May 19, 2026
Everyone is talking about taste right now. Taste as the moat, taste as the differentiator, taste as the one thing AI can’t replicate. I was invited to speak at Podim Conference in Maribor, Slovenia last week, and I told the room we’re pointing at the wrong thing.
My talk was called "Back to Startup Pirate Mode." I came up in New York just as Silicon Alley, New York’s answer to the Valley, was taking off. It was 2012 and there were pirates everywhere: tinkerers, misfits, engineers with strange obsessions, building things nobody asked for. No playbook or best practice, just a bunch of people with ideas and the willingness to build something.
People started companies, and importantly, people started selling them. The weird ideas got polished into pitch decks, the pirate ships became cruise liners, and building something real went from costing guts and a sick domain name to costing millions, a team of forty, and eighteen months of runway before you could even test whether your concept had legs.
AI is bringing that pirate energy back. Except this time, the tools let anyone be a builder. Instead of millions and headcount, all you need is a Max subscription.
So here is what I told the room. The real fundamentals of this moment are not frameworks or certifications. Those have a shelf life of about two weeks. And the fundamental is not taste either. Taste is downstream of something deeper.
The fundamentals are your expertise and your experience. The people who will do remarkable work with AI are the ones who have spent years getting close to a real problem, who understand the texture of an industry, who have earned the pattern recognition that a model can't fake.
AI will generate a thousand options, it doesn’t need to sleep! Your expertise tells you which one is worth building, and your experience tells you why the other 999 will fail. That is the edge.
A huge thank you to the Podim team for putting on a conference that felt genuinely forward-thinking, optimistic, and a lot of fun. Thank you to Urban Lapajne, Nataša Rus, and Matej Rus for the invitation, the hospitality, and for filling the rooms with brilliant founders, operators, and investors.
Pirate mode is back, baby! Build something.
