Welcome to Business+Build
Business+Build is a practitioner-led newsletter about how AI is actually reshaping software delivery, team structure, and the business of building products — not the hype version, the real one. Written by Skip Marshall (CEO) and Chuck Griess (CTO) of InTech Ideas, it’s two co-founders thinking out loud from the trenches, sharing what works and what breaks across real engagements.
Who we are
Skip Marshall has spent his career at the intersection of business strategy and technical delivery. As CEO of InTech Ideas, he’s the person in the room when a client asks “why does this cost so much and take so long?” — and the person who has to give an honest answer. Skip writes about the organizational consequences of technical decisions: team design, client relationships, the gap between what a dev shop tells you and what’s actually happening, and what it looks like when a business tries to change fast enough to keep up. His natural question is why — why teams break, why decisions get relitigated, why speed doesn’t always mean progress.
Chuck Griess is the one who’s been in the codebase when things go wrong. As CTO of InTech Ideas, Chuck has debugged the merge conflicts, untangled the semantic collisions, and figured out what actually happens when three AI-assisted developers ship three features in parallel and the result doesn’t hold together. He writes about the technical side of the same problems Skip writes about from the business side: orchestration, architecture, engineering craft, and the AI tooling that’s changing how software gets built in practice — not in demos. His natural question is how — how systems fail, how teams coordinate, how you build something that holds up under pressure.
Together, they run InTech Ideas — a product and engineering firm built on the belief that product thinking and engineering execution work best as a single accountable system, not two teams throwing work over a wall at each other.
Why this newsletter exists
There is no shortage of takes on what AI means for software development. What there is a shortage of is honest, practitioner-led thinking from people who are actually building things — not just writing about building things.
We started Business and Build because we kept having the same conversations on repeat: with engineering leaders trying to figure out why their teams were faster but no less chaotic, with non-technical founders who’d been burned by dev shops and didn’t know what questions to ask, with developers wondering what their role actually looked like in a world where AI handles the first draft of most code.
These are hard questions. We don’t have all the answers. But we’ve seen enough — across enough real engagements, in enough different organisations — to have something worth saying. And we’d rather give it away than gatekeep it.
What we cover
The End of the One-Person Myth Everyone’s talking about the “one-person billion-dollar company.” We think it’s the wrong conversation. AI changes the shape of teams, not the need for them — and the real story is about what a high-performing small team looks like when it’s built for the new constraints.
Time-to-Delivery Is Collapsing AI compresses dev timelines dramatically. What nobody’s talking about is what breaks downstream when the bottleneck moves: sprint planning, estimation models, QA processes, client expectations. We write about the structural consequences of speed, not just the speed itself.
Team Orchestration Is the New Bottleneck When AI agents write code in parallel, coordination problems get strange fast. Merge conflicts are the easy version. Semantic conflicts — where two features make incompatible assumptions about the domain — are where products quietly break. This is where we spend the most time, and where we have the most to say.
Field Notes Shorter, from-the-trenches dispatches. A tool we tried. A workflow that held up. A pattern we’ve seen work across enough engagements to be worth sharing. Whoever was closest to the story writes it.
Non-Technical Founders Building Real Products The gap between “working demo” and “production product” is invisible to most founders — and the people selling them services aren’t rushing to make it visible. We write for the founder who wants an honest guide to navigating technical decisions they can’t fully evaluate themselves.
Who this is for
You’ll get the most out of Business and Build if you’re:
Leading an engineering or product team and trying to figure out what AI actually changes about how you deliver software
A non-technical founder building a real product who’s tired of being sold things you can’t evaluate
A developer or IC trying to understand where your role is going and how to raise your ceiling
A CEO or business leader who needs to understand what’s happening in your technical organisation without being talked down to
Every piece is written to be worth the time of someone who is smart, experienced, and already drowning in breathless takes. We try not to add to the noise.
How to read us
We publish weekly. Long pieces on Tuesdays. Occasional shorter dispatches between.
Each article has a named author — Skip or Chuck — because you deserve to know whose point of view you’re getting. Joint pieces carry both names and are reserved for the moments that need both lenses at once.
New here? Start with → Start Here: The One-Person Company Myth (And What's Real Instead) to find the right entry point for where you are.
