Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. It’s the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, and man is it. Well, it’s 2026, Rich.

Rich: Happy New Year.

Paul: Happy New Year. Just happened. We’re doing it again.

Rich: Here we go.

Paul: Back for another one. And so let’s talk about just very rough, a couple, just very broad predictions, but let’s play that theme song first.

Rich: Let’s do it!

[intro music]

Paul: Richard,

Rich: How are you doing?

Paul: I’m doing fine. This is a big, exciting new year. I think it’s gonna be a very interesting year for…us?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay, so that’s where I start. I’ll be frank. Things are kind of chill at home. I got two 14 year olds, twins, which is a lot different than having, like, two 12 and 13 year olds.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: People are doing good in school. Vacation’s over.

Rich: God bless.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That’s great.

Paul: It’s just kind of… Personally, I’m counting on my bike and I’m counting on a good year here. Good year working with my business partner.

Rich: This is sound like a Pepperidge Farm ad.

Paul: [Pepperidge Farm ad guy] Absolutely, Richard.

Rich: Button it up.

Paul: [still in character] Yes! Today we’re going to talk about artificial intelligence. It’s wholesome and good. [laughter] How are you doing? How’s…

Rich: I’m good, I’m good, I’m good, I’m good. Same. Kids are amazing. Family’s amazing. Very blessed.

Paul: All right, here we go. So, you know it’s the beginning of the year.

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: Not a lot of news out there right now, or too much news, depending on how you look at it. It’s time for, I think we should just do a couple broad predictions about how things go. I got, we got our predictions book here.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: I have this book, it’s. I wrote about this once for WIRED. It’s the People’s Almanac Book of Predictions from the 70s.

Rich: Ooooh.

Paul: You can see it on YouTube. It’s bright yellow. But the reason I like to bring it up is all the predictions are wrong.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And it turns out, I’ll tell you why predictions are wrong.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: People absolutely think the technology will move faster.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: They think the wrong technologies will move faster, and they don’t even notice the ones that are about to move quickly.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So in the 70s, everybody assumed we were going to be living on the moon. They’d just seen the moon landing.

Rich: You’re not saying that figuratively.

Paul: Literally,

Rich: Genuinely believed…

Paul: We’re going to get to Mars in 50 years.

Rich: Right.

Paul: We’re going to do all this stuff. And they didn’t see computers happening at all, because they were really big robot machines that—

Rich: They’re giant and…

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Expensive and all that.

Paul: And everybody assumed that, like, weed would be legal by the 80s, and cocaine by 2000—

Rich: I mean, weed showed up.

Paul: It did, but—

Rich: Later.

Paul: But everybody assumes a very high velocity of social change.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Based on their internal understanding of what needs to change.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They don’t see the techno—if you see somebody say, “This is going to change everything around a technology.”

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: It’s safe to assume that it’s going to plateau and something new is going to come along.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I think we’re in the Space Age era of AI.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Where people are like, “It’s all going to be this and only this forever.”

Rich: Right.

Paul: It’s so futuristic, it’s so wild. We’re all going to just do this. We’re going to talk to bots and have agents and do all that stuff. And I’m not saying, look, this is our business. I’m not saying it’s not the most important thing that we’re doing right now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I think the cultural change transformation narrative is very much, very similar to that of the Space Age, where we were all going to be literally in orbit by now.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And so I think that’s where we are.

Rich: I think that’s a good observation, and I think it’s the right one. And the thing that people, I think, get wrong more than anything around technology is they forget that the gatekeepers are people.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Almost every time. And you can look at pretty much every Gartner report that plots things on a chart.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: About the things that are going to happen.

Paul: Let me ask you a question.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What’s a gate?

Rich: Adoption.

Paul: Okay. So someone is standing in front of a gate labeled “adoption.”

Rich: Yeah, and when I say—

Paul: A guard. Who is the guard in front of that gate?

Rich: I mean the guard is old habits.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Old patterns, status quo, and culture and power. And then when technology shows up, that’s why right now it’s so dramatic. There’s all this insinuation that the power structures—frankly, my job as VP, frankly, my bonus next year, because I resell software that everybody’s telling me is going to be obsolete, is under threat. That is the big prediction. And the truth is, people often win. [laughing] That’s what people don’t get. Like, everybody’s like, “Ah, the tech is coming and it’s going to steamroll all of you.” And people win most of the time.

Paul: Well, often they will find a way to co-op the thing, make it their own and say, “Look, I got this for you.”

Rich: It’s starting to happen.

Paul: Yeah—

Rich: That’s already starting to happen.

Paul: Well, why don’t we do this? Because we’re actually, we keep playing this out, and I think this will lead into the actual predictions, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We had a conversation last night on WhatsApp.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Where I was like, “Man, this is moving fast.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, I’ve been doing lots of vibe coding and I figured out some really good approaches to get a lot of work done.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I threw a thought experiment out. And I tend, when I do this, when I say thought experiment, what I tend to do is tell you something’s going to change and then you say, “Shut up, it’s not gonna change like that.” And then we fight. That’s how we do—

Rich: It sort of happened last night.

Paul: No, but this is what always happens.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because I like to take a maximalist forward motion. Because you tend to be on the kind of, like—you go into gatekeeper role, not cause you’re a gatekeeper, but because you kind of think in terms of organizational transformation, and I think in terms of technological progress. That’s usually how we fight. We figure it out.

Rich: Yeah. I mean we encourage everyone to read the newsletter.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: It’s me telling everyone that Paul is wrong because he’s in his basement alone.

Paul: And me being right. And that’s how it works. So…

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Yesterday I was like, “Listen, someone could make Seamless or Grubhub or DoorDash.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “They can make their own, they can launch it. It will be cheaper and better. It will be AI-enabled, so you’ll just take a photo of your menu, upload it, and it’ll make a website and set everything up for you. And they will do that and they will get some VC funding and they will absolutely start to conquer the incumbents.” That was my hypothesis.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And what did you say?

Rich: Absolutely not.

Paul: Why not? And that’s my prediction by the way.

Rich: Your prediction is somebody’s going to spin up—

Paul: Just that, like, someone’s going to make a big platform to take on entrenched platforms. You’re going to see—because code is getting cheaper.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Just code, not business-building, but code.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, building a platform is getting cheaper. And so you’re going to see VC funding and a lot of people just really approach, “Can we attack and take over the incumbents who have a lot of lock-in with their platforms?” DoorDash, Uber, Lyft.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: All these sort of big systems.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Can we take them over with AI-accelerated, rapidly built platforms that are probably five-person teams as opposed to 500-person teams?

Rich: Yeah. I think you’re completely wrong on, like, 11 levels.

Paul: Great.

Rich: So this is gonna be a good podcast.

Paul: That’s great. I mean, honestly, if we only get this prediction in, it’s probably the most valuable.

Rich: So let’s go for reason number one.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Reason number one is this: Seamless has been around for about 20 years.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And you would think that—

Paul: Has it really?

Rich: Oh, at least.

Paul: Oh, that’s too long.

Rich: That’s my guess. I don’t know. Maybe 15, I have no idea. But a long, long time.

Paul: And Seamless is mostly New York. People know Grubhub.

Rich: There’s Grubhub, there’s DoorDash, pick any of these. DoorDash is a monster.

Paul: Well, Seamless is, like, part of Grubhub, too.

Rich: Seamless bought Grubhub, I think…

Paul: Vice versa.

Rich: There’s many products like this that deliver prepared food around the world. Some are huge in, like, Turkey, and South America. There’s all sorts of these.

Paul: Yeah. Order online, it comes to your house.

Rich: Correct. Reason one is that the current version of DoorDash or Seamless is not the first version. It is, in fact, a product of change and resistance and friction that had to go into place for it to exist successfully.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And you have no clue, in your basement, what iterations these platforms had to go through to even get there. I’ll give you an example. Okay? It turns out they didn’t expect that most delivery people would be non-English speaking.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And they found that they couldn’t get, they were getting restaurants, but they weren’t getting drivers or bikers, right? And they realized that depending on locale, the app that they built for the driver, for the delivery person, didn’t support their native language, and, in fact, many of them—let me dial it up a little bit—are almost illiterate.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: And it had to be visual and easy to use and zero training and whatnot.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I guarantee you, they stepped in shit probably a dozen times until they got to that point. Now, you’re gonna show up.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: From your basement.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And spin up this app. I gave you one tiny example.

Paul: Hold on, let me. But, okay, that’s one tiny example. How long did it take SeamDash to address that at a platform level, do you think?

Rich: Probably months?

Paul: Months. Okay. What if, as an AI maximalist, which I go back and forth now, or not.

Rich: Yeah, mmm hmm.

Paul: I told you, “I can build a pretty good working version of everything you just described in, like, a day.”

Rich: Yeah, that’s fine.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Great. So I just—

Rich: First off, you have to find out about these hitches. I gave you a hitch in hindsight. You’re gonna find out a bunch of other hitches, and then you’re gonna have to react.

Paul: Why don’t I just take some of my VC funding and go get a product manager for one of those companies to come over—

Rich: Oh, now you’re bringing people into the mix?

Paul: Yeah, sure. I’m ready to spend a little money. I don’t have to do this for free.

Rich: Okay. No, fair enough.

Paul: Okay, so—

Rich: Fair enough.

Paul: I’m gonna keep, you keep telling me why I can’t—

Rich: You keep pushing.

Paul: And I’m gonna keep telling you, so I’m gonna tell you what I have. I have a product manager who I hired over from one of those companies.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: They’ve seen all this stuff. They kind of know the platform really well.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Somehow we got them out of the non-compete.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: And they are telling me about all this.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And what I got, My two smart solution engineer, AI coding assistant, whatevers.

Rich: Yeah. You’re going to be nimble.

Paul: We’re nimble. So I just, I just—

Rich: I’m going to give you this one.

Paul: I credibly built that in a day. So I knocked that one down. What else you got?

Rich: It gets worse from here, Paul.

Paul: All right, great. Let’s knock it down.

Rich: The second reason is nobody wants to change. The users like the tool. The restaurant, which hates technology. The restaurant owner and their partner, the chef.

Paul: They hate the fees, though.

Rich: They hate the fees and they hate that, they hate tech, they hate change.

Paul: Uh huh.

Rich: And they’re not in the mood. And in fact, all our customers, their loyalty base, they come in recommended at the top, recent orders on Seamless because I ordered from them before. And regular customers drive economies. Right?

Paul: All right.

Rich: And…who are you? I’ve met people like you before. You think you’re the, you think AI was needed for somebody to try to disrupt Seamless? The momentum and the inertia of having that level of network lock-in, not just for the—you picked a really hairy one, right?

Paul: I know. On purpose.

Rich: You picked one where there are three cohorts that have to be orchestrating together: Delivery people, customers, and restaurants.

Paul: Okay. Okay.

Rich: And all of those people are on this platform, and a really tight, taut network effect is kicked in.

Paul: Let’s try to solve it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Give me half a million dollars.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Congrats.

Paul: I’m gonna make, first of all, I’m gonna make a marketing pipeline that texts everybody. Just gonna text them all, everybody in New York City.

Rich: Spam!

Paul: Fine. Some of it’s gonna go spam, some of it isn’t. I’m getting, I’m gonna give them a $10 coupon.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I’m going to say first thing, if you get this app, hell, I’ll give them $100.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: It’s probably worth it, long-term. Now I probably do need now, like, $6 million in VC.

Rich: Oooh….

Paul: But it’s a bargain! It’s a bargain.

Rich: Fair enough.

Paul: And that God knows the world’s flush.

Rich: Fair enough.

Paul: Okay? My team is about maybe 10, 12 people.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: I’m doing automated marketing. Okay, I got a spam problem. I’m going to have to figure that out. I’m going to have to figure out how to reach people. But there are ways to do that. I’ll hit them on LinkedIn if I have to.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But my bots are out there saying, “I got $20 for you to install this app. And probably, kind of like, first meal’s on me.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? And I’ve gone out and I said, “All you gotta do is give me a picture of your menu and we take it from here.” And I build a whole nice little website and presence for these people, and I give them a guaranteed lock-in of delivery of rates never going above a certain amount. It’s 15 minutes to onboard a new restaurant.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So, and I am going to go talk to 3 million New Yorkers, and tell them that they get a free—

Rich: How are you going to talk to 3 million New Yorkers?

