Investing When Anyone Can Build

If building software is becoming so cheap and so fast, what are VCs actually betting on? Where's the edge when the technology itself is no longer the advantage?

Matt Małysz (Partner, Inovo VC) invests €0.5-4M in pre-seed and seed-stage startups from Central and Eastern Europe. He's seen portfolio companies grow from zero to $12M ARR in 12 months, profitably. In this episode, we dig into what changed and what didn't — and why the fundamentals of building defensible companies still matter even when anyone can ship code.

We discuss:

- Why AI acts as a force multiplier for good engineers (and barely helps weak ones)

- The pressure on non-technical founders when technical founders just got 10x stronger

- SaaSmageddon — what's really happening to SaaS valuations and why

- Where moats come from now: product, network effects, distribution — not software itself

- Why VCs only care about companies that can reach massive scale (and why that's fine)

- The bet on deeply embedded vertical workflows replacing generic knowledge work

- Agent-to-agent interfaces: why the next wave of software won't be designed for humans

Episode length: ~40 minutes

Resources mentioned:

- Inovo VC: https://inovo.vc

- Sintra AI (Inovo portfolio): https://sintra.ai

- SaaSmageddon and the Super Bowl (Ben Thompson / Stratechery): https://stratechery.com/2026/saasmageddon-and-the-super-bowl/

- CNBC vibe coding test on Monday.com: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/05/how-exposed-are-software-stocks-to-ai-tools-we-tested-vibe-coding.html

- OpenClaw (open-source personal AI assistant): https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw