Matt Burgess

🚨 99.99% of Agent Builders Will Die The tech world has fallen into a trap: “Building is easy now, so let’s make our customers build software.” Sounds empowering — until you realize what it really means. That “agent builder” now needs full DevOps, SecOps, AgentOps, and SolutionOps… congratulations, you’re now a dev tools/code editor/infra company (and probably didn’t mean to be). Only a handful of companies on the planet have the pockets — or developer appetite — to sustain that. The rest? A slow, painful death is coming. 🪦 The smarter move → open up your platform for the handful of deep, capable agent builders that actually have the maturity to build real software. At AdoptAI, we’re doing exactly that — empowering our customers to turn their applications into building blocks for any serious agent builder. Our latest OSS release makes this possible. 👉 Check it out: https://lnkd.in/g7Gcv38J Adopt AI #AgentBuilder #DevTools #DevOps #AgentOps #MlOps

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1995. 1999. 2004. Three school districts, three opportunities to build technology departments from absolute zero. They each had no clear policies, practices or staff; they just told me, “We need this to work, and you’re the person to make it happen.” Each role was essentially a startup inside a bureaucracy. I had to define the vision and strategy, build the team from scratch, create processes that didn’t exist, justify every dollar spent, and prove value to skeptical stakeholders. Instead of seeking venture funding, I was convincing superintendents. Instead of user acquisition, I was driving teacher adoption. But the core skills were identical: building something valuable from nothing with limited resources and unclear requirements. When a company recruited me for product management in 2011, they recognized something I hadn’t fully understood about myself yet. I was an intrapreneur who thrived on zero-to-one challenges. Looking back, those three roles were perfect training for startup life. Every impossible constraint, every skeptical stakeholder, every resource limitation taught me to build solutions that actually work in the real world. The bottom line is this: some of the best entrepreneurial training happens inside organizations that need you to act like a founder.

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Most founders want feedback on their pitch deck. But sometimes the hard truth is: don't even make one. Last week, a cybersecurity exec came to me wanting help with his deck. His idea? Building a cheaper alternative to an industry-leading data observability tool. For 20 minutes, he passionately explained: → How expensive current solutions are → His technical expertise → His plan to undercut the competition Then I asked: "Has any prospect said they'd pay for this?" silence*** "Well... I know it's expensive, so clearly they want something cheaper" I told him to forget the deck. Instead: • Do paid consulting first • Talk to actual prospects • Validate if anyone would switch He wasn't happy. Pretty sure I lost that client. But better than letting him waste years building something no one wants. Validate first, sell later. Stop relying on Ads to grow B2B tech company The moment you turn it off, your leads dry up. Start creating content → purplepatchservices.com

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Customer data is a privacy lawsuit waiting to happen. But there's a way to avoid this... Most companies handle privacy like a ticking time bomb. Everything works fine until someone sues you. Then comes the mad scramble. This reactive approach costs fortunes in litigation, damages customer trust, and creates unnecessary business risk. But fixing customer data privacy DOESN'T have to be overwhelming. The pathway forward requires two key elements: 1. START WITH EDUCATION Anyone touching customer data needs to know: - What consent means in practical terms - How to handle deletion requests - Which regulations apply - Where sensitive data lives Teams deprioritize privacy because they don't understand the risks. Without a champion, these projects get pushed aside. 2. SIMPLIFY YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE When customer data flows through dozens of systems owned by different teams, consistent privacy enforcement becomes impossible. At RudderStack, we see companies transform their privacy posture when they move to a single pipeline for all customer data movement (whether from websites, backends, or internal systems) A unified pipeline gives you: - One place to enforce consent - Consistent policies across channels - Simplified audit trails - Faster response to regulatory changes With the right infrastructure, privacy becomes systematic, not sporadic. The choice is simple: Invest in privacy now, or pay for lawyers later.

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GovDash has been shipping fast. Here’s what’s new in just the past 2 weeks: - Manage multiple proposals under a single opportunity (RFI, draft RFP, etc) - Instantly trace generated text back to sources with enhanced Dash citations - Create and edit custom roles & permissions for greater control - Faster, more accurate citations across massive RFPs We’re building the operating system for modern government contractors, one update at a time.

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There's a thin line between tenacity and tact. I get it. Cold outreach is part of the game. As a CTO, I receive a steady stream of InMails, emails, and phone calls. If I responded to each one, I’d never get any actual work done. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the hustle. Business development is a tough gig. I respect the persistence, the creativity, the tenacity. But last week, a sales tactic caught me off guard. And not in a good way. Someone I’ve never met called into a 𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 during a live listener segment and used his airtime to name-drop me. Not rudely, but clearly as a way to say, “Hey, I’ve been trying to get in touch for a year and haven’t heard back.” I was floored. Here’s the thing. I actually hadn’t forgotten about him. In fact, I’d been considering whether his product made sense for us. But after that stunt, the answer became clear. It doesn’t anymore. To the up-and-coming sales professionals out there: Sales isn’t about forcing a conversation. It’s about earning one. It’s about building trust, not burning bridges. Want to stand out? Focus on crafting a sharp, relevant elevator pitch that helps your cold outreach 𝘩𝘪𝘵—not just make contact. Persistence is powerful. Tact is priceless. 🌱 Grow. 📣 Share. ♻️ Repeat. #MentorMonday #SalesTips #CTOInsights #ProfessionalGrowth #ColdOutreach