Paul: Through automated marketing, texting, I’ll call them with my robot voice.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: I’ll use all these tools. I will generate—I will tell them about restaurants in their neighborhood that are bought in.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’ll email them. I can use marketing to do this.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now it’s gonna cost me.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s gonna cost me, but I’ll get them.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I can go get them. If I spend enough money, I can get those people and I can give them a coupon.

Rich: You sound like you wanna move fast and aggressive and undercut.

Paul: I got to. I gotta kill these guys before they get any bigger because they’re gonna be able to build their platforms fast.

Rich: Let me share a really annoying tidbit on this example you’ve chosen.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: One of the things these platforms do is they send someone to your restaurant.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: To set you up with a laptop for, like, three days and take pictures of your food. Do you know why?

Paul: Because otherwise it just isn’t gonna happen.

Rich: It’s not gonna happen. And nobody wants to click on anything. And they’re like, “I will walk you through this.” And they have done that. And there are armies of salespeople who aren’t just salespeople, they’re a little, they’re not technical. They know how to use, like, something in the equivalent of Squarespace to set these people up. It is a nightmare. It is an absolute nightmare. And these companies took enormous amounts of energy and time. Let me shift, because we’re focusing on this example.

Paul: No, but I can actually fix this for you too.

Rich: Yeah?

Paul: I can get you—okay, will you go to one URL as a restaurant person? One website?

Rich: Sure!

Paul: Okay. My AI bot is going to walk, and it’ll take any info you give me in any language.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: So you can—here’s the hard part. You can’t take a pretty picture—

Rich: Of the food.

Paul: Of the food.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Unless someone who knows how to take a pretty picture shows—

Rich: Just give me the menu, and you’re gonna price it?

Paul: I will take those prices. I will extract it. I will tell you how much money you’re gonna save. I will translate things into all the users’ languages—

Rich: Wait, wait, wait. You’re gonna charge what the price is on my menu?

Paul: Absolutely.

Rich: But then you’re gonna take your cut. Now I’m not making any money.

Paul: Fine, then we’ll up it by 5%. But I’m gonna take so little it doesn’t matter, because—

Rich: I don’t understand percentages.

Paul: Okay, then I’ll translate it visually and I’ll show you that your cut—I will draw a picture of dollar bills stacking up for you.

Rich: I love the theme of this prediction. It’s great. Because what it’s highlighting—

Paul: Well, I’m going to tell you, here’s what I—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Here’s what I, I don’t know if I believe, I don’t—

Rich: No, no. I think—

Paul: I don’t want to go take on Seamless, but I do think that VCs will fund a group of 10 people who are convinced they can do it.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: So I think you’re going to see a lot of dynamic—a lot of platforms are going to emerge because the cost of making a platform just went from many millions of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

Rich: Yes. But making a platform is a small component of disrupting and succeeding.

Paul: I agree.

Rich: Disrupting an existing status quo and succeeding.

Paul: I agree. But that’s also what every entrenched platform operator says.

Rich: Yeah, look—

Paul: And then—is this as disruptive as the web, that you can build these things almost for free?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay, so the web was very disruptive, because you no longer got a menu dropped at your, at your door and then called them when you wanted Chinese food.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Suddenly, especially mobile.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Once mobile showed up, it was kind of game over, right?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So now I can have all of those experiences plus new ones. For instance, you know, I could call and negotiate with a robot chef to figure out what I really wanted to have for my 12 people who were coming over. It would set up a menu, present it to me, and then send that to the restaurant. Like, I can have new experiences here around delivery that are completely out of reach for most other platforms.

Rich: Okay, that’s more interesting.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Okay. Here’s, I think, what you’re running into. What you’re running into is you went from, like, no people to, like, I’ll get a product manager to, I’m going to get a dozen support people to, I will go visit all the restaurants.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, the fantasy is that you don’t do that, but you literally spin up agents that do it. I don’t see that. We’re just not there yet. You can plausibly do that. You can convince a VC.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You can convince people that this could work.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it is a stretch to keep any kind of quality up. If you’re calling 5,000 people on the phone with a fake voice, who knows.

