Not Because We Ran Out of Ideas, But Because We Forgot How to Build Them

Hey there, digital warriors! ⚔️

Last episode, we were deep in the trenches with a high-performing SaaS founder, Adrien Salvat, unpacking his operating system for scaling: technical excellence, behavioral clarity, radical transparency, and leadership that earns trust.

This time, we’re turning our gaze to the entire battlefield. The data is in, the smoke is clearing, and one truth stands tall:

Venture Capital is broken! Not because we ran out of ideas, but because we forgot how to build them.

Let me introduce you to someone who’s seen this failure play out firsthand: Massimiliano Sulpizi, founder of Equity Match. A platform that doesn’t just match startups to capital, but arms them with the education and mentorship they actually need to survive. Max isn’t selling another pitch deck factory. He’s rebuilding the support system founders never had. And once you hear what we uncovered in this conversation, the cracks in today’s venture capital model become impossible to ignore. Especially when paired with the latest report from John Cowan, revealing how 2025’s VC landscape is being eaten alive by a new investor predator: AI hype. It’s leeching capital away from real innovation, and likely even more.

💺 Buckle up! We’re descending straight into turbulence today! 🛩️

This isn’t a smooth ride through theory; it’s a hard landing on the broken runway of modern venture capital.

Ground Truth: When Fundraising Becomes a Death Spiral 🌀

In this week’s Forge of Unicorns podcast, Max hits hard. His mission? To help founders raise money with a platform that actually supports them, not just lists them.

But Max did more than share a founder tool. He gave us a reality check:

• Most startup platforms offer no real support. They throw you in a pool and hope you swim.
• European investors are risk-averse and often lack technical expertise.
• Founders can code. Maybe Vibe-Coding enough to ship a landing page or MVP. But can they architect companies? Can they scale codebases that don’t rot from the inside, crushed by tech debt and chaos? Very few can.

What Max revealed is a system built to fail quietly. Most startups still go to market with flashy pitch decks, maybe an AI-generated MVP, but not a real product grounded in engineering rigor or product-market clarity.

And here’s the real kicker: no one is checking. 😱 Not the investors. Not the auditors. No commercial due diligence software even attempts to peek under the hood. And the founders? They’re not exactly lining up to get inspected; because they know what’s hiding inside.

Why the market is avoiding the real tough question:

How the hell have you built it? 🔧 Pop the hood. Let’s do a dyno and mechanical inspection of the codebase powering this business.

Because if it’s just duct tape and dreams, no pitch will save you. And I’ve lost count of how many investors quietly admitted:

They’ve seen it happen… again and again. 🤕

Macro Collapse: Cowan’s Data Drop 💥

Enter John Cowan, a former guest and one of the sharpest minds in venture finance. His VC 2025 mid-year forecast isn’t just a red flag 🚨 it’s a five-alarm fire:

• Only 9% of seed-stage startups make it to Series A.
• Down rounds are hitting decade highs.
• Over 70% of VC capital is locked in the hands of just 5% of firms.
• AI is hoarding 50%+ of VC investment, starving every other sector of funding.

Cowan doesn’t mince words:

An extinction-level event for early-stage innovation is already underway.

But the real danger? AI isn’t just absorbing capital, it’s anesthetizing due diligence. Investors are falling for synthetic demos and PowerPoint promises, not actual engineering integrity.

We’re watching the same mistake unfold again, but this time, on a massive scale. Just like the dot-com bubble, we’ve confused what’s flashy with what works. Only now, there’s a new twist:

Forget neuroscience and real cognition. Welcome fake cognitive power.

These LLMs aren’t thinking. They’re mimicking. Built to impress, not to reason. They hallucinate, require massive datasets and obscene energy, and yet, somehow, we’re betting the future of startups on them.

Would you take a sedan off-road just because a salesman swore it could handle rallye tracks? Welcome to the AI scam economy, where hype siphons capital into massive compute infrastructure instead of real product delivery.

The scientists building real AI are shouting from the rooftops. They warn us about the illusion of agentic AI. Machines that appear to reason, but are brittle, bug-prone, and dangerously persuasive. Developd to please you in a perfect techno-theater with Machiavellian flair.

And it’s draining the resources real founders need to build real companies.

The result?

• An energy-hungry sector consuming VC oxygen.
• Founders acting like gamblers, desperate for cash.
• And the only winners? The tech giants consolidating cloud, data, and AI infrastructure into an unstoppable monopoly.

📉 This is techno-feudalism (📕by Varoufakis). And it’s already here.

Here’s the most dangerous part:

Even if AI hype were justified, even if capital were more fairly allocated, no one is doing technical due diligence. All these companies are built on software reliable as a sandcastle!

There’s no product for it. No shared standard. No enforced methodology. And, most damning, no real will to change.

Founders don’t want their code inspected. Investors aren’t abe to inspect it. Auditors don’t have the tools to judge it. And so? We fund vaporware. We bet on demos. We sleepwalk toward another collapse despite all the warning signs.

