the remaining 20% carries all the risk
• How Clarion runs as an AI boutique law firm, an AI strategy practice, and a build shop at once
• Why the billable hour makes efficiency your enemy, and how Clarion prices by value, phase, or task instead
• Walmart's outside counsel guidelines: use AI on this list of work, or we aren't paying for it
• Whether a vendor can govern its own AI, and the case for a third party you can pass liability to
• Where liability sits under EU and US law today, on the deployer rather than the developer, with contracts carrying the rest
• Open weight models behind the firewall, and who's asking for them: defense, family offices, funds, pharma, material science
• The "artifacts of acumen" idea, and how to find the repetitive, data-centric tasks worth building an agent around

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Clarion AI Partners
• DLA Piper
• Harvey
• Glean
• Artisan
• OpenEvidence, Legora, Lovable
• Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft Azure
• EU AI Act
• Am Law 200

Users don't blame your table when it stutters. They blame their WiFi, refresh the page, and wonder if their laptop is dying. Then they open a product where the rows glide, and yours suddenly feels broken.

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Daniel Kazani sits down with Khalil Baydoun, co-founder of 1771 Technologies and the team behind LyteNyte Grid, to get into why speed is a product decision, not a nice-to-have. Khalil breaks down the buy-versus-build math for data grids, why the pull to adopt a tool has to come from developers rather than the CEO, and how a small London team runs like a 30-person company by putting AI everywhere except the hardest engineering.

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They also get into the pressure founders and CTOs now pile onto dev teams: be McDonald's, but make the food gourmet. And why Khalil sits on the dreamer side of the AI debate. For a founder-to-founder view from Daniel and Softup on where developer productivity actually comes from, this one delivers.

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👤 Guest Bio

Khalil Baydoun is the co-founder of 1771 Technologies, the London software company behind LyteNyte Grid, a data grid and data table library that developers embed into their applications. His team has built data grids for almost three years, focusing on performance and developer experience over sales and marketing.

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📌 What We Cover

• The buy-versus-build decision for data grids, and why building one can cost engineers months or a full year of time.
• Why the customer is the company but the user is the developer, and what that means for how adoption actually happens.
• Latency as the silent killer of user experience, explained through slow conference calls and laggy FIFA matches.
• The McDonald's-but-gourmet expectation now landing on every dev team, and how Lovable changes what a product manager expects from developers.
• Doomers versus dreamers on AI, and why Khalil bets on workflows that haven't been invented yet.
• How a small team uses AI for documentation, copywriting, invoicing, testing, and code reviews, but still can't get a data grid past 80% from scratch.
• The "Dyson of data grids" pitch: pick it up, plug it in, get going.

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• LyteNyte Grid / 1771 Technologies
• Claude Code
• Lovable
• Cursor
• Microsoft Copilot
• Palantir
• ChatGPT

Berlin's startup scene has changed. When funding was cheap, an idea and a pitch deck were enough. Now, early-stage founders are walking into banks — not VCs — because capital has gotten expensive and the runway has to come from somewhere. The conversation that follows gets into what that shift looks like from the inside, and what it means for the kind of companies being built in Berlin right now.

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Daniel Kazani sits down with Visar Ferizi, startup advisor at Berliner Sparkasse, to talk about how one of Berlin's oldest institutions is showing up for its newest founders. Visar has spent the last three years working directly with early-stage companies — helping them navigate financing, connecting them to the city's network, and watching the Berlin ecosystem shift from consumer apps toward deep tech, automation, and defense. The conversation is grounded, honest, and full of the kind of perspective you only get from someone who sees hundreds of pitches and has to make real decisions.