Rich: It’s not even quality. You just won’t pull it off. You ever heard of ChowHound?

Paul: Yes, I remember ChowHound.

Rich: Still around.

Paul: I know.

Rich: Yeah. ChowHound, essentially, this was their pitch, which is like, “I’m gonna save you from the gouging, the fees of Seamless and DoorDash.”

Paul: [sighs] You know the other one that breaks my heart, ARRO, which is the Uber—it was, like, they made the taxi, the T&LC?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Made their own, the Taxi & Limousine Commission, they made their own Uber/Lyft. Yeah, you have that on your phone?

Rich: Oh, yes, yes. You said ARRO, and I spelled it A-R-R-O-W.

Paul: No, it’s just an “o.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do remember it. And that was them saying, “Hey, we can do that, too.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And the lock-in effect and network effects are meaningful, because people are going to defend their turf. That’s normal business.

Paul: God bless. I love a yellow cab. But the Uber/Lyft experience is simply better.

Rich: It’s better.

Paul: They come to your, it’s—yeah.

Rich: Yeah, but I think beyond that, I think what you’re realizing, and I think this is maybe hopeful, in what we’re saying in these predictions. People, whether it be through relationships they build to sell whatever they’re selling, or whether it be just the empathy required to make sure that you heard why someone is struggling with a thing, and you’re gonna find a better way for them? Just requires you to go talk to someone and listen to them. And you could sit here and tell me I’m gonna write an agent that’s gonna message the chef at that nice Argentinian restaurant. It’s not gonna work. [laughing]

Paul: I mean, I don’t think it will work, but I do think that people will make a credible case and they will try it. I think that’s coming.

Rich: I think you, you, you touched on, I think the angle that can work here, which is you can try things that are outside of the typical zone. Don’t try to disrupt the incumbents in the old ways. The old ways don’t even matter anyway.

Paul: You have an opportunity. You have an opportunity here.

Rich: Take some swings.

Paul: Well, that’s the thing. You have an opportunity here, where if somebody picks up their phone and says, like, “I really want good chow mein.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You could do something about that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They can just literally say those words. You can be like, “I got three options for you. Who else is ordering?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You know, you usually, I got, you know, usually you get—

Rich: I don’t want to, yeah, I don’t want to go through software.

Paul: There’s also that. There’s also, I could do, like, “Okay, I’m going to tell you the truth here. What I really want is General Tso’s chicken. But also what I really want is to not gain 7 pounds in salt weight tonight.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “So can you help me out here? I need, like, a place with small portions and lots of broccoli.”

Rich: Yep.

Paul: I could be having that conversation, and that could be turning into an order.

Rich: Yeah, it can. And what you might be is a player that routes that order to one of the big players. The truth is, the big players are going to move slow. I’m sure there’s, like, AI teams spinning up at DoorDash, which must be exciting meetings for that. [laughter]

Paul: But, I mean, they mostly spend all their time ordering lunch.

Rich: That’s just kind of— [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So, I mean, look, they’re all going to try.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They all want to make it so that the interfaces around getting stuff is going to get easier, and you don’t have to use an app. My mom makes, calls me to order food.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And I get on, on it, and I have her address.

Paul: No, it’s even worse. She called you last week to order ramen for her aunts. For your aunts.

Rich: For my aunt. During a meeting with, like, 10 people in it.

Paul: No, no. And we had, like, it was a pretty big meeting.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And your phone just kept ringing for DoorDash in Bay Ridge.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That was strong coffee. Anyway.

Rich: No, but this is, this is, I think, maybe I’ll hijack your idea and then give my prediction around interfaces around these things.

Paul: Yeah. Go for it.

Rich: I think right now what’s happening is, what’s really taken hold, and it’s amazing, it is amazing, right? Is that you can go into ChatGPT or one of these platforms and ask it a question about something, ask it to clarify, write a sentence better. Like, just tactical, amazing things that it’ll do. Make an image.

Paul: Especially if you are not good at sentences.