This isn’t just capital misallocation, it’s systemic negligence. And the cost? Billions vaporized before the first sprint ships. Billions funneled straight to a handful of tech CEOs, whose cloud and AI platforms are becoming the new oil rigs of digital extraction.

We’ve seen this before.

The 1970s energy crisis. The 2000 dot-com implosion.

And now?

A generative-AI-fueled collapse, amplified by bad code, blind investors, and a total absence of technical accountability, ethos and excellence.

History repeats, but this time, it’s powered by hallucinations and hosted on AWS, Azure, Google, Meta, X.

The Hidden Failure: We Never Taught Them to Build

This is the part no one dares to say aloud.

We’ve created a generation of founders who know how to pitch, who can storytell, and who can growth-hack… but we never taught them how to engineer. We never taught them to build resilient, maintainable product ecosystems. To treat software like Formula 1 treats its engines: with real-time diagnostics, safety margins, and obsessive refinement.

The consequences are all around us:

• Teams crushed under unrealistic AI mandates, blindly implemented without understanding their downstream risks. Like when Przemysław Dębiak outperformed OpenAI at the AtCoder Heuristic Contest in Tokyo, showing human problem-solving still wins where precision and adaptability matter.
• Products that collapse under their own weight due to an inability to translate real user needs into working systems.
• Codebases that rot and implode within 24 months. Not because of malice, but because there are no enforced standards. No test-first mindset. No observable behaviors expected by default. Like in real engineering.

This is the ghost of Agile, where testing became an afterthought, handed off to automation or LLM-generated stubs after the fact. In real engineering disciplines (motorsport, aerospace, healthcare) you don’t test the product after release on the users! You validate assumptions before a single component is built.

Software has no standard for expected quality. And the market? It’s flooded with unaccountable actors, legacy consultants, and cargo-cult engineers.

The ideas aren’t broken. The system is. A system hijacked by salespeople more obsessed with raising rounds than raising the human bar. A system that, with all its technological power, has delivered zero tangible improvement to middle-class life quality in the last 100 years.

Still skeptical? Answer this:

Can a family in 2025 survive with one parent at home and one working, without sacrificing dignity, health, and mental well-being?

In the 1980s, it was possible. A century plus ago, it was the normality. Now? We’ve built a future so optimized for productivity… no one can afford to live in it.

“Digital natives are not engineers. And investors are not mechanics. So we’re building race cars without anyone who knows how to fix a blown engine.”

That’s why, back in 2010, while facing my own mortality from cancer, we began building the SW Craftsmanship Dojo®. Not a coaching gimmick. Not another framework. A real, open-source system for teaching SaaS engineers and founders how to build. How to think. How to deliver real value.

Thousands have already graduated. Dozens of elite SaaS organizations now thrive because of this model.

And we’re just getting started, because in a world where everyone’s throwing capital at the SaaS + AI combo like it’s a sure bet, no one is asking the critical question: Will it actually work? ⚠️ Will it survive the 3 years milestone or implode under its own fund-raising cycle and hype illusion?

That’s why our conversation with Max is so pivotal. It reveals the missing link. The game changer that could finally inject technical reality back into venture investing. Because the answer isn’t more capital. It’s ethical capability.

The Realization: Due Diligence Needs a New Playbook 🎁

We’ve been quietly running a different kind of test: open-sourcing the Software Craftsmanship Dojo®. This isn’t another Agile or DevOps checklist. It’s a behavioral blueprint rooted in 15+ years of field testing; from Ferrari F1 to Fortune 500 IT orgs.

But here’s 👇 what sets it apart, and why it matters now more than ever:

We don’t just assess the founder. We go far beyond the MVP. We pop the hood and inspect the entire engine room. How the software is written, how it behaves under pressure, and most critically, how the team behind it actually operates. In the dark room, and in the prod fire alarm scenario.

Because technical debt isn’t just code. It’s the byproduct of behavioral shortcuts, poor collaboration, and weak engineering rituals. If your team doesn’t know how to write proper tests, there is no quality by design, only chaos wrapped in demos.

It’s pointless to feed a charismatic founder millions in capital when the product is held together with duct tape. Or worse, invest in brilliant engineers who fall in love with their own tech, blind to market validation, building products nobody wants.

We peel back every layer:

• 1️⃣ from repository structure to CI pipelines,
• 2️⃣ from individual behaviors to team-wide dynamics,
• 3️⃣ from user satisfaction, to customer support.

Because world-class software isn’t born in a weekend hackathon. It’s built like a Formula 1 engine: precision-engineered, pressure-tested, and continuously evolved by a team that knows what it’s doing.

And AI? It’s not the savior. It’s the magnifier 🔎.

In the wrong hands, it automates failure at scale. In the right hands, it enhances human creativity and precision.

That’s the real playbook we’re offering: Not just how to pitch, but how to build. Not just how to deliver faster, but how to design excellence into the system from day one.

We’ve seen the future. It’s not transformation. It’s evolution. And the Dojo is the place where that evolution begins.

📺 Enjoy the full interview with Max

To stay in the loop with all our updates, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter 📩 and podcast channels 🎧:

📰 LinkedIn

🎥 YouTube

📻 Spotify

📻 Apple Podcast