Surviving the early days as an AI startup isn’t just about making the technology work, it’s about hiring the right people, avoiding costly mistakes, and standing out in a crowded market.

This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Jasper Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of Artisan, a fast-growing AI startup building AI employees for sales. Best known for its viral “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign, Artisan is rethinking outbound sales with AI, while still betting on hiring exceptional human talent.

In this episode, they break down what it really takes to build and scale a venture-backed AI company, from Y Combinator to rapid growth.

This conversation covers:

• Startup hiring mistakes every founder should avoid

• Lessons on firing, team building, and company culture in early-stage startups

• The strategy behind bold, controversial marketing that drives growth

• How AI is transforming sales, hiring, and the future of work

• What founders get wrong about the necessary roles needed for a scaling startup

This conversation gets to the heart of building a startup: making the right hires early or paying for it later.

 Subscribe to Build Mode on ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠, ⁠Spotify⁠, or ⁠wherever you like to listen⁠. And watch the full videos on ⁠YouTube⁠.

Apply to Startup Battlefield: We are looking for early-stage companies that have an MVP. So nominate a founder (or yourself): techcrunch.com/apply. Be sure to say you heard about Startup Battlefield from the Build Mode podcast.  

TechCrunch Disrupt: If you're thinking about applying to Startup Battlefield, then October 13 to 15 in San Francisco, we're back for TechCrunch Disrupt, where the Startup Battlefield 200 takes the stage. So if you want to cheer them on, or just network with 1000s of founders, VCs, and tech enthusiasts, then grab your tickets.  

Use code buildmode15 for 15% off any ticket type. 

New episodes of Build Mode drop every Thursday. Hosted by Isabelle Johannessen. Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development led by Morgan Little. Special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams. 

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Show Notes

• Quentin Amaudry – As everyone knows, Cowork is coming within Copilot and it is extremely promising
• Copilot Cowork vs Claude Cowork: Same AI, Different Worlds
• Copilot Cowork: A new way of getting work done
• Cowork overview (Frontier)

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UX is under pressure. A proactive maturity audit gives you a voice before leadership makes decisions about your team without you.

Something uncomfortable is happening in organizations right now. UX teams are being quietly reassessed. AI has disrupted the field, leadership expectations have gone unmet, and there's a growing sense that UX hasn't delivered what it promised. The conversations are happening, but often not with the people who actually do UX work.

If you're in a UX role, decisions about your team's future might be forming in rooms you're not in.

That's the situation I've been thinking about lately, and it's why I want to talk about UX maturity audits. Not as a defensive measure or a tick-box exercise, but as a genuinely useful tool for getting ahead of a conversation that's already underway.

The expectation gap is real

A lot of the cynicism toward UX right now traces back to one thing: overselling. Leadership was told UX would deliver a hundredfold return on every dollar spent. That figure gets thrown around a lot, and someone took it seriously enough to hire one UX person and wait for the magic to happen.

It didn't.

That disappointment is partly our industry's fault, though it's not something we often admit openly. We've marketed UX with promises that assume a level of organizational change nobody warned leadership they'd have to make. Hiring one person doesn't transform an organization into a user-centric one. It never did. There's a certain naivety in the idea that a single hire will magically produce amazing experiences, without understanding the breadth of change required for an organization to truly become user-focused. But plenty of people implied it would.

The result is a leadership team that feels, not unreasonably, like they were sold something that didn't arrive.

Why waiting is a bad idea

The natural response to this situation is to keep your head down and hope things settle. Understandable, but a mistake.

If leadership is already souring on UX, the absence of any structured conversation about what UX is actually delivering gives that skepticism room to grow unchallenged. Decisions start getting made. Quietly, and without much input from the people who understand what's actually happening.

A proactive UX maturity audit changes that dynamic. Instead of waiting to be judged, you're shaping the conversation. You're the one bringing evidence, framing the questions, and defining what success looks like. That's a considerably better position to be in.

And it's not just damage control. Even mature, well-functioning UX teams benefit from this kind of review. There's always a next stage. Whether it's wider adoption, better integration with product teams, or moving toward something more democratized, an audit helps you see where you are and decide where to go.

What a solid audit covers

A UX maturity audit should cover five areas. Not exhaustively, but enough to give you a real picture.

• Strategy and leadership. Does UX have a seat at the table? Is there genuine sponsorship from someone with budget and influence, or is UX being practiced in a corner while real decisions happen elsewhere?
• Culture and capability. How widely does the organization understand what UX actually involves? Are there training pathways and career development? Or is it just a job title a few people happen to have?
• Research and design processes. Is UX practice consistent, or does it depend entirely on who's available? Are designers and researchers involved early, or called in after the big decisions are already made?
• Outcomes and measurement. Can the team point to specific improvements in user outcomes? Are there agreed definitions of what success looks like, and is anyone actually tracking it?
• Cross-functional integration. Is UX embedded across teams, or sitting in its own silo waiting for people to come to it?

None of these are particularly complicated questions. The hard part is being honest about the answers.