Rich: Remove an element from an image. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, the Nano Banana stuff’s amazing. All really great stuff. Now, what hasn’t happened yet, and what is grafting that kind of interface, which my mom can use, onto tools that exist today.

Paul: Meaning chat. Yeah, because that’s actually her—

Rich: I wouldn’t even say chat. I mean, I’ve got, I got Google Home in my house. It’s still wired to the old stuff.

Paul: The funny thing is your mother uses you like ChatGPT.

Rich: She does.

Paul: Yeah, she calls you—

Rich: I’m like a concierge.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I get Ubers for her. I order food for her.

Paul: Right.

Rich: She has the apps on her phone and I showed her how to use them. She’s just like, “Okay, that’s nice.” I think it’s a way for her to also bother me in the middle of the day, but.

Paul: I know your mom. She’s super smart.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: She could absolutely, in about 10 minutes learn all this stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: She has chosen that you will be getting it for her.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So the interfaces around all these other conveniences are, like, me just raising the temperature in my Ecobee thermostat or ordering food or getting a car or, like, all these capabilities today are very point and click. They’re very much, like, you have to be savvy about how to use the software.

Paul: We are going to hear stories next year about, like, 36,000 orders of egg foo young getting to people’s apartments.

Rich: There might be that.

Paul: Yeah, that’s coming.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think, I don’t think the breakthroughs have shown up around the inter—like, I think AI has the opportunity to reset how we interface with technology beyond just going to ChatGPT. How that materializes and whether it materializes, well, the problem with a lot of these is that again, the Ecobee AI team is another team.

Paul: Tell people what Ecobee is.

Rich: Ecobee is a WiFi—it’s like Nest. It’s a WiFi thermostat you put in your house and you can control the heat and the air conditioning and the temperature in the house.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: And it’s hard to use. It has, like, comfort settings and sleep schedules and all this stuff. Other people in my house do not use it. I’m, like, the keeper of the thermostat. [Paul sighs] It’s really sad.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Now, where it can go is I just go into a thing and I ask it what I want, and then it’s a layer on top of what is typically point-and-click UX design software, right?

Paul: I’ve got to say, I’m doing this with things that I used to be very good at, like, but I find excruciating, like deploying to web servers.

Rich: That’s another one.

Paul: It’s okay for it to land on the thermostat. I’m with you.

Rich: Correct. Now, can all these big companies innovate and be smart about how these interfaces work? I don’t know. What I do know is that the populations that can take advantage of these things would explode if they were much more accessible. And many things are not. Like, many, many things are not. I’m not talking, I’m talking about kids and older people who don’t care for tech, but want the conveniences of it and whatnot.

How that material—like, whether that comes from the big players, I have no idea. I think it’s kind of interesting that it’s shouldn’t. It doesn’t have to. It’s, like, not hard to make a clean interface to managing the temperature in your house that only requires you to speak.

The other bit is there’s a hesitation to bring the voice-control stuff to AI too quickly. And the truth is, the voice-control stuff, there is a whole ecosystem out there around controlling your house with voice. Like, if you were into it, it is a disaster. It’s a disaster. Like, to turn on your Christmas tree and to, to, you know, preheat your house and all this stuff through voice because they’re so afraid that you’re, you know, bad things will happen.

Paul: Yeah. “Setting oven to 700!”

Rich: Yeah, all that. It’s real messy right now and, but there’s massive, massive opportunity around it. Around what you’re talking about, upsetting, you know, network incumbents that are entrenched. I just think you can do it, and you do it faster and cheaper, and you can give it a whirl. It’s just so costly around the people side. People discount the people side of so much of tech. And that’s a classic misstep, right? You can talk—I remember when, like bots, before AI, it was, I think it was chatbots were going to run the world.

Paul: Conversational interfaces.

Rich: Conversational interfaces. Turns out nobody wanted to deal with them. And they were like, “Okay, well, nobody wants this.”

Paul: I think it’s one of those things where if you’re a nerd who works on the command line, you’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah. Even Web3, like, VR and Web3 and then Web3 was, like, you’re going to buy real estate in your head. All of that nonsense.

Paul: When you use a word processor, it still thinks in pages. We like that stuff. It’s hard to disrupt existing forms if humans have already agreed they like them.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So, like, letter-sized paper, we’re going to have that until we die.

