AI in Venture Capital: What Changes—and What Doesn’t

AI in Venture Capital: What Changes—and What Doesn’t—discover how AI reshapes deal sourcing while core VC judgment stays irreplaceable.

Dive into the groundbreaking world of AI in venture capital! This show unpacks how artificial intelligence is transforming investment strategies, enhancing due diligence, and predicting market trends. But what remains unchanged in this evolving landscape? Join us to explore the balance between innovation and tradition and discover insights that could redefine how you think about tech investments.

With Special Guest Alex Chompff of Evolution Labs & Evolution Ventures

Former U.S. Marine turned technology and finance leader. I served as Director of Technology for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers during the dot-com boom, supporting venture-backed startups with scalable infrastructure and growth.

Today, Alex is an active VC, a member of the Sacramento Angels, and a co-founder of the Northern California Innovation District, where he advances entrepreneurship, capital access, and innovation across the region. I also mentor emerging leaders at Sacramento State, UC Davis, and the U.S. National Labs Academy (Sandia & Lawrence Livermore).

Alex is passionate about building companies, communities, and ecosystems where integrity, innovation, and growth thrive together.
This Week’s Sponsors

Jetpack: Jetpack

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Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.070] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1032. In this show, we’ve got a fantastic guest. We’ve got Alex Chompff. month with us, Elevation Labs and Elevation Ventures. He’s a VC; he’s based in Northern California. He’s really big in the VC community in Northern California. In this episode, we’re gonna be talking, we’re gonna talk about the bigger picture. We’re gonna be talking about AI, about where it’s going. What can we surmise about how it affects WordPress, open source, and SaaS in general? Should be a great show. So, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:01:16.430] -Alex Chompff

Thank you, Jonathan. It’s an honor to be here, and I really appreciate the opportunity to share with your community. Thank you.

[00:01:23.740] – Jonathan Denwood

You got a deeper voice than my co-host, Kirk, which is fantastic. Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:01:34.310] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más and also work with the team at WP-Tonic.

[00:01:42.520] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it should be a great show. I’ve been looking forward to this one. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, we’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:01:56.220] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:02:16.250] – Speaker 4

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[00:03:15.020] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got special deals from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress technology and services for freelancers, small agencies, and power users. You can get all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. That’s where you’ll find all the free goodies, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. I’ve made a career from disappointment. There we go. So, Alex, it gets the odd laugh from the guest, actually, Alex, but sometimes it doesn’t. So let’s go straight into it, Alex. I thought, number one, you know, there seems to be a lot of conflicting narratives out there around AI. I’m not an AI— I don’t think I’m an AI hater. No. I use a fair bit of it myself. I think, I think it’s definitely a technology that has a future. But on the other hand, I get totally exasperated by AI. I call them the AI bros. And I also haven’t got much time for those who are running some of the major AI businesses at the present moment.

[00:04:51.690] – Jonathan Denwood

My patience with them has basically run out. But to start our discussion, there seems to be this narrative that one person can run a whole business in a box, that AI agents are going to be able to literally do everything. What’s your attitude toward this narrative right now, Alex?

[00:05:20.600] -Alex Chompff

Thank you for the question, Jonathan. Um, you hit a lot of things in there.

[00:05:25.880] – Jonathan Denwood

I do. I ramble. That’s why I have a co-host. He tries to control me, Alex.

[00:05:31.180] -Alex Chompff

We’re gonna do our best, but if I, if I skip one, come back.

[00:05:34.050] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, sure, Alex.

[00:05:35.170] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, let me, let me, uh, open, by the way, by saying, Kurt, Mañana No Más is a great name. Um, I’m a massive lover of Latin culture and, um, I do business in the United States. I love the name.

[00:05:49.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nice.

[00:05:50.350] -Alex Chompff

So fantastic.

[00:05:51.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

There’s a great story. We’ll share it sometime.

[00:05:54.430] -Alex Chompff

I’d love to hear it.

[00:05:55.100] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m not jealous. Are you not going to say anything nice things about my name?

[00:05:59.800] -Alex Chompff

But I think you have a lovely accent.

[00:06:01.340] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Cheers.

[00:06:04.940] -Alex Chompff

Sure. Yeah. A voice made for radio, no doubt. So, you know, in general, I’ll start by saying that I’m an optimist. I’m in life, I’m an optimist. You have to be an optimist if you’re going to be in the startup world or if you’re going to be at VC or if you’re going to be in investing. You have to believe that ultimately what’s coming is better than what you have. Otherwise, you know, none of those things make sense. I’m also a lifetime keyboard banger, right? I’ve been banging on a keyboard for money since 1990. I started banging on one in the ’80s because I wanted to meet girls. And, um, there were more girls on CompuServe than there were in Dungeons and Dragons. So it was like, okay, here I come. Um, so I’ve been playing with technology for a long, long time. And I’ve certainly seen some of the harm that technology can do, right? We don’t, we don’t have to look any further than the effect of social media in places like Myanmar to understand how difficult technology can be to society and how transformation is not an unadulterated good, right? Globalization was the headline in every paper that I delivered when I was in 6th and 7th grade.

