Disrupt or Defend

About Disrupt or Defend

In the age of AI, founders face a constant choice: disrupt the market—or defend what they’ve built. Disrupt or Defend is a weekly podcast for startup founders, CTOs, and tech builders who want to stay ahead without losing focus on people and purpose. Host Daniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup Technologies, talks with founders and experts who are shaping the next wave of software innovation. From AI agents and low-code tools to scaling dev teams and building products that last, each episode explores the decisions that define a company’s future. If you’re building in tech and want real stories, practical lessons, and honest conversations about the balance between boldness and focus—this show is for you. Subscribe and join the community of builders defining what comes next in tech.

Publisher

Softup Technologies GmbH

Category

business · education · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Oct 2025

Latest episode

20 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

34 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Aug 2026

   When to sell your startup, and who actually gets paid (with Sebastien Stanley-Jones) | Ep. 36

   Airtable sold to Bending Spoons. The founders walked away ultra-high-net-worth, and the employees who gave the company three, five, or ten years walked away holding something worth zero. ㅤ Daniel Kazani (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielkazani/), co-founder of Softup (https://www.softup.co), sits down with Sebastien Stanley-Jones (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-stanley-jones-mmie) of Flippa, the world's largest M&A marketplace for digital assets. Around 15,000 transactions a year run through that marketplace, and Sebastien thinks most founders are missing the same thing. They know how to build. They have no idea what their exit ramps look like. ㅤ The conversation covers what makes a business genuinely sellable, why the preference stack decides who actually gets paid, and why fundraising is like walking through a desert. Sebastien gets spicy on VCs, explains why a business built in a weekend with no defensibility sells for a fraction of revenue, and lays out what he would look at with 500K to spend on an online business. ㅤ 👤 Guest Bio ㅤ Sebastien Stanley-Jones (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-stanley-jones-mmie) leads global strategic M&A for EMEA at Flippa, where founders sell SaaS, e-commerce, content, apps, and domains into a global buyer network. He is Canadian, based in Amsterdam, and his career runs through investment banking, private equity corporate development, and fintech: managing director at Two Roads Advisors, global business development at Accel Club, corporate development at Moonshot Brands, and head of enterprise at Clearco in Toronto. He also mentors founders through Plug and Play. ㅤ 📌 What We Cover ㅤ What Flippa requires before its brokers will push an asset to the buyer network: two years of monthly financials, taxes in good standing, and an API call into Stripe, Adyen, or SumUp to confirm the revenue is the revenue Why the Airtable sale is a preference stack story, and why the employees absorb the loss while the founders and most of the VCs do not Sebastien's own version of it at Clearco, scaled fast to multi-million status, options now worth zero Fundraising as walking through a desert: fill the canteen when you find water, go one and done, and stay the person dictating the next terms instead of taking the price Why he thinks most VCs are not very good, and what daily mark to market has to do with judgment The three-part test for whether to sell: are you having fun, do you have line of sight on growth, are you making money. On the way up you have control. On the way down you are a passenger Defensibility as the only question that matters for AI-built businesses, and why how you built it is irrelevant if the revenue is durable The 500K playbook: entry price first, the SaaS apocalypse is overblown, e-commerce hard assets are cheap, and key-person risk gets solved with SOPs and deferred payments that keep the seller answering the phone ㅤ 🔗 Resources Mentioned ㅤ Flippa (https://flippa.com) Airtable (https://airtable.com), Bending Spoons (https://bendingspoons.com), Meetup (https://www.meetup.com), komoot (https://www.komoot.com) Constellation Software (https://www.csisoftware.com) Clearco (https://clear.co) Stripe (https://stripe.com), Adyen (https://www.adyen.com), SumUp (https://www.sumup.com), Shopify (https://www.shopify.com) Wayflyer (https://wayflyer.com), 8fig (https://8fig.co) Atlassian (https://www.atlassian.com) Lovable (https://lovable.dev), Claude (https://claude.ai), Cursor (https://cursor.com) Plug and Play (https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com) Andreessen Horowitz (https://a16z.com), Founders Fund (https://foundersfund.com), Craft Ventures (https://www.craftventures.com) Sebastien Stanley-Jones on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-stanley-jones-mmie)

2. 