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Thinking about diving in and developing or designing on day one of your new website or custom software project? Think again! 💡 My latest blog post lays out the case for why Discovery makes a difference and takes the guesswork out of creating digital products. 🧭 I also break down what can go wrong when Discovery is overlooked. 🫣 https://lnkd.in/ehyu__WW #digitalproducts #discovery #strategy

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You ever have that moment when your gut tells you something’s off— a slowdown in files, a shift in referrals— but your reports don’t show it yet? In title, the decisions you make today often don’t show up for 45–60 days. That delay is what AI is built to reduce. At Alanna, we see AI not as replacing people but as amplifying what great title professionals already do—trust their instincts and back them up with data. Think: *Spotting bottlenecks before closings gets delayed. *Predicting which clients might drift. *Coaching new team members through redundant tasks automatically. When you can make smarter decisions today, you see results sooner. It’s not about automation anymore—it’s about augmentation. AI won’t take your job. But the title leaders who learn to use it will lead the next chapter of our industry. #TitleIndustry #AIinTitle #Leadership #AlannaAI #TitleTech

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Tech folks love their acronyms. But behind every REST, SOAP, and gRPC is a real-world challenge we’re all trying to solve: communication that’s fast, reliable, and scalable. Conversations with teams and clients have been circling back to one key question; "What’s the right API protocol for what we’re building?" The truth? There’s no one-size-fits-all. It’s contextual, messy, and sometimes more art than science. A few reflections: REST still rules, but its limitations are becoming obvious in real-time use cases. Webhooks are brilliant until they start failing silently. GraphQL is a developer’s dream and an ops team’s nightmare (if not implemented well). gRPC and WebSockets are gaining traction, but they come with their baggage. And old players like SOAP and EDI? Still holding down critical infrastructure across industries. The takeaway? It’s not about what’s trending. It’s about what aligns best with your data flow, system constraints, and end-user needs.   #APIDevelopment #SoftwareArchitecture #SystemDesign #DeveloperExperience #api

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I’ve been cursed by being too early. Rules-based website personalization in 1997, when static websites were the norm. Mobile marketing SaaS in 2000, when the media was plain SMS. Mobile games in 2006 - yeah right. The timing was off by years. That curse is broken now, thanks to AI. AI compresses the innovation cycle. Projects that were too risky on a 2-4 year horizon now ship in months. Ship fast, win big, or pivot quick. There’s this old joke about getting only two out of fast, cheap and good. Now, AI hands you fast and cheap, your job is to make it great. Domain expertise outweighs pure technical AI skills. The winners won’t be the best engineers, but the ones who deeply understand the problem. Being ahead of the curve isn’t a burden anymore, it’s your edge. Go build. #AI #Innovation #Startups

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Ever had that feeling when your cart crashes, your payment fails, and your app just… spins? Yeah, that was AWS having a little Monday moment. This morning, a hiccup in US-East-1 took down parts of the internet with it. Amazon checkouts stalled, Coinbase froze, Robinhood panicked, and Venmo users couldn’t pay for brunch. Even HMRC and a few UK banks blinked. All because one region decided it needed a nap. Funny how “cloud” still sounds weightless until it rains on every checkout at once. Here’s what this says about modern commerce: ☁️ Everything is interconnected. Your payment, auth, and shipping APIs might live in different worlds but share the same dependency chain. 💳 Downtime = lost revenue. Some brands watched carts die in real time while ad budgets kept burning. 🧰 Most sellers aren’t truly multi-region. Failover plans look good in PowerPoints but rarely get tested before chaos strikes. 🤖 AI merchants beware. Agents and recommendation engines break just as fast when their backend feeds go dark. What to actually do next time the cloud sneezes: 🧩 Test your failover. Run it like a fire drill, not a theory. 🛒 Save the cart locally so shoppers can finish later. 🏦 Add a backup PSP or tokenized fallback when payments lag. 🧾 Make order creation idempotent so you don’t double-charge. 📢 Communicate clearly and extend promos after downtime. Outages like this don’t just test infrastructure. They test who’s actually operationally ready. Because when half the internet goes offline, it’s not the outage that defines you. It’s the recovery speed. #marketplaces #ecommerce #DTC #AWS #ChannelMojo

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So we did another thing. LimaCharlie Playbooks, launching as part of the Labs initiative. Lots of exciting stuff coming soon, but I wanted to share this specifically because I think it's a big deal for a lot of folks: Python Playbooks built-in to LC. Check out the video for the 7ish minutes walkthrough, but TL;DR; run Python playbooks at scale, fully managed, fully infra-as-code, with internet access so you can automate all the things. Let me know what you think!

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