Your infra is lying to you.
There’s this thing that happens to you when you’re a founder.
You wake up every day with a thousand tabs open in your head.
Investor calls. Product decisions. Hiring (or firing).
And in between all of that chaos, you’re supposed to figure out if what you’re building is even right.
Now, here’s the part most people won’t tell you: Sometimes, it’s not your strategy that’s broken.
It’s your infrastructure. Not the sexy dashboards and clean design,
I mean the deep, invisible architecture underneath your entire product.
Recently, I sat down with Anil Ravindranath, the CTO of a startup that’s been quietly building with some of the sharpest minds in AI.
And what he told me left my brain buzzing for days.
“You’re not building for now. You’re building for 2026.”
That’s the first thing he said. No context. No intro. Just that line.
I asked him what he meant.
He said:
“Most startups are building like it’s still 2023. They’re creating tools that require a human to be involved at every step. But AI is evolving faster than their thinking, and it’s going to leave them behind.”
He called it the agentic shift, the moment your tools stop waiting on you, and start taking initiative on their own.
Not in some far-off future. Now. Today.
The problem?
Most founders haven’t built the foundation to support that.
Their infra assumes the user is always there, clicking, prompting, dragging, correcting.
But that world is dying. And quickly.
According to Anil, a ton of startups are silently burning $80K–$120K a month.
Not because they’re scaling too fast or paying bloated salaries.
But because their infra is a leaky pipe, and they don’t even know it.
“You’re not measuring GPU waste. You’re stacking APIs with no observability. You’re running models that can’t evolve. And every month, you’re bleeding.”
Not just money.
But momentum.
Confidence.
Time.
The three things most founders can’t afford to lose.
And here’s the kicker: It feels like you’re moving fast.
You’re shipping. You’re pushing updates. You’re doing the founder hustle.
But under the hood?
You’re drifting.
“Agentic design isn’t optional anymore.”
By this point, I was wondering if I should just rebuild everything from scratch.
And Anil just kept going.
“You don’t have to go full sci-fi. But if your system isn’t built to support tools that think ahead, reprioritize, or act without a prompt… you’re designing yourself into irrelevance.”
Think about that for a second.
How much of your current stack relies on someone being there to guide it?
To babysit it? To make it smart?
Because the next wave of AI won’t need your guidance.
It’ll just go.
And your product, your startup, needs to be ready for that.
If you’re building right now, building anything, ask yourself:
-Are we tracking GPU waste like our runway depends on it? Because it does.
-Can our infra support delegation, not just automation? There’s a difference.
-Is our team trained to think agentically? Or are we still stuck in prompt-response mode?
If these questions make your stomach flip a little, good.
Every week, Liftoff paid readers get full access to conversations like this.
Raw insights. Unfiltered lessons.
Just real people trying to build real things that don’t fall apart.
I decided to send this one to you, because I want you to feel what paid subscribers get every single week.
And if something clicked for you while reading this, even one small thing…
Then maybe it’s time to stop watching from the outside.
Become a paid subscriber today
You’ve waited long enough.
See you in the next one,
Keith
Inspired by my conversation with Anil Ravindranath, watch here!