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👤 Guest Bio

Visar Ferizi is a startup advisor (Firmenkundenbetreuer für StartUps) at Berliner Sparkasse, Berlin's largest bank and a fixture of the city's financial life since 1818. He has been with the bank since 2017 and has spent the last three years working exclusively with early-stage founders — advising on financing, connecting startups to investors, KfW, IBB, and the broader Berlin ecosystem, and being a consistent presence across the city's startup events and university competitions. He's worked with over 80 startups and is part of a three-person team dedicated entirely to the city's founder community.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why a 200-year-old savings bank runs a dedicated startup team, and what founders actually get from working with Berliner Sparkasse beyond a free first-year account
• How the funding environment has shifted over the last three years — from easy VC money to founders approaching banks at the MVP stage
• What Visar sees changing in the types of companies being built in Berlin: fewer delivery apps, more deep tech, automation, and defense
• Whether AI is still just a tool or whether it's become the product itself — and why Visar thinks the distinction matters for how you build
• The single most common piece of advice Visar gives first-time founders, and why AI's speed advantage makes it more urgent, not less
• Who to get feedback from first: customers vs. investors vs. outsiders, and how to think about the difference
• What a bank actually needs to see before it will finance a startup (business plan, financial model, cash flow, USP) — and why showing up unprepared is the fastest way to get a no
• The a2zebra / TukToro story: how a founder who started working at 16 built a math-learning dice toy backed by the founders of tonies, and why that story stuck with Visar

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Berliner Sparkasse — Berlin's largest bank; startup advisory team led by Visar Ferizi
• Visar Ferizi on LinkedIn — connect directly or search his name to reach the startup team
• IBB — Investitionsbank Berlin — Berlin's state development bank; a key financing partner for early-stage companies
• KfW — Germany's federal development bank; startup and SME loan programs
• Berlin Partner — Berlin's economic and technology development agency
• Business Angels Club Berlin-Brandenburg — Berlin's leading angel investor network
• a2zebra / TukToro — Berlin-based EdTech startup; math-learning dice toy for children aged 4+ backed by the founders of tonies
• tonies — German children's audio brand (Toniebox); founders Patric Faßbender and Marcus Stahl invested in a2zebra
• EDURINO — Munich-based children's learning startup; physical figurines + app (comparable in the kids' phygital-learning space)
• Softup Technologies GmbH

Everyone says small businesses will start building their own software. Tim Metzner has a sharper read: most owners are too busy surviving to ever maintain their own tools.

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Host Daniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup, sits down with Tim to work through what makes a software company defensible when technology stops being a moat. They get into why he chose to step out of the day-to-day at the insurance company he co-founded, what he looks for in early-stage founders, and why he tells people to build a scalpel before a Swiss Army knife.

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The conversation runs through founder replacement, AI hype, why a 150-year-old business still runs on Excel, and what to do about AI slop on LinkedIn. Throughout, Tim keeps returning to one idea: fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

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👤 Guest Bio

Tim Metzner is a Cincinnati-based serial entrepreneur and the founder of Fireroad Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on small and mid-sized business tech. He co-founded the technology studio Differential and the faith-based accelerator Ocean, which launched around 70 companies. In 2018 he co-founded Coterie Insurance, a small business insurance company that has raised over $200 million, and held a senior leadership role there before stepping out of the day-to-day. He also writes a daily newsletter, Daily Mo.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Tim chose to tap out of his CRO seat instead of being forced out, and how he started treating his own company the way an investor would.
• What makes a founding team fundable once AI turns "build a great product" into table stakes: a go-to-market motion that's hard to copy, plus real domain expertise.
• Why "fall in love with the problem, not the solution" is the filter he uses on founders.
• How a two-person fund uses AI internally to screen hundreds of deals a month, trained on their own deal memos.
• Why small business owners won't build and maintain their own CRMs, even with vibe-coding tools, because they're in a knife fight every single day.
• The "build a scalpel first, not a Swiss Army knife" approach to getting embedded in a critical workflow.
• Why trade shows and picking up the phone still beat AI-generated cold outreach when you're selling to SMBs.
• The case for less but better content, and treating every post as someone's first impression of you.

