I’m in my office at Dotslash Utrecht. Startup world. 450+. Brick walls. Strong coffee. I start at 8. They start somewhat later… Somewhere, down the hall, a ping-pong ball refuses to give up.
This is home base. From here I run GenAI workshops for education, researchers, SMBs and government teams. Here I build chatbots and agents. I talk to founders. Have coffee. Try to get out of their bloody beanbags. Young kids laughing at grandpa.
Some of the local startups and scale-ups have found me. They wander in. Some already know me, attended one of my GenAi workshop for startups. Others just heard there’s “an old fart” (their words) in the building who still has a few useful tricks. Turns out: I do.
The surprise? Most of them aren’t using GenAI much at all. I understand education or SMBs lagging behind. But startups, well funded? Not using it in the product. Not in the back office. Not even in marketing. Focus on the app. Not on the customers. Value proposition of Osterwalder. Never heard off. Features over pain relievers.
So we sit down. We walk through what’s possible. Do another workshop. And you can see it click.
They’ve been thinking in the old MBA way:
Fixed capacity. Growing backlog. You have to choose.
You don’t. Not anymore.
The real questions now: What needs to be done? What could a chatbot do? What could an agent handle end-to-end? And where do we draw the guardrails so we trust it?
This changes everything. You stop fighting over human hours. You start designing for capability. Humans where they matter. Machines where they can help. Twenty-four hours a day. No coffee breaks. No sick days.
And that’s when I see it happen. The shift. From cloud native to AI native.
Cloud native made you fast and scalable. AI native makes you smart and unstoppable. It’s not a layer you bolt on: it’s in the DNA from day one.
The backlog? It starts to melt. Not because you’re doing less. Because you’ve stopped believing in what I call the Fix Capacity Fallacy.