https://jacknikodem.com/writing/Recent content in Writing on Jack NikodemHugoen-ushttps://jacknikodem.com/writing/trust-problem/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/trust-problem/A CEO of an Asian digital bank built AI agents that work. Customers don’t use them. Better AI doesn’t fix the trust gap — you’re solving a relationship problem that predates AI by a decade.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/filter-upstream/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/filter-upstream/Seed investors are deprioritizing pure software companies. The filter just changed — and most growth-stage investors haven’t noticed yet.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/follow-the-incentives/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/follow-the-incentives/VCs have access to non-public financials, board-level strategy, and real-time metrics across dozens of companies. They often still make consensus bets. Most founders never trace the incentive chain far enough.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/gpu-budget/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/gpu-budget/Hung Bui built a research lab in Hanoi that published at NeurIPS, ran a 7B model on a phone without internet, and sold to Qualcomm for nine figures — with Vietnamese undergraduates and a fraction of a frontier lab’s compute budget.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/requirements-problem/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/requirements-problem/Every major AI lab now hires forward deployment engineers. Most are building the role wrong — optimizing for implementation speed when the bottleneck is upstream.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/agent-virus/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/agent-virus/10x coding output is also a 10x attack surface. The quality of code reviews is going dramatically down — and machines don’t get suspicious.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/learning-agents/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/learning-agents/Today’s AI agents are clever loops that don’t learn from experience. The next wave closes the feedback loop — borrowing from a decade of reinforcement learning — and the infrastructure to do it is already here.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/network-gap/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/network-gap/Your AI works and the company still fails. In traditional sectors — insurance, logistics, healthcare — technical superiority is not enough. The bottleneck is access.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/pixel-journal/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/pixel-journal/Building a new AI app means no historical data, locked marketing deadlines, and ML teams thinking in probabilities while everyone else expects Gantt charts. Here’s what it actually took to ship Pixel Journal.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/vibe-coding/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/vibe-coding/Vibe-coding made writing software trivially fast. But turning code into production-grade systems is still slow. The bottleneck moved; the org chart didn’t.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/figma-is-being-eaten/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/figma-is-being-eaten/Designers are skipping Figma entirely, vibe-coding directly to prototypes. The bottleneck isn’t tooling — it’s implicit knowledge that no agent can read.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/macromill/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/macromill/CVC needs AI-powered automation to justify a tech multiple, while AI is the primary threat to the asset they’re trying to re-rate. The way out is to disrupt the panel business before someone else does.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/benesse/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/benesse/EQT bought Japan’s largest education company for $2B. Two businesses, one company — each needs a different thesis. Where the real value creation lever is, and what the operating partner needs to execute.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/yayoi/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/yayoi/KKR is running the standard PE incumbent playbook on Japan’s leading accounting software. This is where the standard playbook breaks — and what the operating partner needs to execute before the window closes.https://jacknikodem.com/writing/coupa/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://jacknikodem.com/writing/coupa/Thoma Bravo bought the #2 procurement SaaS player at a distressed price. The thesis isn’t software optimization — it’s a multiple expansion play built on $1.3T in annual spend that Coupa barely monetizes. Three years to prove it.