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Phill Keaney-Bolland· Co-founder and Designer, Yaya2 min readWith Mike Walters (Opens in a new tab), Co-founder, Action1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.