[00:07:18.710] -Alex Chompff

And you had to read all the way to the 23rd inch of the article to read the University of Wharton professor who said, hey, you know, Globalization is not an unadulterated good for people in Pittsburgh or North Carolina. It’s, you know, cheaper t-shirts in return for homegrown industry might not be the trade you want to make. So I think that’s, that’s how you have to look at all of these things, right? You mentioned earlier that you’ve got some frustration with the leaders of the AI world. And I would offer to you that your frustration might be more around the way that they’re choosing to drive the vehicle of capitalism. Yeah.

[00:07:56.120] – Jonathan Denwood

Actually, that was, that was actually, I’ve been extremely diplomatic for me, actually. I could use some much more primitive English words to describe my frustration about the leadership of some of these AI labs and their PR teams.

[00:08:16.250] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it’s, I think there’s a lot of room for criticism. I think they leave plenty of room for improvement. And I think a lot of times, you know, when you’re young, you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s all. You just, you know, especially if you’re very, very bright, especially if you’re very, very successful at a very young age. One of the most common misconceptions is that money reflects merit. It’s a very common misconception. People with money often think that that reflects merit in some way, right? And we have a tendency to be good at one thing and think we’re good at many things, right? 80% of the world thinks it’s above average. So I think when you understand that those are just aspects of human nature and you think about maybe the way that these individuals are choosing to drive the vehicles of capitalism that they own or are responsible for, I think maybe that’s where some of the frustration comes in. I think that it’s pretty widespread. I think it’s something that we absolutely need to talk about. And I think we need to consider artificial intelligence. and capitalism and commercial and globalization, all of these are human inventions.

[00:09:27.560] -Alex Chompff

And none of them were given to us from on high. And as human inventions, we as humans need to decide how we’re going to use them. And we need to use them with intention and we need to use them with forethought, just as we use our cars with intention and forethought. I don’t get in my car and tear down the road at 140 miles an hour and shout, left turn now. Right. I actually have a number of things that I do, not only because the law constrains me, but because my understanding of the role that I play as a human on the— a human being on the road with a 7,000-pound vehicle constrain me. And so I think we ought to be taking the same kind of view toward all the things we do. And I would encourage the leadership in this particular area to slow down a little. Think about what you’re doing. Ask you. Yeah, but,

[00:10:13.180] – Jonathan Denwood

um,

[00:10:13.420] -Alex Chompff

you’re serving your— the people that are allowing you to exist, you know.

[00:10:16.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but what do you think about, you know, the big thing over the last year? You know, we’ve been on a journey for the past 4 to 5 years now. The latest thing has been agents, and the latest, um, you know, the way it’s pushed to the extreme is that one, you know, You’re gonna be able to really be able to reduce your headcount. And you’re literally, you’re gonna be able to really remove teams with just literally replace it with AI agents and you just have 1 or 2 people and that’s it. What do you actually think? Well, of this, of this particular, um, argument that’s put forward.

[00:11:10.800] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, we, we wrote a paper out of Evolution Labs. So Evolution Labs is the organization that I lead, and Evolution Labs is dedicated to the ethical use of tools like artificial intelligence and capitalism. And we, we think very deeply about these topics. And, uh, we’ve been doing, you know, uh, let’s call it AI-native workflows since 2023. And in 2026, February, we wrote a paper and the paper’s called The Greenfield Below. And The Greenfield Below borrows heavily from the Tufts University biologist’s work, Michael Levin. He has a, he has a piece of work he calls the Cognitive Light Cone. And I heard it on another podcast. And essentially, Michael Levin’s question is, um, you know, how do you define cognition without being metaphysical? And Michael Levin came up with, I think, a pretty good way to define cognition. It’s, it’s, it’s this idea of an organizing principle above its component parts. So if you think about my hand and my stomach, which will never ever meet and have never ever met, yet my hand regularly serves my stomach by delivering it something delicious. That might be cognition. Okay. And if that is cognition, that’s useful because we can, we can apply that frame to many things.

[00:12:36.700] -Alex Chompff

And it could be that there’s a kind of cognition above the human level, and that’s called organization. And you alluded to it in your question. An organization harnesses, controls, governs, in our case, human intellect. And has been doing so for millennia, so long that we’ve long since forgotten that organization does this. And if we think about what organization is, because, right, because organization has priorities that no human would have, like let’s build a jet, let’s build a car, let’s build a washing machine. No human being would do that. But an organization does that regularly. And so if you think about organization as a kind of cognitive glue for humanity, you might think that organization actually encompasses everything. that you consider to be, let’s see, GDP, gross domestic product, or national or world domestic product. All of it’s tied up in organization, not just corporations, because governments are organizations, churches are organizations, armies are organizations. Okay? So there’s a great deal of value tied up in the organizational layer. And the organizational layer’s principal value or vector for value is its ability to harness people. I could give you 1,000 engineers. I could give Curt 1,000 engineers.

