Author Archives: dselz

About dselz

Husband, father, internet entrepreneur, founder, CEO, Squirro, Memonic, local.ch, Namics, rail aficionado, author, tbd...

“What has been thought, cannot be un-thought” – we need AI certification fast

Voluntary restraint by individual labs will not prevent harmful outcomes from frontier AI, because the real risk is created at deployment. We need an aviation-style certification regime for high-risk AI deployments: independent testing, continuous monitoring, mandatory incident reporting, and enforceable accountability. Without it, insurance and boards will increasingly refuse large-scale agentic systems, and regulators will lose authority by lacking technical capability. Continue reading

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“No AI” – the “No Software” re-run in enterprise techhnology

AI is currently extending the life of legacy enterprise software by smoothing over painful workflows and filling capability gaps. But once automation removes the human checker, data quality and accountability become hard constraints that cannot be bolted onto transaction-focused systems. As in the “No Software” era, the real shift may arrive later than predicted, then happen fast, and the winning slogan will be the one incumbents cannot say back. Continue reading

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AI won’t kill legacy software, it may actually keep it alive

The 2026 selloff in software stocks looked like the start of a SaaS replacement cycle, until enterprise buyers did the opposite: they renewed. AI is increasingly acting like WD40 and Play-Doh for legacy systems, reducing friction and filling gaps just enough to make switching harder. For AI-first vendors, the wedge is no longer “the incumbent is bad”, it is owning end-to-end workflow, unique curated data, and governance designed in from day one. Continue reading

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Flat screens and enterprise AI, the waiting game…

Waiting made sense when flat screens got cheaper every year, because the product was finished the day you bought it. Enterprise AI is different: the real cost is the learning curve, process redesign, and governance muscle you only build by doing. Deferring that tuition does not remove the productivity dip, it just postpones it until competitors are already climbing out. Continue reading

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If AI is a bubble, the real question is: Who survives the bust

AI investment is starting to look like the railroad boom of the 1880s: massive buildout, intense competition, and a likely shakeout. The critical question is not whether the bubble pops, but which assets and operators endure when compute depreciates faster than it can pay for itself. Continue reading

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All things agentic: Are we (just) talking to ourselves?

A room full of builders can feel like proof that a technology has arrived, but homophily makes agreement cheap and common. The only signal that matters is whether people outside the room are willing to pay for what is being built. Continue reading

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Everything turns on its head. Often a good thing.

UBS is pushing back on tougher Swiss capital rules, yet those same rules are designed to prevent another taxpayer-backed rescue like Credit Suisse in 2023. The deeper pattern is broader than banking: regulation and consensus often flip from constraint to protection when conditions change. What looks like the obvious strategy in one era can become the risk in the next. Continue reading

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When to trust your Gut, and when not to

Two early bets, on maps for local.ch and on retrieval augmented models at Squirro, were validated years later by the market, not by a pitch deck. The real lesson is that intuition is only reliable in environments with repeatable patterns and lots of feedback, and dangerously convincing everywhere else. Continue reading

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Got Five Minutes? The Hidden Work Your Calendar Won’t Show

The most consequential parts of leadership rarely arrive as scheduled meetings, they show up as “got five minutes?” interruptions. Those moments carry real context switching costs, but they are also where decisions get unblocked, customers get saved, and the real job happens beyond the calendar. Continue reading

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“How True” or the Grind nobody sees

In 2012 I reposted a Chris Dixon paragraph about how “overnight success” usually hides years of struggle, while quietly living that reality myself. The real story is not that success takes time, everyone knows that now, it is what founders do while they are still inside the grind, and why “fake it till you make it” can be a tempting, costly norm. Continue reading

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