Founder Focus Ep 20: Matt James - AI Coding Hits Production: Move Now Or Get Left Behind.

Matt James was employee number 22 at Virtual Gaming Worlds (VGW), joining as an early engineer when revenue was just beginning to land and rising to CTO.

He scaled with the business through to roughly 1000 staff worldwide and over a $1Billion in annual revenue by the time he left, with VGW going on to post A$6.1B in revenue in FY24. 

Today he is Co-founder and CTO at SupplyWise, a Perth-based B2B e-commerce platform for SME suppliers and retailers, and one of Australia's more vocal voices on production-grade agentic AI coding.

This is a great episode, with key discussion points including: 

• What an inflection-point AI coding workflow actually looks like in production (not just MVPs).
• How a non-technical founder should evaluate engineering hires now.
• Practical strategy for upgrading legacy codebases and databases when an investor or director is pushing for pace.
• Where the moats are when code itself is becoming a commodity
• The SaaS investability question: small and medium SaaS may have a golden age, but venture-backable outliers get harder

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