[00:13:50.070] -Alex Chompff

I could give myself 1,000 engineers, and I doubt any one of us could build a plane. But Boeing does it every day. So it’s not just raw power, it’s harness, it’s intention, it’s thinking. Okay? And if you think about all the value that’s in the organizational layer and the fact that for millennia, the bottom unit in organizations has been human cognition. If you wanted more cognition, you had to wait 23, 24 years to get a cognitive being that knew what all the other cognitive beings knew and train it for 3 or 4 years. And maybe when it was 28 or 29, it would start to contribute to your organization. That would be possible. Okay. Now I can have as much cognition as I want. I can have it instantly. I can have it at the PhD level. It has certain problems. It’s amnesiac. It’s overconfident. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. It’s got some problems, but I can have as much cognition as I want, and it’s at least as good as the 23-year-old I used to hire.

[00:14:47.120] – Jonathan Denwood

Okay. Yeah. So to move the discussion on and And just before I throw it over to Curt for the next question, Alex, is that you, you actually, you actually think that large learning models and, and agents and they are machine intelligence. I fundamentally disagree with that position. I’ve seen that. I think, I think there’s a lot of anthropomorphization going on. You know, there’s— because it, it can reply to your questions and you can have a conversation, there’s a lot of projection going along. And the problems of hallucination. And the inability of the technology to consistently do things correctly. You know, it could be fantastic doing one thing and then it can be fantastic for 4 or 5 other things. And then the 6th thing, it’s totally useless. I think Garry Marcus has pointed that out quite regularly when he’s been interviewed. I think that’s a fundamental problem with the technology and the way it’s been sold. Um, how would you quickly react to what I’ve just outlined, Alex?

[00:16:21.040] -Alex Chompff

Thank you for that. I, I understand exactly what you’re saying, Jonathan, and I’m going to finish the last thought and then connect it to this thought. Okay. Because the greenfield below posits that to the degree that a human being can provide the cognitive glue, that organizations have heretofore provided. A human being can harness a great deal of cognition and, and do so very effectively. And to that end, we’ve released into the open source world, because I’m a big believer in open source. I actually ran a business based on WordPress years ago, and we’ve released an AI-native software development lifecycle. That controls swarms. So it’s like Hugging Face, but in reverse, right? Instead of an uncontrolled swarm, you get a controlled swarm. We’ve also released a mathematical contract that you can use with your artificial intelligence to deliver a universal, a very widely useful finite intelligence. engine. We call it the Attention Factory. These things are available. They’re in the public domain. Happy to share them with your community. I’ll send them to you later. Excellent. And I’ll say that in my own world, Jonathan, I’ve currently got a product, an attention factory that I’ve been developing for about 9, 10 months that is well over half a million lines of code, 100% AI-driven, handles its own marketing and sales, And, uh, I’m the only human being involved, and I run it very economically, and it provides, um, receded, um, information about what’s happening in the world currently.

[00:18:07.970] -Alex Chompff

It, um, I’ve used thousands and thousands of agents to create it over this period of time, and I’ve solved for problems like amnesia, which is what you’re describing. You’re describing the amnesiac problem. You’re describing the overconfidence problem. We did a number of things like we externalized memory. So we’re used to dealing with humans who have internalized memory and who are stateful, but you’re dealing with stateless cognition here. And so you have to instantiate it with memory. You have to instantiate it with purpose. And so we’ve designed, we’ve done that by externalizing that. We allow our, we allow the cognition to, um, we, we set it up in tiers and we allow it to, uh, govern not only itself, but, but the cognition below it. And as a result, we’re able to allow, um, dozens a day, hundreds a week, thousands over time of agents to work on a common code base without, um, catastrophizing the whole thing. And, and these, this is just a little bit of evidence from one lab in the corner, in this corner of the world. So I, I would suggest that many of the, um, things that you’re holding to be true in your head are either much ameliorated by the systems that myself and other people have created and are releasing into the world, or will be ameliorated by the simple fact that this is as bad as the technology is ever going to be.

[00:19:34.220] -Alex Chompff

You’re in the, you’re in the, you’re in the, the crappiest part of AI right now. You’re in the—

[00:19:39.630] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I refute that as well, but we could continue. So I’m going to throw it over to Kurt now. I, we could really go on a bender, but I really refute that statement as well, Alex. But I, I could be wrong and you could be totally right. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:19:57.650] -Alex Chompff

Well, and I might suggest that it’s not an or condition. We don’t have I’m right and you’re wrong or vice versa. We can both be right. We can both be wrong in whole or in part.

[00:20:07.220] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah,

[00:20:07.950] -Alex Chompff

right.

[00:20:08.270] – Jonathan Denwood

I think that’s probably right, actually, Alex. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:20:13.090] – Kurt von Ahnen

I was enthralled by your discussion, both sides, but I want to drive back to like, I’m thinking about the listener and, and not for anything like this whole VC world is a mystery to a lot of folks. Like I hear people talk in, in the tech space like, oh yeah, I’m just going to whip up a product and I’m going to throw it, you know, I’m going to present it and I’m, we’re going to get some— we’re going to get some investment and then I’m going to plan my exit, you know? And I’m like, okay, I think you’ve been watching too many movies. Um, when we ask the question about like a one-person shop, for example, I run my agency, I use a contractor model, and for the most part I use some AI here and there, but I have contractors that I leverage to do certain tasks. And I’m not going to lie, Alex, there’s this giant temptation for me to go, why am I sending this cat money when I could just For $20, get Claude to knock something out for me. But the reality is I work with other human beings as customers, and those people miss their dates, don’t get their dates right, like something, something happens.

