Last night, Golden Ventures hosted another edition of our invite-only dinner series, Plated in Waterloo exploring “The New Playbook for Product Development.”
I had the pleasure of moderating a conversation with three exceptional founders shaping the future of how teams build, ship, and scale products:
💡 Mike Murchison, Co-founder & CEO of ada CX
💡 Alan Paulin, Co-founder & CEO of Mavis Labs
💡 Kevin Michael, Co-founder & CEO of Tempo (YC S23)
We covered a lot of ground including from the velocity AI unlocks in product development to the evolving relationship between design, engineering, and leadership.
A few standout insights:
💸 Inference cost matters — even small percentage reductions can have a meaningful impact on cash flow at scale.
🔬Production vs. prototyping: Great tools exist for prototyping, but production-ready code still creates friction. Tools like Tempo are bridging that gap.
⚡️While 95% of features can now be built in hours with AI, but the last 5% of polish still takes time — teams have to decide between velocity and perfection.
✅ Talent mindset is evolving: curiosity and adaptability now outweigh traditional experience; even AI-native students are teaching seasoned engineers new ways of working.
🚀 AI is redefining engineering roles, enabling junior devs to ship production code safely while senior engineers shift toward oversight and system design.
Thanks to Mike, Alan, and Kevin for such a candid, thought-provoking discussion and to everyone who joined us for great food and even better conversation!
Special thanks to our partners Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, TD Innovation Partners, and Google Cloud for their continued support of the Plated series, and to the Golden Ventures team for bringing it all to life.
Until next time 🍽️
CC: Matt Golden, Julia (Baird) Konefal, Jamie Rosenblatt, Nick Chen, Alison Kaizer, Bert Amato, Vincent Xue, Ryan Unruch, Sam Ip, Tom Lowden, Shez Samji, Alison Drader, Cindy Zhong