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Fireroad Ventures
• Daily Mo newsletter
• Tim Metzner on LinkedIn
• Coterie Insurance
• Differential
• Ocean Accelerator
• Manus
• Claude Code
• Claude Cowork
• OpenAI / ChatGPT
• Lovable
• GitHub
• Y Combinator
• Calendly
• Notion
• Pipedrive
• The Last Dance

Real estate moves slowly. AI moves fast. Daniel Kazani sits down with Frederik Raspé, founder and CEO of Acquirepad, to figure out what happens when you point fast technology at a slow, trust-heavy industry.

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Acquirepad takes the manual admin out of commercial real estate investing. Frederik explains how AI reads the messy documents real estate runs on, rent rolls, lease agreements, investment memos, and structures them so a team can get to a decision faster.

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The two get into where automation stops and human judgment starts, why 30% of the work can run on its own while 70% still needs a person, and how an industry that punishes mistakes learns to trust a machine. Frederik also makes the case for buying versus building, and what breaks when companies try to run their own AI tools internally.

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👤 Guest Bio

Frederik Raspé is co-founder and CEO of Acquirepad. He studied real estate and spent his early career inside the brokerage world, working as a broker at one of the world's largest firms (Cushman & Wakefield) and then in a digital strategy and innovation role at CBRE, the largest commercial real estate services firm in the world. That mix of property and technology led him to build Acquirepad, an AI platform for real estate asset managers and investment companies. He's based in Germany.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Frederik went after commercial real estate, an industry known for moving slowly, and how years inside CBRE shaped that bet ㅤ
• How AI reads and structures the unstructured documents real estate runs on: rent rolls, lease agreements, investment memos, offering memorandums ㅤ
• The split between automation and oversight: 30% of processes fully automated, 70% with a human in the loop, and why the deeper you go in a deal the more critical that human gets ㅤ
• How Acquirepad earns trust in an industry that's sensitive to mistakes, through free trial periods and 99.9% accuracy on core processes ㅤ
• Buy versus build: why 80% of software cost sits in maintenance, not the initial build, plus the story of a client whose self-built tool broke when one employee left ㅤ
• Why an LLM on its own isn't a database, and where a vertical product beats a raw chat tool ㅤ
• The time savings Frederik sees on the workflows he covers: up to 80 to 85%, like turning a half-day rent-roll job into ten minutes ㅤ
• Where Frederik thinks AI will and won't change real estate, why the decision itself stays slow, and his read on the AGI hype

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Acquirepad ㅤ
• Frederik Raspé on LinkedIn ㅤ
• AI models discussed: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral, Qwen ㅤ
• Automation and developer tools: n8n, Make, Claude Code, Codex ㅤ
• Companies referenced: CBRE, Vonovia, BlackRock, Blackstone, Personio, Slack

What separates a SaaS business worth a real exit from one that buyers quietly walk away from in 2026?

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Daniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup, sits down with Dirk Sahlmer, partner at FE International, to talk about how AI is reshaping SaaS M&A. After six years on the buy side at saas.group, Dirk now advises founders through sell-side exit processes, and he's seen both ends of how exit value gets won or lost.

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The conversation goes long on retention as the new growth signal, why a lot of AI-hype revenue has rotting cohorts under it, and the valuation misconceptions most founders carry into their first exit conversation. Dirk also breaks down what real AI defensibility looks like, why a fifteen-year-old "boring" SaaS can still command a strong multiple, and the one question every founder needs to be ready to answer before a buyer asks it.

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👤 Guest Bioㅤ

Dirk Sahlmer is a partner at FE International, where he advises SaaS and tech founders on competitive auction exit processes.

