How do you decide which product idea to focus on?

Mike’s answer is subtractive. He had to kill ideas he was attached to, including ones with early signal, to find the single product that would scale. The difficulty is emotional rather than analytical.

Is AI-assisted coding reducing the value of software companies?

Mike argues it reduces the value of the code itself, since capability becomes quicker to reproduce. What gains value is distribution and data gravity, meaning the customers you reach and the data that accumulates around you.

What is endpoint takeover prevention?

An architecture built on the assumption that the vendor’s own cloud may be compromised, so that a breach of the vendor does not cascade into a breach of every customer endpoint it manages.

Why is patch management still an unsolved problem?

Partly because it is unglamorous. It attracts less attention and less competition than more fashionable categories, while remaining one of the most persistent routes into an organization.

Building Action1: Mike Walters on Patch Management, AI Vibe Coding, and the Power of Focus

Phill Keaney-Bolland· Co-founder and Designer, YayaJuly 7, 20262 min read

With Mike Walters, Co-founder, Action1

Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

Key takeaways

Killing product ideas you are attached to is the precondition for finding the one that scales.
Patch management stays critical precisely because it is unglamorous.
Vibe coding tools are reducing the intellectual property value of ordinary code.
Distribution and data gravity are replacing code as the defensible moat.
Assume your own cloud will be breached, and architect so customers survive it.

Killing your own babies
The unglamorous category
What vibe coding does to moats
Assume you will be breached

Killing your own babies#

Mike is blunt about the hardest part of his first startup. Too many product ideas, all plausible, all with some early signal. The discipline that produced a business scaling to tens of millions in revenue was killing the ones he was personally attached to.

For founders in a crowded category this is the useful frame. Focus is not choosing what to build. It is choosing what to stop, and the cost is felt rather than calculated.

The unglamorous category#

Patch management is not a category anyone builds a launch film around, and that is roughly why it remains one of the most persistent vulnerabilities in IT. Unsexy problems attract less competition and less attention, which is an advantage if you are willing to sit with them.

What vibe coding does to moats#

Mike’s provocative claim is that AI-assisted development is lowering the intellectual property value of ordinary code. If a capability can be reproduced quickly, the code stops being the thing you defend.

What replaces it, in his reading, is distribution and data gravity: the customers you reach and the data that accumulates where you already sit. That is a strategic argument with direct implications for how early a company should invest in its brand and its route to market.

Assume you will be breached#

The technical portion covers endpoint takeover prevention, and the architectural principle underneath it. Design on the assumption that your own cloud will be compromised, so that a breach of the vendor does not become a breach of every customer. In an environment of automated attacks, Mike treats this as the only honest posture.

Phill Keaney-Bolland

Co-founder and Designer, Yaya

Co-founder and designer at Yaya, and host of the Cult Products podcast. Fifteen years designing products, brands and UX across multiple industries before narrowing to cybersecurity, and lectures on design at Imperial. Works with cybersecurity founders on positioning, strategy and the website that has to carry a launch, across identity, cloud security, AI agents and software supply chain, including Twine out of stealth and Geordie AI, which won the RSA Innovation Sandbox in 2026.