Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology · Riding Unicorns Productions

Building, Backing & Scaling in an AI-Native World with Kenneth Auchenberg, Partner @ AlleyCorp

September 10, 2025·46 min·2 clips

Kenneth says AI-native founders now spend seed money on agents and tokens instead of engineers.

1. Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology speaks with Kenneth Auchenberg about building, backing, and scaling companies in an AI-native world. 2. Kenneth Auchenberg is a partner at AlleyCorp, and he says he leads investments in AI developer tools and infrastructure while also helping incubate new companies. 3. The episode asks what changes when founders can use AI to build software faster, raise smaller teams, and shift money toward distribution. 4. Kenneth says he started as a software engineer at 16 in Copenhagen, then spent about a decade building and another decade in product management. 5. He describes AlleyCorp as an early-stage venture fund in New York with a family-office background, plus pre-seed, Series A, and incubation activity. 6. Kenneth says having been an operator helps him empathize with founders who are “sleeping in the office” and doing all-nighters. 7. He says he wants to be the person founders call, not just an investor who wires money and stays at email distance. 8. He explains that AlleyCorp can incubate companies when the team sees a tangible market problem after reviewing many companies in a vertical. 9. Kenneth says he is currently acting as interim CEO for an AI agent company while the team is being assembled. 10. He says vibe coding has lowered the barrier to prototyping, which changes expectations for pre-seed founders. 11. Kenneth says founders who arrive without a prototype are sending “a clear second” that they are not AI-native. 12. He says AI-native founders can build in weeks what once took five engineers and six to nine months in a basement. 13. He says early-stage budgets are shifting toward agents, tokens, distribution, brand, and marketing rather than large engineering hires. 14. Kenneth says software is becoming “mass produced,” and he places more value on workflow ownership, brand, trust, and taste. 15. He says the best companies will collect workflow data that can train AI systems and agents over time. 16. Kenneth says building agents is largely about workflow chaining, and he names Mastra as a JavaScript framework he uses. 17. He says tools like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot are changing how software gets built and how agents consume infrastructure. 18. He says the shift is from customer experience to developer experience and now to agent experience, with examples like Resend and Stripe MCP. 19. Kenneth says European founders should care about New York because the time zone helps collaboration with teams in Lisbon, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. 20. He says founders who want a big swing should think about the American market, not only Germany or other nearby European markets.

As heard by us

A practical take on AI developer tools, infrastructure, and the value of serving builders early.

The episode follows how software gets built and backed while AI reshapes the stack. Kenneth, a partner at Alicorp, brings a builder's lens to early-stage investing, moving from his own background into incubation, company formation, and the first checks that shape a young company.

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Why you'd press play

A founder-friendly conversation on how AI developer tools, infrastructure, and early-stage bets can compound when they hook into real workflows.

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