[00:21:19.230] – Kurt von Ahnen

And for some reason, 4 clients need something on a Tuesday. And if I’m by myself, even working with AI agents, it’s not really feasible to make all 4 people happy that day. So I kind of hold on to this idea that I still need to have a team, I still need to have folks. And then from a VC perspective, I would think that it would lend a little more stability or security if you’re working with people that have a team versus some dude that’s like, yeah, I had an idea in my apartment and I whipped this thing up with some agents.

[00:21:51.850] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, yeah, that’s a— those are great points, Kurt, 100%. And, and of course what you’re speaking of is a blended Team, a blended architecture. Yeah. Some natural intelligence, some artificial intelligence, and you’re serving as the cognitive glue, or your organization is serving as the cognitive glue between them. And you’re finding that there is some substitute for labor at certain points, but that there are— there is no substitute for human interaction.

[00:22:18.240] – Speaker 4

Yeah.

[00:22:18.860] -Alex Chompff

I think that’s perfectly reasonable. I bet that’s perfectly cogent. I don’t, I don’t see why that wouldn’t be the case. Right there in the Industrial Revolution, we found different substitutes for labor. And, you know, there was some consternation from time to time over what that might entail. And as we mentioned earlier, globalization is not an unfettered good. Right. So neither was labor substitution. Right. These are not unfettered goods. These are not things that should be used irresponsibly or without thoughtfulness. So I salute the way that you’re approaching it, Curt, and I encourage you to continue. engaging with humans, because I think that it’s very, very important. One of the most important things that we can do in 2026 and 2027 is, as natural intelligences, we can learn to cooperate more effectively, because artificial intelligence cooperates extremely effectively. So we’d better learn to cooperate more effectively. And even if it, even if it means spirited civil disagreements between Jonathan and Alex about the nature of cognition or the future of work, that, that’s, that’s part of learning how to collaborate and cooperate. So I really, I salute that. Um, you know, at a basic level, Kurt, I would suggest that what you’re describing is, um, the problem that could be associated with an improperly controlled workforce.

[00:23:43.810] -Alex Chompff

And I think that’s what you’re describing. You’re saying, listen, I have these problems. that are occurring within my workforce, whether it’s human or system. And sometimes they don’t work together the same way. Sometimes they don’t deliver when one needs, or one’s not responsive to the other, or my customers are late, or vice versa. Well, that’s why you and I and Jonathan can’t build a jet, even if you give us 1,000 engineers. And that’s what makes you and your business very, very special. And that’s why you’re the cognitive glue holding it together. But I would be willing to bet you a cup of coffee that between now and 2027, this time, you will do more labor substitution with artificial intelligence than you currently are as you learn to control and deal with the agents that you’re bringing in. And as you learn to help the people around you work more effectively with these new tools, because that’s part of your job as a leader. And, and I suggest to you that at this time in 2027, it won’t simply have been a labor substitution that you’ll have done. You’ll actually be doing more interesting, higher orders of business that maybe weren’t available to you before because the technical talent is not easily available to you like it is now, or the cost-benefit analysis relative to your customer’s need wasn’t available when you were paying for, let’s say, talent that cost $60, $80, $100, $200 an hour versus talent that costs 1/10 of that or 1/20 of that.

[00:25:16.890] -Alex Chompff

Okay.

[00:25:17.110] – Speaker 4

Yeah.

[00:25:17.690] -Alex Chompff

I think when you learn to harness that talent more effectively, you’re going to find that your returns increase, your customer opportunities increase, and your workforce is more satisfied rather than less satisfied.

[00:25:32.600] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think you’re probably right, and I’d probably still get you a cup of coffee. Like, we don’t have to have a bet. So if you want to get together in a year and have a cup of coffee, I’m down. So that leads us to like the AI effect, like between SaaS and—

[00:25:48.510] – Jonathan Denwood

Actually, actually, I’m sorry to interrupt, Kurt, but I think it’s a good place for us to have our middle break. I can’t believe that we are almost half hour in this conversation. I think this is mostly down to me, but it Hopefully Alex isn’t— he looks pretty happy. It’s a pretty big subject, so the first question took up almost the whole first half of the show. I apologize to the regular listeners and viewers, but hopefully you give me a bit of slack and won’t blame me for this. But I think it’s, it’s a good spot for us to go for our middle break, and then when we come back, we’ll have some back, more questions. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. we continue this fascinating discussion. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:26:36.050] – Speaker 4

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[00:27:11.840] – Speaker 5

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[00:27:50.640] – Jonathan Denwood

Quick copy. Back, folks. Um, I want to point out, if you really want to support the show, can you not— and you’re listening on your mobile device and you’re on iTunes or Spotify— can you not give us a 5-star review? It enables us to get quality guests like Alex to come on the show and have these great discussions. So if you could do that right now, go and give us a 5-star review. That would really help me and Kurt. So I’m going to take over the next question. I’m sorry, Kirk, but I’m going to do it. I think this is the really— this is this second question, really. I was looking forward to putting this to you and getting your views based on your enormous experience, Alex. Now, we had about earlier on in the year, we had the SaaS apocalypse. You know, in share price, you know, Salesforce, Adobe, a number of some of the largest SaaS companies, their share price basically collapsed. And it’s going to be end of SaaS, basically. You know, to some extent, these sales, these, their values returned. And then a couple of days ago, I thought I thought this would never happen actually, Alex, that I might come across as a defending Adobe, one of the one of the companies that I really despise.