   6 Aug 2026

   How AI is disrupting the practice of Law | Ep. 35

   Most law firms bill by the hour. Bennett B. Borden (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennettborden/) built one that almost never does. ㅤ He tells Daniel Kazani (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielkazani/), co-founder of Softup (https://www.softup.co), that conservatively 80% of what a lawyer does today is better done by AI. The 20% left over is very high stakes. So he took his team out of DLA Piper and started Clarion, a firm that practices AI law and builds agentic systems for clients at the same time. ㅤ Bennett calls gen AI the most transformative technology since electricity, and he has a reason for the comparison: every prior revolution was additive to knowledge workers, and this one competes with them. His framing for clients is Iron Man, not the Terminator. You don't unplug a person and plug in a bot. ㅤ The conversation gets into the layer most companies skip, which is the sensors and metrics that prove a system behaves precisely as intended. Daniel pushes on whether a vendor can credibly govern its own AI, where liability actually sits when something goes wrong, and why data sovereignty turned urgent in the space of a few months. Bennett's split on adoption: 20% technical problem, 80% psychological. ㅤ 👤 Guest Bio Bennett B. Borden (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennettborden/) is a lawyer and data scientist, and founder and CEO of Clarion AI Partners (https://clarionai.com). His career started at the CIA in a new data analytics division in the early '90s, work he describes as understanding, predicting, and influencing behavior from digital data. He went on to Georgetown Law and a graduate degree in analytics from NYU Stern, then spent years in big law focused on automated decision-making systems: the algorithms behind credit approvals, hiring, social feeds, and ads. He was Partner and Chief Data Scientist at DLA Piper (https://www.dlapiper.com), where he led the global AI practice, and founded Clarion in 2024. ㅤ 📌 What We Cover Why gen AI is the first technological revolution that competes with knowledge workers instead of adding to them The 80/20 split in legal work, and why the remaining 20% carries all the risk How Clarion runs as an AI boutique law firm, an AI strategy practice, and a build shop at once Why the billable hour makes efficiency your enemy, and how Clarion prices by value, phase, or task instead Walmart's outside counsel guidelines: use AI on this list of work, or we aren't paying for it Whether a vendor can govern its own AI, and the case for a third party you can pass liability to Where liability sits under EU and US law today, on the deployer rather than the developer, with contracts carrying the rest Open weight models behind the firewall, and who's asking for them: defense, family offices, funds, pharma, material science The "artifacts of acumen" idea, and how to find the repetitive, data-centric tasks worth building an agent around ㅤ 🔗 Resources Mentioned Clarion AI Partners (https://clarionai.com) DLA Piper (https://www.dlapiper.com) Harvey (https://www.harvey.ai) Glean (https://www.glean.com) Artisan (https://www.artisan.co) OpenEvidence, Legora, Lovable Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft Azure EU AI Act Am Law 200

3. 

   23 Jul 2026

   The Fastest Data Grid for your App? | Ep. 34

   Users don't blame your table when it stutters. They blame their WiFi, refresh the page, and wonder if their laptop is dying. Then they open a product where the rows glide, and yours suddenly feels broken. ㅤ Daniel Kazani (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielkazani/) sits down with Khalil Baydoun (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebrahimbaydoun/), co-founder of 1771 Technologies and the team behind LyteNyte Grid, to get into why speed is a product decision, not a nice-to-have. Khalil breaks down the buy-versus-build math for data grids, why the pull to adopt a tool has to come from developers rather than the CEO, and how a small London team runs like a 30-person company by putting AI everywhere except the hardest engineering. ㅤ They also get into the pressure founders and CTOs now pile onto dev teams: be McDonald's, but make the food gourmet. And why Khalil sits on the dreamer side of the AI debate. For a founder-to-founder view from Daniel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielkazani/) and Softup (https://www.softup.co) on where developer productivity actually comes from, this one delivers. ㅤ 👤 Guest Bio Khalil Baydoun (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebrahimbaydoun/) is the co-founder of 1771 Technologies, the London software company behind LyteNyte Grid, a data grid and data table library that developers embed into their applications. His team has built data grids for almost three years, focusing on performance and developer experience over sales and marketing. ㅤ 📌 What We Cover The buy-versus-build decision for data grids, and why building one can cost engineers months or a full year of time. Why the customer is the company but the user is the developer, and what that means for how adoption actually happens. Latency as the silent killer of user experience, explained through slow conference calls and laggy FIFA matches. The McDonald's-but-gourmet expectation now landing on every dev team, and how Lovable changes what a product manager expects from developers. Doomers versus dreamers on AI, and why Khalil bets on workflows that haven't been invented yet. How a small team uses AI for documentation, copywriting, invoicing, testing, and code reviews, but still can't get a data grid past 80% from scratch. The "Dyson of data grids" pitch: pick it up, plug it in, get going. ㅤ 🔗 Resources Mentioned LyteNyte Grid / 1771 Technologies (https://www.1771technologies.com) Claude Code (https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code) Lovable (https://lovable.dev) Cursor (https://cursor.com) Microsoft Copilot (https://copilot.microsoft.com) Palantir (https://www.palantir.com) ChatGPT (https://chatgpt.com)

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