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Based in Germany, Dirk trained as an engineer before co-founding his own SaaS company, then spent close to six years building the deal origination function at saas.group as their first full-time hire, evaluating thousands of SaaS businesses and leading multiple buy-side acquisitions. In late 2025, he moved to the sell-side at FE International. He also writes the saas.wtf newsletter on SaaS metrics, valuations, and exit readiness, followed by thousands of founders and investors.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why retention has become the metric buyers watch most closely in the current AI hype cycle
• The biggest mistakes first-time exit founders make: no sparring partner, no clean numbers, no realistic sense of what the business is worth
• How private equity and financial buyers really think about boring SaaS that survives the next ten to fifteen years
• What separates a real AI business from a chatbot bolted onto a website
• Where AI defensibility actually lives: unique data, deep workflow integration, vertical focus
• Why a fifteen-year-old SaaS can outperform a hype-stage AI-native startup in an exit
• Why simple products like Calendly probably don't get replaced by your afternoon hack
• The question every founder should answer before a buyer asks it: how is AI both an opportunity and a threat to your business?

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🔗 Resources Mentionedㅤ

• FE International
• Calendly
• Personio
• Slack
• Asana
• HubSpot
• Monday.com
• AWS
• Microsoft Azure
• n8n
• Claude Code
• ChatGPT
• Dirk's email: [email protected]

Spotify and Netflix both know what you like. The one place that exists for your literal taste, the restaurant, hands every guest the same printed card.

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Daniel Kazani sits down with Amir Khoshbakht, co-founder and CTO of Lokalia, to talk through what happens when AI moves out of the dashboard and into the dinner table.

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Amir's team is rebuilding the restaurant menu as a personalized surface. Items sort themselves to each guest based on prior orders and cross-venue preferences. An in-menu AI assistant answers questions in any language. A new agent on the manager side predicts which ingredients to push or pull back this week.

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Early data from Lokalia's customers: 15 to 20% more engagement with menu items, and bigger checks per guest. The conversation also covers why most restaurant owners almost hate AI on first pitch, and where AI actually earns its keep when it leaves the dashboard.

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👤 Guest Bio

Amir Khoshbakht is co-founder and CTO of Lokalia. He spent over a decade in software engineering, with prior full-stack and blockchain work at Soar Robotics and a co-founder role at Aikido. He started Lokalia after deciding AI should move out of dashboards and into the parts of daily life people physically experience, beginning with restaurants and cafes.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why every restaurant menu is the last static surface in your customer experience
• How Lokalia's AI Waiter inside the menu changes the order flow
• The 15 to 20% lift in engagement when the menu sorts itself around each guest
• Cross-venue preference matching: liking the chocolate cake at restaurant A changes what restaurant B shows you first
• What the data shows about why low-selling items actually sell low (rarely about quality)
• "The Expert," Lokalia's new agent that predicts ingredient demand for the kitchen
• Why most restaurant owners almost hate AI when you walk in pitching it
• Where Amir sees hospitality landing: an operating system with fewer tools, not more

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Lokalia
• Amir Khoshbakht on LinkedIn
• Spotify
• Netflix

The hype says AI is coming for your engineers. John McKinney, a fractional CTO who has run engineering at AOL and a string of CTO seats since, says it is closer to "super Google."

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Daniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup, sits down with John to talk about what has actually changed in how software gets built. The conversation lands on the shifts that matter most for founders and engineering leaders right now: product-minded founders shipping working prototypes with Lovable before an engineer joins, the dev role looking more like a mechanic and less like an architect, and the cost of trusting Claude Code with HIPAA-bound systems.

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John is a 20-year engineer and longtime skeptic of every new wave that hits the industry. He is also a working bassist in two New York metal bands, which says something about the kind of CTO he is. They get into vibe-coded MVPs, why QA engineering might be the role most reshaped by AI right now, the broken state of remote technical hiring, and the difference between sprinting to a real horizon and selling a horizon you can't deliver.