[00:29:33.040] – Jonathan Denwood

But basically for their you know business practices, which I I think are totally immoral. But, you know, we had AI and vibe coding utilized to build apps that are copies of most of Adobe’s suite of tools, basically. How do you really think over the next couple of years, the SaaS business model is gonna cope with the realities of AI coding? And also, how does this affect open source as well? I think this is something that you’ve got a tremendous amount of experience in, and you must have been thinking about yourself. So what’s your thoughts about this, Alex?

[00:30:34.720] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, good. Another long one, Jonathan. So let’s unpack it. So, you know, software as a service, SaaS, right? I pay a certain amount of money to get a certain problem solved. That itself was a solution to an earlier problem, right? And the earlier problem was that of the controlled management and distribution of software and infrastructure to companies that were only using a fraction of what they were purchasing, right? So when I, when I started in the 1990s, I was what they call a director of technology, and I delivered very high-end, very highly available at that time mail file and print services to growing organizations in the venture capital world. That, that was kind of how I made my money. Gmail came along and Cut the legs out of that entire business model by providing mail, file, and basic services for free, as long as you didn’t mind if they scanned your mail, or for $5 a pop if you didn’t want anybody looking at your mail. And that’s what happens is technology comes along, and particularly there’s this characteristic in technology leadership One of the defining characteristics in technology leadership is that the next product cuts out the prior product at its apex.

[00:32:01.360] -Alex Chompff

You replace the product when it’s doing its best. So if you want to understand that, look at Apple. Apple releases its next product when its prior product is at the height of its success. That’s a characteristic of technological leadership, as opposed to, say, operational leadership characterized by, like, an Amazon, for example. Okay. And here I’m borrowing from Treacy and Wirsema’s work from the mid-’90s called The Discipline of Market Leaders to explain a dynamic to you. Okay. And so what you’re looking at is you’re looking at a dynamic in which technology leaders are undercutting themselves at the height of their own success. Okay. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve reached the apex of usability for these technologies. That’s just the technology itself. Technology has to be applied. to solve human problems. And software as a service is, you know, an example of people who came along and said, well, why don’t we, why don’t we share the infrastructure? Why don’t we share the software? Why don’t we rent out access to our box? We’ll have a multi-tenant solution and people will pay a fraction of the price and they’ll be very satisfied and we’ll maintain this thing in the background and that’ll be beneficial.

[00:33:09.580] -Alex Chompff

Well, that’s okay. That’s just the model. Like, don’t get married to it. It’s just a solution for a problem that existed in the late ’90s. And now we’re in— we’re into a different place where technology development or coding or software, if you want to call it software development, is no longer the principal barrier to entry. That’s all. It’s just— it’s not the principal barrier to entry. Kurt, you, me, we can develop an app. overnight if we want to, that does any of the basic things that we want to. That doesn’t mean that those apps are going to be suitable for enterprise use. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be— they’re going to conform to regulatory requirements. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be up sufficiently so that I can have tens or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people using them simultaneously. Those are engineering problems that the creation of software at scale are simply not gonna help. If anything, they’re gonna make it somewhat worse, right? So if you were around when the PC revolution began and peer-to-peer networking began and client-server networking began in the ’90s and 2000s, all the mainframe guys, the big iron guys were like, oh my God, you have no idea what you’ve unleashed on your enterprise.

[00:34:26.430] -Alex Chompff

You do not know what’s gonna happen when you create all these data silos and you have all these different ways of processing and everybody in every department can create anything they want, and they can go hire some kid off the street who can build them a local peer-to-peer network, and then they can share. It’s going to be chaos. You do not know what you have done to your enterprise. Okay, that’s what they said, and they weren’t wrong. And as the world has gone to a more and more and more of a web-based system, you’ve actually kind of gone back to the big iron way of central control and distributed application deliverance. Well, You’re going back into that period again. It’s the Wild West. That’s all. Anybody in your organization can create a solution that, yeah, looks like a replacement for Adobe PDF. But wait a minute, is it really a solution? Can I, can I ship this document around the world? Will it be accepted in the courts of the world? Has it got a provenance trail that’s sufficient to withstand scrutiny under discovery? Right? It’s, it’s, it’s more than just signing a PDF form.

[00:35:30.660] -Alex Chompff

There’s a lot that’s going— there’s a lot of value. That’s built into that structure. Once again, you can give me or you or Kurt 1,000 engineers, maybe we can build a plane, but that doesn’t mean we can fill it with passengers, keep it in the air, and get it repaired properly.

[00:35:44.050] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I’ve known it. So I’m going to throw it over to Kurt because I’ve taken up— and, um, Kurt, what’s your response to that? And I’m, I’m gonna let you control the second half because I took up too much of the first. He’s been really patient with me, Kurt, but he knows That used to be there. So over to you.

