Ninety percent of the room raised their hand. The question was who here is building something, and the room was a Claude meetup in Toronto — three hundred people, with four or five hundred more on a waitlist. Lawyers. Doctors. Everyone building something on a weekend.
Chris Grimes and Reuven Gorsht start there and end up somewhere less comfortable: if anyone can build the product, the product is not the business.
They work through what that means for AI startups, for the app layer sitting between the frontier labs and the customer, and for mortgage lending specifically. Chris rebuilt a top-three fitness app in ninety minutes on a Sunday. A tool set that needed Claude Code four months ago is now a feature of the model provider. Half a trillion dollars went into startups in the first half of 2026, and roughly 43 cents of every dollar went to two companies.
If the product can be built over a weekend, the product was never the business. So what is? That is the question the rest of the episode is trying to answer, and in regulated lending it turns out to have a different answer than it does anywhere else.
What you'll take away
- What the frontier labs absorbing the app layer does to the companies funded to sit there
- Why lenders do not shop a vendor list, and what actually gets a vendor into a budget
- Where the margin turns out to be, and why it is not in the AI business
- What makes auditability, rather than capability, the thing that decides who wins in lending AI
Chapters
(00:00) A maxed-out AI week
(01:16) Three hundred people at a Claude meetup
(04:06) A great time and a terrible time to build
(06:08) Why lenders don't shop vendors
(09:29) A product mid-flight, and testing distribution first
(10:46) Half a trillion in funding, and where it went
(12:22) The app layer, and the fitness app built on a Sunday
(16:36) Long Lake, Amex, and margin as the real prize
(20:12) Razor-thin lending margins and the tax agent
(27:00) Fannie, OSFI E-23, and the coming washout
(30:23) The cleaning company paying four thousand a month
(33:17) Start with the problem, not the AI
Mentioned in this episode
Anthropic, whose economic index comes up in the discussion of what people are actually building with these tools
Lovable, the platform used to rebuild a top-three fitness app in an hour and a half
Long Lake, the HOA management company founded in 2023, and the episode's central example of where margin really sits
Amex Global Business Travel, the low-margin operation Long Lake acquired, and the case study Reuven builds the argument on
OSFI E-23, Canada's model risk management guidance, cited as the deadline Canadian lenders are working toward
Fannie Mae, whose AI transparency and traceability requirements took effect recently
The Mortgage Bankers Association, credited on tape for the cost-to-originate figures
Your hosts
Chris Grimes is CEO of FundMore.
Reuven Gorsht is CEO of Deeded and The Variable.
One builds the tool. One absorbs the friction.
Related episode
AI vs. The Human Element— Balancing Trust and Technology — two AI conferences in one week, fifteen vendor demos, and the three questions a lender has to answer that nobody could
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