Maks Giordano has spent 30 years watching technology promises collide with reality. At Venturethon 9, he shared what that experience taught him about AI, entrepreneurship, and why right now might be the best moment in history to build something.

Maks' relationship with technology goes back 30 years, through companies like Icon Mobile, Kite, and ProSiebenSat.1, through angel investments, through corporate partnerships, and through a lot of hard lessons he no longer needs to learn.

The Pictures That Started It All

Maks opened his session with a set of illustrations drawn around 1900, shortly after the telephone was invented. Artists of that era were imagining what the technology might eventually make possible. In those old drawings, you can see people on mobile phones, on video calls, in scenarios that would not become real for another century.

Technology does not just create new products.  People look at what exists and immediately start asking: but what if it could do this? What if we combined it with that? What would the world look like if we pushed it further?

Being Early Is Not the Same as Being Right

Maks has personal experience with being ahead of the curve. He was building mobile apps before the iPhone existed. He spent five years trying to convince clients and investors that mobile marketing would become a multi-billion dollar industry. They were skeptical. He was correct. And then he ran out of patience.

"I lost hope," he said. "I really lost hope that mobile marketing would be what I always expected it to be."

And so he moved on. And then the iPhone arrived. Then the App Store. Then flat-rate data plans. And mobile advertising exploded, while Maks was already elsewhere.

This is not a story about being wrong. It is a story about patience, about understanding that technology does not develop in a straight line. It needs catalysts. It needs other technologies to meet it halfway. And sometimes the person with the best instincts is simply the person who quits one week before the breakthrough.

Where Are We Now in the AI Hype Cycle?

On the investment side, we are at peak hype. Seed rounds in the hundreds of millions. Pre-product companies achieving unicorn valuations. OpenAI acquiring a company from Jony Ive for $6.5 billion before a single product had shipped. These are not signs of a healthy market. They are signs of a bubble, and Maks does not think it can continue indefinitely.

But on the practical side, the story is different. Generative AI is genuinely producing real outcomes for real people. It is not smoke and mirrors. Founders who are using it daily are seeing productivity gains that would have seemed impossible three years ago. What used to take a week now takes half a day. A prototype that once required months of engineering can now be stood up over a weekend.

The bubble will correct. It always does. But the technology itself will not disappear. What the dot-com crash actually did was flush out the silly business models and leave the solid ones standing. The same will happen here.

As Winston Churchill once put it, never waste a good crisis.

Science Fiction Has Already Become Science Fact

As a teenager, Maks was obsessed with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In that book, a babel fish sits in your ear and translates any language into your mother tongue in real time. He remembered reading it and thinking: what a beautiful, impossible idea.

It is now a product you can download.

Real-time translation, AI avatars that 9 out of 10 people cannot distinguish from a real video, voice-powered customer service, agentic workflows that connect your calendar and your inbox and your Trello board and act on your behalf: these things exist. They work. And according to Maks, this is still the worst version of AI we will ever experience. Every iteration from here improves on the last.

He is particularly excited about what comes next in how we physically interact with AI. The Jony Ive acquisition, he believes, signals a coming shift away from the mobile phone as the primary interface. Whatever replaces it will likely be worn. It will listen, see, translate, and assist in ways that feel less like using a tool and more like having an extremely capable presence with you at all times.

The movie Her, he suggested, is worth watching again. Not as science fiction, but as a slightly early documentary.

What This Means for Founders

Maks spent the second half of the session taking questions, and several of them circled around the same anxiety: if AI is available to everyone, where is the edge? If big platforms keep absorbing new features, how does a startup survive? If you are not already well-connected, how do you break in?

On the wrapper problem, his answer was measured. The risk is real. If your entire business model depends on a capability that OpenAI or Anthropic might ship as a free feature next quarter, you have a feature, not a product. That question, "is this a feature or a product?", has existed for 20 years of VC conversations and it has not gone away.

But there is another way to look at it. The big players cannot go everywhere at once. There are regional markets, vertical niches, and specific use cases where a small, focused team can move faster and build deeper customer relationships than any platform giant can. That window is open right now. The question is whether you will walk through it.

On the entry-level job question, Maks was candid. He has not seen clients firing people because of AI. What he has seen is clients not hiring. The entry-level job is disappearing not through dramatic layoffs but through quiet attrition, through decisions not to backfill. For a fresh graduate, this is a real problem. But it is also, in a strange way, a gift to entrepreneurship. When there is no corporate ladder to climb, the calculus of starting something yourself becomes much simpler. What do you have to lose?

He also flagged something he called "work slop," a new kind of corporate output that looks polished and sounds authoritative but contains very little real thinking. As AI makes it easier to produce volume, the premium will shift to genuine insight. That is a human skill. It cannot be outsourced.

On Networks and Cold Outreach

One of the most personal moments of the session came when a founder asked about competing without connections, about whether the startup world rewards those who already know the right people.

Maks grew up in a German working-class family. His father was a war refugee, an untrained factory worker. There was no network. There were no introductions waiting to happen.

What he found instead was presence. Showing up at events, even without being naturally extrovert. Staying in touch with the people he met, over years, through genuine interest rather than transactional calculation. Giving before asking. Building slowly.

Cold outreach, he admitted, rarely works. Not because the person on the other end is malicious, but because it tends to be blunt and self-serving and easy to ignore. What works is showing up consistently, offering value, and trusting that the network builds itself over time.

The Final Word

This is an extraordinary time to be a founder. Not because everything is easy. But because the gap between having an idea and being able to show it to someone has collapsed in a way that would have seemed impossible even five years ago.

Market research, pitch decks, prototypes, customer support, marketing copy: these used to consume enormous stretches of time and money. They now take days or hours. That compression does not eliminate the need for great founders. It amplifies what great founders can do.

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