[00:36:03.160] – Kurt von Ahnen

I actually don’t really need to clarify anything, Alex. I think you described that, you know, wonderfully moving through some things. When I think about, you know, AI and SaaS and open source software and what’s happening, you know, in layman’s terms, our conversations are turning to like, you have some people that say it’s the Wild West, build something, sell something. You know, there’s no-code geniuses out there making a ton of money. And then there’s like this other audience that’s going, well, Software is basically free now. Like, there’s no value. AI just, you know, spits out what you need and you can just like, you can just build whatever you want. It doesn’t cost you nothing. And, and I think that’s a dangerous proposition. I was like, because obviously you’re paying for AI credits and, and of course your education to figure out how to use the thing in the first place. But I’m really interested in things like, again, from the agency perspective or a freelancer’s perspective or from a client perspective. Like, I want to have a project built. I’m the client. I want to have a project built. And somebody might have said, hey, that’s going to take $10,000 and we’ll have it done in 4 months.

[00:37:08.900] – Kurt von Ahnen

And that might have been the answer, I don’t know, 3, 4 years ago. Now you have agencies saying, we can have that for you in 30 days, but it’s going to be $14,000. And customers are saying, wait a minute, I know you’re leveraging AI for this. Why am I paying you extra money for something that’s making your job easier and faster. And I think there’s like a real confusion in the marketplace about the value of the work that’s being done. And now you’re on that other side of the table where someone’s maybe coming to you and saying, hey, I built this amazing thing and it’s worth this much and I’d like a share of it, right? But how do those conversations happen if you know something’s AI-derived?

[00:37:49.140] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, yeah, there’s this tendency, Kurt, to fetishize software development. And that’s because for a long time it’s been a huge barrier and it’s been very, very specialized. Listen, any, any job, any education that relies on the ability to tie together esoteric knowledge is at risk. Okay? In 1995, being a travel agent looked like a pretty good gig. Okay. It was a pretty good, good lifestyle, good money. 2, 3 travel agents in every shopping mall, let alone in every city. Yeah. Now, when was the last time either of you used a travel agent? Right. Forget about it. So, so Saber was— the Saber system was the key to a travel agent’s good life. Okay, you learned to talk to Saber and then you could have a good life. Okay, well, the same thing is happening with lawyers. Okay, you spend your life learning to talk to the law code and then you can have a good life. Well, that— sorry, that’s not true anymore. Same thing’s going to happen to financial experts. Same thing’s going to happen to anybody whose value as an intermediary lies in tying together the esoteric. You’re talking about a system where the esoteric is immediately accessible at scale.

[00:39:14.080] -Alex Chompff

And if one system can’t do it, another can. And if the best way to do it is set 3 systems on it, let them challenge each other, and you’ll get a product that’s much better than anything you could have developed yourself or hired a human to develop. Okay? Because unlike human beings, right, the principal problem with human beings is that half of them are below average. That’s the principal problem, right? That’s the principal problem with any human construct. And artificial intelligence, As soon as one of them gets to 60%, they’re all at 60%. As soon as one gets to 75%, they’re all at 75%. There is no below average in this calculation. Okay? And so I would suggest to you that your opportunity exists in the higher order of business, in the next level of business. You don’t need to spend so much time making bricks. You have as many bricks as you want. Now, what do you want to build with those bricks. One of the most fundamental principles of technology is that the bottleneck moves around. There’s always a bottleneck.

[00:40:19.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:40:19.990] -Alex Chompff

Okay. Used to be the bottleneck was in RAM, then the bottleneck was in processing, then the bottleneck was in storage, then the bottleneck was in the network. Okay. Well, you’ve had a bottleneck at software development for so long that everybody’s accepted it. It’s correct.

[00:40:35.760] – Jonathan Denwood

I call them pinch points.

[00:40:38.120] -Alex Chompff

Absolutely. Pinch points. 100%. Now, if you think that software is the only pinch point in a successful business, okay, well, like you said, you’ve been watching too many movies. You don’t just create a product. The number one failure mode, the numero uno failure mode in venture capital is a product with no market.

[00:41:02.390] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, and that actually segues to the next question, and that is distribution. Jonathan and I do multiple shows about this where people think they’re just going to build it and people will come. They’re just going to make an awesome course and they’re going to become millionaires because some, you know, AI bro told them that’s the way the internet works. And we’re like, no, who’s your audience? Where’s your tribe? Do you have— you have a mail list? Do you have a group online that you have influence with? Do you Do you have any, like, person capita, or do you just have a cool idea? And the hard part is that a lot of people think they have a tribe. They think they have people they have influence over. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to swipe a credit card, they find it’s much more difficult than they expected.

[00:41:46.960] -Alex Chompff

Yes, absolutely. Distribution, I would say, is separate from demand. You’re calling it distribution, but I’d say even if you have unlimited— even if you’re able to create unlimited demand, you still have to support it, which is why your vibe-coded 20,000-line PDF copy might not work the way you think it does. Okay, so as a lifelong technologist, I’m here to tell you that there’s an awful lot going on in the background to continue to deliver services the way that you’re expecting them to be delivered securely, safely, in compliance with the law, and so forth. So that’s why I say people have this tendency to kind of fetishize software development, and that’s because for a long, long time, It’s been a pinch point. It’s been a bottleneck. It just isn’t anymore. That’s okay. Business is still hard. Getting attention is still hard. Figuring out how to sell a product and support it is still a difficult thing to do. It’s just that you no longer need to be limited by your software development team. That’s all. That’s the principal change that’s occurring in this dimension. And I would encourage people to step back and take a broader view.

