Crossing the chasm at AI speed
About this episode
Yannick Dillen teaches entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School, and he watches students kill good startup ideas over a €1,000 token bill. Meanwhile, Belgian scale-ups that fired their software engineers are quietly reposting the same vacancies. His argument: the zero-employee startup is not the cheap startup. Salary cost became token cost, and the pendulum between AI and software will settle in the middle.
Three claims carry this conversation. There is now an extra chasm before the innovators, because every market is flooded with lookalike vibe-coded products — and that is pushing B2B companies back to trade fairs and billboards. The "beautiful-weather entrepreneur" who sets up an AI company and waits on a terrace will fail the way 97% of dropshippers did. And the companies that win will be the ones that remove complexity, not the ones that add features.
Chapters
Guest
Yannick Dillen is Professor of Entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School. Connect with Yannick on LinkedIn.
About the show
Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.
About Haris
Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards, a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. More about Haris →
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