Execution Alpha: The New Multiple Wall Street Hasn’t Priced In Yet

Profit as Proof: Building the Only KPI That Matters In A World Where Everyone Is Armed With The Same Tools

We’re in New York this week.

Three founders. Ten years older, maybe a decade wiser.

Not to raise. Not to rebrand.

To prove and to demonstrate

When I launched my first company in the US, everything was about scale. The US was absolutely about demonstrating unabated scale

You were judged by your burn rate, your pitch deck, your “runway.” And your traction

Profit was almost an embarrassment, a signal you weren’t growing hard enough.

The era of cheap money and unabated growth - an era that every time I let my mind wander on a walk or whilst generally thinking ahead - feels like an era that is very much in the rear view mirror

This time it’s different for me and my two co-founders Dan and Kevin

We’re expanding a profitable business.

A platform that’s built to last, not just to launch.

And that says everything about how the world and the founder mindset has changed.

The Post-Build Era

I’ve been writing recently about the concept of the post build era. It’s a personal thought experiment driven by observations around the impact of AI on building. I don’t think it’s today by any means, but I don’t think it’s necessarily far away when I look at the rate of AI change, market volatility around large and established businesses like Hubspot and Monday.com with relation to changes or even just rumours (Hubspot shares sank on rumours of an OpenAI CRM) and the generate rate of exponential change that we’re seeing in the exponential era

There was a time when building was the moat. I remember it well in the early and mid noughties and really right up until now-ish

When the ability to design, code, and deploy faster than anyone else decided who won.

Great ideas needed to be stealthily delivered rapidly, and the moat - some patents aside - was to build faster, get a lead and keep dammed running.

Throwing some patents behind you was akin to leaving some banana skins on the path behind you, but the main weapon in a founders armoury was to understand the evolution of the space they operated in, and back themselves to continue innovating. A real copycat may skid on the banana skin but really your best chance was to hit the front and hold the lead

But AI flattened that advantage almost overnight. Working versions of major tech platforms like Spotify are being coded for a bit of fun. Plenty of enterprise tech platforms are little more then a fancy UI on some often surprisingly basic actual capability - so why would they be immune? Businesses don’t want fat reoccurring SaaS fees for all the same reasons, mirrored, that VC have loved them for the last two decades

Today, everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, the same APIs. And they’re a smart prompt and a matter of hours, days or a few weeks in the complex sense away from designing their own versions of the precise bits of enterprise tech stacks that they value and need and they can drop all the bits they’ve been paying for and not using. That is why Hubspot wobbled - their SME market doesn’t typically need the full capabilities of each module they license, so when a senior member of OpenAI showed some internal tooling he’d been playing with in a private GPT… a company as big as Hubspot wobbled. That makes me think an awful lot of smaller SAAS could get annihilated…

With a credit card and curiosity, you can build what took teams quarters or even years just a few years ago.

Today I build innovative new B2B ideas in a handful of dedicated hours between tooling like Claude Code, Replit, cursor and ChatGPT. It’s ideation, but my engineering team are armed with their own AI tooling that means a team of 12 feels like a team of 24 ten years ago. The whole flow of building has changed and evolved rapidly

And this tooling is new and evolving fast - what will it be able to do in 2 years? If today “vibe coding” gets you a good looking demo or 80% of the way to a working web app, needing an engineering team to fortify it - anyone sat there sneering at this is missing the point entirely.

In the exponential age of technology, the rates of change are more like the Richter scale than a flat evolution. A model could launch that turns me into a passable full stack developer tomorrow.

That’s the paradox and the point I’ve been trying to make

Building has never been easier and yet, building alone no longer builds value.

How can it if anyone that can prompt can stand technology? Not today, but in 2/3/4 years. Are you going to wait around assuming AI won’t ever be good enough? I hear this argument across other professional services and sectors like legal - with a really relaxed attitude to what I think is inevitable. People in their 30s and 40s being confident that technology which didn’t exist a few years ago and which has gotten so good so fast, won’t clear the final miles to impact them. I believe it will and this thinking should span industries

We’ve entered the Post-Build Era where AI is a given not a bubble

Where the hard part isn’t standing something up — it’s standing it apart.

The challenge isn’t to make software; it’s to make systems that survive and thrive

The challenge is to operationalise the usage of technology to build a real moat.

