Agentic vs real workforce.

There’s a narrative forming right now. Agents everywhere. Workflows automated. One person doing the job of ten. And yes, part of it is true. We’ve seen it ourselves.

One founder built a working product in 26 minutes. Another started selling something that didn’t exist 24 hours before. Entire flows go from manual → automated in a single night.

But after a week in Cape Town, locked in with founders, engineers, and designers building with AI… A different pattern showed up. The teams moving fastest weren’t the ones replacing themselves with agents. They were the ones becoming more human. More opinionated. More obsessed. More present. Because agents don’t remove the need for builders. They remove the excuses.

First things first: agents don’t replace builders.

We’re entering a world where more and more of the work gets done for you. Code. Outreach. Analysis. Decisions, even. So the obvious question becomes: Who wins when everyone has access to the same leverage?

We saw this play out in two very different environments:

• A week building AI companies from scratch with some of the best operators we know

• A deep dive with Mstudio, who built 100+ AI agents across their venture playbook

Different contexts. Same conclusion: Agents aren’t the moat. Data is.

Not more data.
Not more tools.
Better structure.
Faster truth.

Because when everyone has access to agents, the advantage shifts:

→ From execution → to judgement 
→ From output → to taste 
→ From speed → to direction

And that’s where the real workforce still wins.

In the loop: builders, rooms, and real conversations

A few moments that shaped the month:

• Cape Town build week — 5 days, 27 people, 0 plan. What started as an experiment turned into something else entirely. Founders building like beginners again. Speed we didn’t think was possible. And a reminder: creativity + domain knowledge + AI doesn’t just accelerate… it changes the game.

• Studio Roadshow — Mstudio (West Africa). A conversation that went further than expected. Not “how to use AI,” but what actually makes a studio defensible when everyone has the same tools. Their answer: 100+ agents. Ours: structured, time-aware data. The insight we agreed on: leverage is everywhere. Truth isn’t. Read more. 🔗

• Builders Investor House #13 — umob. No decks. No polish. Just operator truth. Bibi Jorissen shared what €70M in failure actually teaches you, why selling to city councils might be the real moat, and what it means to rebuild at scale with a team of 25 across 21 countries.

• CTO Network x Snowflake x Inkef (April 21, Amsterdam). Continuing to build rooms for the people actually building. Small group. No stage energy. Just honest conversations between CTOs and founding engineers. Speaker announcement soon. Signup 🔗

Ventures in motion: humans in the loop

• Trigger — from optimisation to real-world pressure. March was all about refining the product. Now we’re turning up the pace: kicking off April by onboarding a new design partner every day. Goal: real feedback, real usage, and potentially going live sooner than expected. Want a preview? You can already try the free tools on our website. Curious to go deeper? Let us know. 🔗

• Cortena — workflows that actually adapt to you. We gave the website a new face. But the real update sits underneath: the Workflow Builder. Finance operations aren’t standard, your tools shouldn’t be either. Build fully customizable workflows for any process: define triggers, approvals, escalations, and how agents execute every step. No code. → Worth a try 🔗

• Avery — learning from the people actually hiring. We’ve been publishing weekly vlogs with hiring leaders in the field. No theory, just how they actually build teams today. If you’re not following yet, you’re missing signal. Check it out 🔗

• Everday — where AI meets real-world interpretation. We ran a live experiment combining skills mapping with strategic career coaching. One clear insight: most people aren’t under-qualified, they’re over-ambiguous. Everday shows the skills. The gaps. The match. The human layer translates that into a story a hiring manager understands in 30 seconds. → Try your own skills passport (free): https://passport.ever.day/ 🔗

👀 What we’re reading (and writing):

• House of Founders — from experiment to stage. Can you build multiple companies in 5 days with AI? That’s exactly what a group of founders tested in Cape Town, and the results are being revealed on April 29 in Amsterdam. Not a panel. Not a pitch night. Real companies, built in real time, with all the chaos that comes with it.

• The only four jobs left in tech. Product generalists who move fast. Infra people who keep it running. People who create trust and experience. And “adults in the room” who make the calls. Everything else is getting compressed.

• Marc Andreessen’s playbook still holds. High-growth environments. Do more than your role. Stay longer than it’s comfortable. Stack skills, then build. The tools changed. The game didn’t.

• 95% of AI projects don’t fail because of tech. Teams aren’t falling behind, they’re running fast in the same place. More tools, more dashboards, more confusion. The real gap isn’t capability. It’s actually using it.

Final word: Obsession still wins

Agents will do more. That’s a given. But the founders we see winning aren’t the ones trying to automate everything away. They’re the ones who can’t stop building.

The ones who go deeper. Test more. Stay longer. Who get pulled into problems instead of pushed by them.

In a world of agents, automation, and AI…

That obsession might still be the most unfair advantage.

Forward, always,

Michael van Lier
Managing Director at Builders