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👤 Guest Bio

John McKinney is the founder of Merge Conflict, a fractional CTO and technology-strategy consultancy he started in 2017 in New York City. He came up as a web developer in the Ruby on Rails era, co-founded the agency Ashe Avenue in 2007, and stayed on as VP of Engineering for AOL Core Products after AOL acquired the company. Since then he has held CTO seats at Netcapital, LaterPay, Heyday, and Food52. Off-keyboard he plays bass in the New York metal bands Woe and Glorious Depravity.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Claude Code went from novel to "a staple of every engineer's toolbox," and why John doesn't believe it turns one-x developers into ten-x.
• The shift in product roles: product leads now ship working proof-of-concepts before an engineer touches the code, and what that means for PRDs.
• A real client story of going from a multi-million-dollar agency build to shipping the same retail and clinician software with Lovable.
• The new shape of the dev job: bulletproofing, production hardening, and compliance checking after the founder ships.
• Why a HIPAA leak is still your fault, not Claude's, and how exposed API keys on the front end happen.
• The poisoned hiring funnel: AI voice modulators in phone screens, 400 unqualified applications in the first hour, and Voight-Kampff-style interviewing for replicants.
• What CS 101 might look like when "Hello, World" gets replaced by prompt-writing, and whether junior-to-mid acceleration actually speeds up.
• John's read on the "software engineering is solved" claim, the Klarna walk-back, and why the snake-oil crowd from Web3 is the same crowd selling AI now.

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

Merge Conflict - John's fractional CTO practice

Claude Code (Anthropic)

Lovable

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Grok (xAI)

VS Code

Selenium

Stripe

Ruby on Rails

Klarna (the AI-layoffs walk-back John references)

Artisan (the "replace your human workforce" billboard campaign)

Icon (the AI ad-maker Daniel tested)

Sam Altman, Ray Kurzweil, the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner

Most people think of AI as a productivity tool. Dr. Adam Link sees it as something else entirely: a wealth transfer mechanism, one that's quietly shifting money from people who don't understand AI toward people who do. In this episode, Daniel Kazani of Softup and Dr. Link break down what that actually means for founders, developers, and anyone trying to build financial security in a world where AI agents are replacing entry-level work.

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The conversation spans a lot of ground: the collapse of the college-to-job pipeline, why non-technical entrepreneurs are outpacing developers in AI adoption, the potter's wheel vs. the factory floor, and why the court system is just the debugging process for laws. Concrete, candid, and a bit unsettling in the best possible way.

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👤 Guest Bio

Dr. Adam Link, CFP® is the founder of Fireweed Capital, a fee-only, fiduciary wealth management firm based in northern Minnesota. He holds a Doctorate in Computer Science, a CFP® designation, and currently serves as Senior Engineering Manager at Coinbase, where he leads the Cloud Center of Excellence and FinOps teams. Before Coinbase, he worked across multiple tech startups with three exits and an IPO under his belt. He now specializes in active risk management for tech families - and builds his own CRMs over the weekend.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why AI is accelerating the shift from a labor economy to a capital economy - and what that means for how you think about your "war chest"
• The college-to-job pipeline breaking: why large tech companies are pausing entry-level hiring and what happens to the path from degree to wealth
• The CRM story: how Dr. Link got blocked by a vendor on a Friday and had a fully vibe-coded, custom-built replacement running by Monday morning
• AI as wealth transfer - not just to hyperscalers, but to small businesses that cut OpEx, kill vendor dependencies, and keep more of their own money
• Vendor concentration risk: when you replace your whole team with OpenAI, you've just created a two-vendor company
• The railroad analogy: why AI infrastructure is different from past wealth transfers - and why this time, everyone gets their own train
• The franchise model: one friend's idea to build AI-powered websites and license the software out instead of building a SaaS
• Why non-technical entrepreneurs are outpacing developers in AI adoption - and why that's terrifying if you're a developer
• The potter's wheel vs. the factory: how AI is disrupting the creative flow state that made software engineering meaningful
• AI hallucinations in financial advising, why freeform text has no unit tests, and why good professionals still matter

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Fireweed Capital - Dr. Adam Link's wealth management firm
• [email protected] - Contact Dr. Adam Link directly