Build as if they cut off your API tomorrow
This week's play is uncomfortable but necessary: run a critical dependency audit on your business. Today.
Open a blank sheet and answer three questions for every AI tool you use: what happens if the price goes up 5x tomorrow? What happens if it disappears? What happens if a government switches it off or regulates it into uselessness?
That isn't paranoia, it's basic engineering. If your margin depends on OpenAI continuing to charge the same, you don't have a business, you have a temporary arbitrage. And arbitrages close.
What I'm doing at VIVIO: every critical AI process has a plan B with another provider and a manual plan C (more expensive, slower, but it works). It isn't sexy, I don't post about it on LinkedIn with pretty charts, but it lets me sleep.
Operating rule: if a single external provider can kill your company in 48 hours, your company is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
What I learned
This week I had a conversation with a founder I admire a lot. I showed him where VIVIO was heading, proud of what we'd built over the past few months. He looked at me and said: "Alejandro, you're optimising something when you still don't know whether people will pay the price you need."
One of those uncomfortable silences.
And he was right. I'd spent weeks polishing product details that seemed key to me, when what I should have been doing was getting back out there, on calls, closing. The engineer-founder trap: taking refuge in what you know how to do (build) to avoid what scares you (selling at a real price).
My lesson: when you find yourself very comfortable, get suspicious. Comfortable is almost never what moves the business.
On the radar
- Reid Hoffman raises 100M for Prentis, a lab for AI agents that operate computers. The next battleground isn't the chat, it's the agent that executes. Get ready to redesign processes, not to write better prompts.
- HubSpot launches AI Search Grader for free, to measure how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini describe your brand. SEO is no longer Google, it's how the AI describes you. If you don't come out well there, you don't exist for the next generation of buyers.
- A bipartisan proposal in the US to give the government a kill switch over large AI models. Welcome to the era where your stack can be switched off by decree. Diversify providers or pray.
- The US ban on foreign drones is being sidestepped by shell companies with fake addresses. Every regulation has its hole. Every barrier to entry, looked at closely, is an opportunity for whoever reads the small print.
The actionable advice
Apply the "three column process" rule today. Take your most repetitive task of the week and split it into: (1) what only you can do, (2) what someone else can do with clear instructions, (3) what an AI can do with a good prompt. Most founders live 100% in column 1 out of ego. Move one single task to column 3 this week. Just one. And time how much you get back.
Behind VIVIO
A real number from VIVIO this week: we found that 60% of our operations team's time went on tasks that a well-built agent did in minutes (matching creators to briefs, first screening, follow-ups).
What I learned building it: automating badly is worse than not automating. The first attempt spat out bad matches and we burned trust with two clients. We rolled it back, put human review at the critical points, and now it does scale.
Lesson: AI doesn't replace judgement, it amplifies the judgement you already have. If you didn't have a clear process before, AI will just make you wrong faster.
This is a version of what I send every week, unfiltered, in my newsletter "Eso no fue suerte". If you want the rest, subscribe for free.