Building an AI-native firm in 30 days. Except we didn’t.

Mon, 04 May 2026 14:14:00 +0200

“Building an AI-native firm in 30 days” is a great LinkedIn AI slop bait title.

We are not AI-native. We are roughly 10x more AI-enabled than we were on April 1st. Those are different sentences. The gap between them, between AI-enabled and AI-native, is most of what I want to share, because it is the thing every VC, CTO, and partnership-led firm I now talk to is getting wrong.

For 30 days in April, I ran a sprint that pulled our entire firm (partners, investors, finance, legal, EAs, ops, all 30 of us) out of business-as-usual. The one thing we did not drop was answering our founders. We are a venture firm, and that line is sacred. Everything else moved aside, so that between 50 and 80% of every person’s time, every day, went into building with AI. By Demo Day 5 on April 30th, we had shipped 52 internal apps, deployed multiple production AI agents, redesigned core processes, and turned a partnership of investors and operators into a partnership of builders.

Ai on Jelmer de Jong

Building an AI-native firm in 30 days. Except we didn’t.