A founder I’ve been emailing with sent me something that made me laugh. Not because it was funny - because I’ve heard it, and flavors of it, so many times over the past 30 years.
“I committed to Cursor and went heads down for about 4 months. Our platform went live in January. We have about 400 users across 50 paying customers. With the exception of the AWS IAC, the platform was 100% built with AI. Unfortunately, I’ve had very seasoned engineers emphatically tell me, ‘It’s not possible,’ ‘It’s a house of cards,’ or ‘It has to be AI slop.’”
She’s not an engineer by training, but she’s tech savvy enough to have run product, dev, and operations teams at scale. She committed to a tool, went heads down, and shipped a platform that now has paying customers.
And now “seasoned engineers" are telling her it’s not possible.
I told her that was nonsense. There is a ton of crappy AI-generated software out there - I won’t argue that. But you can build high-quality, production-grade software using AI right now.
Then she asked the money question.
“I also hear that investors are reluctant to invest in AI-developed platforms… especially one not developed by an engineer. Here’s my question. From your experience, is the approach I took a pro or a con for investors?”
Investors who don’t think very hard will have that reaction. But a React app hacked together by two technical co-founders in a garage isn’t inherently better than one built by a domain expert using AI tools. Code quality at the seed stage has never determined whether a company succeeds. What matters is whether you can find AI-first engineers to join your team and help harden the systems as you scale.
As a devotee of Battlestar Galactica, I can comfortably say, “All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”
The Internet - “It’s a toy.” I sat in meetings in the mid-1990s where smart people explained patiently that the Internet was a curiosity for academics. I had a CEO friend tell me to stop bothering him about the Internet - he ran a direct mail business and he’d been doing it successfully for twenty years. Real commerce happened in stores and through catalogs.
The Web - “Web software doesn’t really work and isn’t secure.” I remember a CTO at a financial services company who said that his team would never deploy software they didn’t compile and install themselves. Web apps were demos. They broke. They couldn’t be audited. They couldn’t be controlled. He had a compliance department to answer to.
SaaS and the Cloud - “It’s not as secure, reliable, or safe as running your own data center.” I heard this one for a decade. I sat across from CIOs and CTOs who insisted they needed their own racks, their own physical control, and keycard access to the data center. One told me he’d be the last person on earth to move to the cloud. Last time I checked, he was on AWS.
Mobile - “It’s a toy. Mobile devices will never replace a computer.” Steve Ballmer’s 2007 reaction to the iPhone . “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized with a plan?” The phone was for calls and maybe email. Real work happened on a laptop. Apps were games for kids.
The engineers telling this founder “it’s not possible” are in the same camp as the CTO who wouldn’t deploy web software. The VCs who won’t fund an AI-built product are like the CIOs who refused to move to the cloud.
She built something real. She should talk about it publicly. She should find AI-first engineers to help her scale it. And she should ignore anyone who tells her what she built isn’t possible - especially while she’s running it in production.
Nothing new to see here.