[00:42:57.130] -Alex Chompff

of what it actually means to run a successful enterprise from end to end. It’s a lot more than developing features that customers like. That’s important, but it’s a lot more than that.

[00:43:09.260] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. And that kind of takes us— if we’re thinking about startups launching product distribution, demand, all those things, When you’re doing your thing, like, because for instance, we’ve interviewed other people that have like this romantic fantasy about bootstrapping, and then we’ve interviewed people that are the other way. They’re like, I got to get some investment, build this thing quickly, and then like I said, watch the movie and go for the exit plan. But, um, in your position, how do you like rethink what you do? Or when you see like a, like an underrepresented or, um, like a low entry point founder, like you’re like, this dude should be at a higher level. This— I’ve met the person, I’ve seen the product, I understand the background. This should be at a— how do you deal with that? Or do you just deal with someone that has low expectations, isn’t built for success, and you let them go anyway?

[00:44:06.220] -Alex Chompff

A lot in there, Kurt. So let’s unpack it a little bit.

[00:44:09.220] – Jonathan Denwood

So it’s almost worse than me.

[00:44:11.560] -Alex Chompff

Yeah. Let’s start by recognizing the value of capital. So at Evolution, we say that we offer capital, community, and culture. And the least valuable of those is capital. The least valuable. That’s because capital is much like a wedding. You can spend an awful lot of time concentrating on your wedding. Anybody who’s been married knows how much time goes into your wedding. And just like capital, it’s in the rearview mirror very, very quickly. And now you’re married.

[00:44:42.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:44:43.360] -Alex Chompff

Marriage is an entirely different proposition than a wedding. Right. So, so think about that. Now, the next thing I’ll say about capital is that it is at best a necessary evil. And I’m saying this as a guy who writes checks. At best, it’s a necessary evil. Remember, there’s this tendency to confuse merit with money, right? Don’t do that. There’s also this tendency on the— on behalf of people who write checks to think that somehow that’s reflective of their ability to make better decisions. As opposed to, let’s say, luck, happenstance, timing, or the many, many other things that contribute to our financial well-being that are often uncredited. And I would say that the actual merit, if you want to find merit, is in finding and meeting the need of, let’s call it, a customer in your community, somebody who actually has a need. that you’re meeting, and then they’re trading you their ducats. They’re giving you their money. They’re giving you their markers in the database, as Elon might say. And that’s in return for you having provided something of value that’s actually meritorious. It’s actually meritorious to earn money from your customers. It’s not meritorious to raise money from your VCs.

[00:46:02.690] -Alex Chompff

That’s just reflecting a necessary evil. And I would suggest to you that I would suggest to anybody in this business that the principal value of venture capital for an awful long time has been the financing of organization. So we discussed this earlier on. Organization is a very, very, very large value capture. It’s so large that it might be capturing all the value in the world. It might be very difficult to conceive of something in GDP that’s not delivered by an organization. Organizations deliver so much value that for speculative investors like myself, It can be worth it to pay for an organization around a team that has an idea or a product or a service that seems to have some promise. That’s really what my checks are going to. They’re going to the organization, or at least they were 12 months ago. Today, I would suggest that the organization exists below the human. That’s what we call the greenfield below. I would suggest that you have tools, if I may be so bold as to say, our software development lifecycle, which we released to the public because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, or the attention factory, which we release to the public.

[00:47:13.800] -Alex Chompff

So you don’t need to go find, you know, these particular— you don’t need to cross the kinds of barriers that you needed to cross 12 or 18 or 24 months ago. This reality has only been true since somewhere between December of 2025 and February of 2026. It’s less than a year old. that you can do what we’re talking about here, which is spin up a company by harnessing the power of cognitive agents and providing the cognitive glue yourself. And as an investor, I would much rather write you a check for $25,000 in compute than write you a $250,000 check so you can hire an organization around you. Are you capable of being the cognitive glue? Because if you are, we can make much, much better use of this capital.

[00:48:02.360] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m very sticky, my friend. I’m very sticky.

[00:48:05.700] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You understand? Does that make sense, Kurt?

[00:48:09.800] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s coming around. It’s coming around. It’s, um, it’s just when you’re in a group of peers and someone spouts off, well, software is free now, you’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up, son. Free’s a big statement.

[00:48:23.920] -Alex Chompff

Yeah, demonstratable features are close to free.

[00:48:27.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:48:27.800] -Alex Chompff

Demonstratable features. That doesn’t mean that enterprise readiness or, you know, the support for business-to-business commerce or regulatory compliance or sufficient uptime, none of those things are free.

[00:48:40.220] – Kurt von Ahnen

And I love the way that you frame that because when you deal with like vibe code people or no-code people, you know, that’s usually where I come in. Like, for instance, I have a peer that says, oh, I can build a a plugin. We use it internally. It might take me 20 hours to build it, but it’s awesome. And then I go, yeah, but your agency rate’s like $200 an hour. So now you’ve spent $4,000 to build something that you can’t really sell. And if you would have just bought something ready-made, it would have come with a license and support and all those things. I would rather pay $200 and get the license than spend $4,000 of agency time.