Rich: It’s not us being nostalgic, it’s just us not wanting to deal.

Paul: Fair enough. [laughter] All right, so I’m going to give you my exact prediction and you can tell me whether you think I’m right or not.

Rich: Is this a different one or the same one?

Paul: It’s the same one, restated.

Rich: So you’re going to, you’re going to, you’re digging in.

Paul: No, it is that the opportunity to establish new companies that disrupt existing big platform plays? It’s going to, it’s going to lead to an influx of VC, and we’ll just see a lot of those companies, and some of them will start to chip away.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: In 2026 you’re going to see startups that start to eat at the big networks because you can build so much more quickly.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And what we’ll find out this year is that we’re about to enter a laboratory where we’re going to see the value of being able to build, own, and operate a platform versus network effects.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’ve put those two together culturally. You build the platform and you lock in the network.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now you can build the platform without the network. You don’t even need it. You can just kind of go to town and build all day long.

Rich: Yeah. I want to take a red line to your prediction. I like your prediction. I think the red line I would make is, I think the ones that try to just replicate existing platforms will fail. I think the ones that focus in on pain points and see strange lateral opportunities around them or through—like, what I just described. Like, ordering food.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like if you’re just going to make another Seamless, you’re not going to get anywhere. But if you make it so that the experience is so different and it opens up opportunity for people who wouldn’t use it anyway, and it’s weird and different, then I think that’s really, really interesting. So I think the ones that go at it have to come at it not just like, “Well, I could build it cheaper.” Well, that train left, like, there’s a lot of people who tried that. I think you have to do something a little different, a twist to it that sort of shakes up how things work. Which you can try because it’s cheap, so why not?

Paul: Richard, what is our company? Why are we talking about this?

Rich: I think—we are Aboard.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: We ship custom software at a fraction of what it used to cost. We’re learning something that pretty much further underlines what I’ve been saying, which is that when you go into places, they have particular problems, and you have to talk to them.

Paul: That’s true. We can stand up a really good, like, CRM-style platform in, like, five minutes.

Rich: It’s incredible, right?

Paul: It is.

Rich: It’s all amazing and incredible.

Paul: But it’s not necessarily what anybody needs.

Rich: No one is impressed with how fast we can do it.

Paul: They’re impressed that we can change things quickly to meet their needs.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: That actually turns out, it turns out to be less about the one-shot, here’s the app.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And much more about the like, “Hey, I really need people to be able to put in vacation time in this particular way, so it’s compliant with our policies.”

Rich: Correct.

Paul: If we can go, “Yeah, not a problem. Let me get that for you.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Then they are really excited about us.

Rich: Some people ask us, “Wait, are you guys an agency?” And that’s because we walk and talk like one. And the reason we do is because we spend time with you.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: The platform we use to deliver the thing is insanely accelerated. We could never, could never deliver it to you that quickly and that cheaply. But we still want to talk to you and spend time with you.

Paul: To be clear, the product is that you license our platform and we work with you to give you the whole thing. So you get kind of all the power of AI, all of it, but in a way that is just really hewed to how you work and safe and reliable and not a lot of vibe-coded code just slopping everywhere.

Rich: No.

Paul: Like, a system.

Rich: We’re having some fun conversations with smaller businesses that never been able to get custom software before. So it’s very cool. Check us out at aboard.com.

Paul: There it is. Hello@aboard.com if you need us. We’re glad to talk, and give us five stars. Do all the stuff. Let’s start this year off right.

Rich: Stay healthy in 2026.

Paul: Any New Year’s resolutions? You’re already going to the gym.

Rich: Yeah, I don’t know squats.

Paul: No, I mean that’s—

Rich: At 130.

Paul: Just keep going.

Rich: How’s that for a resolution?

Paul: You’re 42 years old. Just keep going to the gym.

Rich: I’m going to keep going to the gym.

Paul: That’s what I’m doing. I’m biking a lot.

Rich: Bless your heart.

Paul: Here we go.

Rich: Keep going. Have a great year, everybody.

Paul: Have a great year and we’ll be back next week. Bye.

Rich: Bye.

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