It points to service businesses being the winner. Tech + managing the edge it generates to create greater output then the tech alone can deliver

The new differentiator therefore isn’t technical capability, its operational capability driven by technology. If it wasn’t or isn’t, then why wouldn’t your customers build it themselves?

It’s not “how fast can you ship?” but “how repeatably can you deliver?”

Profit as the New Growth

And what ultimately could be a better demonstration of agitating a technology enabled edge than profit?

If the last decade was the era of “growth at all costs.”

We built dashboards to track users, more so then margins.

Valuations were rewarded for potential, not performance and delivery

AI has made that game obsolete. The macro markets have hammered the point home with a big fat exclamation mark

When the barriers to building drop to near zero, the only scarcity left is execution. And I believe there is plenty of opportunity to win here because it’s often the Achilles heel anyway

Profit has become the purest proof of execution. If you’ve built a profitable technology business in this new era, then you must be operationalising the usage of it and the business process around it very well. The market is becoming so efficient, you have to

It’s the signal that the market values what you do — not because a VC says so, but because customers pay for it. Repeatedly

At FunnelFuel, we didn’t set out to be contrarian.

We set out to build something that worked.

And in doing so, we discovered something deeper:

Profit isn’t the reward for growth anymore — it is growth.

Profit fuels founder independence.

Profit protects focus.

Profit is data — it tells you exactly what to do more of and what to stop doing entirely.

The Moat Has Moved

If AI ended the product advantage, where’s the moat now?

It’s in the how, not the what. How to ideate, roadmap and design systems that your team can deliver world class excellence when they operate those systems

In operations, even ahead of innovation. Because increasingly innovation can be driven out of AI - building solutions are getting pretty good at layering up their own roadmaps when given the right spark/s

In the rhythm of how your team works, learns, and improves.

This is why we stopped chasing the myth of “proprietary tech.”

We integrate best-in-class partners; The Trade Desk, Index, others I won’t yet mention — and focus our energy on the orchestration layer. Creating connective tissue for B2B marketers which doesn’t exist, enabling my world class team of execution layers to do better work, more accurately, with more capability then they could without it

We win not by owning every brick, but by controlling the blueprint.

The real defensibility now lies in:

• Data loops that compound.

• Processes that scale without chaos.

• Teams that can turn signals into strategy faster than anyone else.

• Creating agentic layers on top of our in house skills to augment and extend capability (not replace humans, augment them)

• Designing connection layers that have novelty and drive capability or efficiency or ideally both

It’s easy to buy tools.

It’s hard to build systems that use them well.

That’s the moat.

And most founders are only just realising it.

The Founder Mindset Shift

The best founders I know have quietly shifted their mindset.

They’re not chasing the next feature, they’re tuning the feedback loop.

They’re not building for investors, they’re building for longevity.

The playbook now looks more like this:

• Build less, automate more.

• Measure everything.

• Operate profitably.

• Expand only when it compounds.

In a world where anyone can build, the winners are those who can operate with intent.

We used to celebrate the founders who raised the most. A right of passage. I once met a founder who lost her business because she thought she needed to raise to get validation - it wasn’t a proper “startup” without VC backing. The direction they drove her in led to the business closing. It’s not uncommon and maybe these story’s fuel the idea of leaning on the right tech to build the right processes to get profitable with less overhead (engineering with AI building; ops teams with agentic) and controlling your own destiny

Now I celebrate the founders who don’t need to raise and who are actually winning

The US Chapter

So, yes — three founders in New York.

Not with a pitch deck.

With a playbook.

We’re not here to chase growth for its own sake.

We’re here to prove that you can build a profitable, global business in the AI era — without playing the same game everyone else is still addicted to.

To prove that part of the value I/we bring is tuning into the changing temperature and seeing the new direction. This era is a hell of a time to be alive for true entrepreneurs; gold rush territory driven by the exponential age of technology and capability but a world still struggling to adjust the web era pace

The Post-Build Era belongs to the operators.

To the founders who treat profit as signal, not side-effect.

To those who believe growth without discipline isn’t growth at all.

This is how we’re building.

This is why we’re here.

And this is what the next decade of entrepreneurship will look like.

Paid Reader Reflection: The Operating Moat Framework