[00:49:23.010] -Alex Chompff

I would agree with you up to a point. And where I disagree with you is the value that that 20 hours injected into that person who did that work. That 20 hours of work.

[00:49:36.450] – Kurt von Ahnen

So, like, the knowledge and experience.

[00:49:37.940] -Alex Chompff

That, yeah, 20 hours of work that they did, however they did it, where they went from 0 to 1, where they solved a real problem, where they thought all the way through a business process and fixed it, that’s worth $4,000 easily. Easily. Just—

[00:49:53.840] – Kurt von Ahnen

Okay,

[00:49:54.950] -Alex Chompff

Easily. No problem at all. That’ll pay for itself next month.

[00:49:59.170] – Kurt von Ahnen

New perspective for me. Jonathan, I’m gonna let you wrap it up.

[00:50:08.500] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, basically, obviously we try to keep it to below an hour, but are you up for having a bit more of the discussion and keeping it going, Alex, after we wrap up the podcast, which everybody can watch on YouTube? Or do you have to leave at the hour, Alex?

[00:50:33.580] -Alex Chompff

Jonathan, I am honored beyond words that you would let me hang out on your show. My wife says that I should never, ever, ever talk about this stuff at parties, and I can’t believe that you’re gonna let me keep talking. Awesome.

[00:50:47.950] – Jonathan Denwood

Right, right. We— well, I’ve got one more question before, um, we wrap up the podcast and, um, then we go into bonus content. And like I say, you’ll be able to watch the whole show on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. Um, now let’s wrap up with the— with a final question. If you could go back in time, had your own time machine, and have a quick chat with yourself, Is there one insight tip you wish you’d known at the beginning of your career? Alex?

[00:51:28.780] -Alex Chompff

Things that I wish I knew at the beginning of my career. So many things I wish I knew at the beginning of my career. I would say if I could go back, because I came up in a very, very, very exciting time. I was very fortunate. I was raised in the California Bay Area, and the parents of the kids I played Dungeons and Dragons with were creating PeopleSoft and Genentech. My father created his first company in the ’80s. This was just the way it was. And then I went into the military, which was very active, very high, you know, very high intensity. And then I, then I came home and I hit the, I hit the valley in the ’90s. ’95, I was in Silicon Valley, and by 2000, I had scaled mountains I didn’t even know existed. And I pushed, and I pushed, and I pushed, and I burned, and I burned, and I burned, and I did a lot, a lot, a lot. I still do a lot. If there’s one thing I could tell myself from all those years ago, it would be to slow down and enjoy the view.

[00:52:44.590] -Alex Chompff

Yeah. Say hello to more people. Keep track of the phone numbers. Stay in touch, stay in contact, make human connections, and enjoy where you are. Because when you’re particularly in the earlier part of your career, you can burn so hard, especially if you’re watching. the world, and the world’s telling you, burn, burn, burn, go, go, go, grind, grind, grind. I would just say enjoy this world that Providence has given us. Enjoy the people around you and take the time to appreciate where you are, because one day you’re going to look back and the memories are going to be imperfect and you’re going to wish they were better or more perfect, more complete. You might have missed them because of your tunnel vision.

[00:53:32.060] – Kurt von Ahnen

Man, in that part of the world, you slow down, you hop on your Ducati, you go down Highway 32 to Alice’s restaurant and down Highway 9. Ooh.

[00:53:40.260] -Alex Chompff

Take your time. Yeah, yeah, go over the hill. Takes— if you’re in the valley, go over 17, go to Santa Cruz, get in the water, get in the water.

[00:53:48.930] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s good to me. So, um, like I say, I’m going to wrap up the podcast part of the show, folks. Alex has agreed to stay on. I’ve got a couple of questions. Kurt’s got to go off to a pre-booked engagement, so we’re going to wrap up the podcast. But as I said, you can hear the bonus content and the full interview on the WP-Tonic website. So Alex, what’s the best— what’s the best place for people to find out more about what you’re doing and your thoughts, Alex?

[00:54:19.230] -Alex Chompff

Well, first of all, let me just say thank you to you and to your audience for the opportunity to be here and to share some of the things we’ve learned over the years. We’re deeply humbled and deeply honored. If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing, please join us at evolutionlabs.dev. evolutionlabs.dev. We share many tools to help entrepreneurs. We support the open source community. We’re big believers in open source. Linus Torvalds is a hero around here. And so we hope to support your community, and we appreciate the opportunity to do so.

[00:54:52.190] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And what’s the best place for people to find out more about you, Kurt?

[00:55:00.110] – Kurt von Ahnen

You can reach me at mañananomas.com, or you can reach out to Jonathan at WP-Tonic, and he’ll put us together. Or you can find me on LinkedIn.

[00:55:10.020] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. We will be back next week with another fabulous guest like Alex. We’ve got some fantastic guests coming on the show. I’m always amazed at the quality that we get. We will see you next week. See you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:55:26.690] – Speaker 6

Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? And also, to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

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