The 5 tiers of AI vulnerability
About this episode
Y Combinator's latest guidance to founders was blunt: AI has cut the cost of building software 10 to 100x, so clone an existing product and sell it for a tenth of the price. Bram Kaashoek is Partner and COO at Main Capital Partners, a PE firm with more than 50 enterprise software companies representing €12 billion in assets. His answer isn't defensive. Cheaper code is real. It just isn't the game.
The episode makes three arguments. First, the shift that matters is not cost but category: software is moving from a tool that helps a professional to a platform that executes the job, which unlocks budgets far beyond IT. Second, AI vulnerability is not evenly spread — Main scores its market in five tiers, from systems of record down to single-task tools, and only invests in the top three. Third, incumbents sit on the one thing AI-native startups cannot build: years of customer and usage data. The hard part isn't orchestration. It's getting that data out of the product, especially when the product still runs on-prem.
Chapters
Guest
Bram Kaashoek is Partner and COO at Main Capital Partners. Connect with Bram 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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