The difference between a real audit and a survey

An audit that just collects opinions tells you what people think, which is interesting but not necessarily accurate. A good audit looks for evidence.

That means checking whether research plans actually exist. Whether findings get used or disappear into a folder. Whether design systems are maintained or quietly falling apart. Whether the team can point to specific recent changes that improved user outcomes rather than just shipped features.

But the more revealing question is often why these things aren't happening, because the answer usually points straight to the organizational problems that stop UX from gaining traction in the first place. A missing research plan isn't just an admin gap. It's often a signal that no one with authority has made space for it, or that the team has learned it wouldn't be taken seriously anyway.

The questions worth asking aren't simply "how good is our UX?" They're "how well is UX supported here? How consistently is it practiced? What would move us forward?"

This shifts the audit from a performance review to a diagnostic tool. Diagnostics are much easier to have productive conversations about.

Where to start

It's worth being honest about one thing before you dive in: this isn't something you can do half-heartedly. A UX maturity audit that gets treated as a side project, or squeezed into the gaps between real work, tends to produce polite summaries that nobody acts on. It needs management buy-in from the outset, not as an afterthought once the findings are ready.

There's also a strong argument for bringing in someone external to run it. Not because your internal team lacks the ability, but because independence matters here. People will say different things to an outsider. And an external reviewer is less likely to be seen as someone with a stake in the outcome, which means their conclusions carry more weight when they land on a senior leader's desk.

The right person for this isn't someone who will sit in judgment of the UX team's output. The question isn't whether the work is good. The question is whether the organization has created the conditions for good work to be possible. That's a different kind of assessment, and it requires someone who understands enough about how UX actually functions to read the environment accurately rather than just counting deliverables.

Given where things are right now, that feels like a fairly important prerequisite.

Find The Latest Show Notes

Viktor Glinka: Why Context Is King for Scrum Master Success — Building Capabilities That Drive Business Goals

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"Product management skills are crucial for Scrum Masters. Once you understand how retention impacts your return on investment, you will be able to coach your product owner." - Viktor Glinka

Viktor offers a nuanced perspective on Scrum Master success by distinguishing between short-term and long-term success. On the long-term side, he argues that the purpose of a Scrum Master extends beyond working with teams — it's about helping improve the system as a whole. To do that, you need to connect your contribution to the product's success by helping build specific capabilities. Viktor grounds this in practical terms: start by asking what the business goal of your company is, and check whether people around you actually know it. Never assume everyone does. That simple act of curiosity gives you the information you need to figure out how to contribute. In his experience, the key capability his teams needed to develop was multi-learning — the ability to work across components — and that directly served the business goal. Viktor makes a strong case that Scrum Masters need product management skills. Understanding how metrics like retention impact long-term success allows you to coach product owners and analyze product dynamics. His practical advice: if you're not experienced in this, go shadow your product owner, spend time with the sales department, and look through customer support tickets. You'll understand far more about the system than staying at the development organization level.

Self-reflection Question: Can you clearly explain how your work as a Scrum Master contributes to your product's success? What specific capability are you helping the system build right now?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Data-Driven Discussions with Actionable Outcomes

Viktor's approach to retrospectives is refreshingly pragmatic: it depends on the team. For teams not yet used to actionable improvements, he starts simple — review previous retro decisions, ensure new concrete ones are created, and bring data as food for thought. He particularly likes using the cumulative flow diagram and time distribution histogram to help teams reflect on consistency in delivery. One team he worked with adopted this as a natural habit over time. For mature teams, format matters less — one team ran a simple "good, bad, to improve" retro in 30 minutes on their own, without a Scrum Master, and it was one of the most engaged and effective retrospectives Viktor had ever seen. He also values the free-talk format when first meeting a new team, coming in with genuine curiosity and no biases. And when something clearly went wrong — an incident, a failure — Viktor drops whatever format he had prepared. "In those moments, it's important to trust your instinct, read the room, sense the tension, and step into the danger directly."

[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥

Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.

🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

Buy Now on Amazon

[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

About Viktor Glinka

Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He's practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability - both in business and in personal life.

You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Dan and Chris start with Anthropic's Mythos frontier model, parsing what is publicly known about its cybersecurity capabilities and projecting its possible implications from "We've been here before. 🙄" to "See ya, cybersecurity! 😱"  It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. 🙃

Then they have fun with the craziest AI announcement of the year (except for the Mythos one of course).  Allbirds pivots from shoe manufacturing 👟 to neocloud provider ☁️. No, we didn't see that one coming either! 🙈

They finish with rise of “tokenmaxxing” - the gamification 🎮 of writing code with maximum LLM usage.  Incredibly profitable 💰 for commercial frontier model providers and insanely expensive 🤑 for the gamers.  Better have 10X productivity just to avoid bankruptcy! 

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Shares in Allbirds surge after maker of wool sneakers announces pivot to AI
• AI-boosted hacks with Anthropic’s Mythos could have dire consequences for banks