saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #16 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Leo Goldfarb, co-founder of Albato — a 100% bootstrapped automation and integration platform with 200,000 users and 80 people — after years at Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Booking.com. This episode gets into what it actually takes to build an AI-first product when you're competing with Zapier and nobody on your team has formal AI experience.

In this episode:

→ Why Albato deliberately pivoted away from competing with Zapier head-on — and what they built instead

→ The AI copilot that kept crashing, and the API redesign they had to do before it could work

→ How to spot an AI skeptic on your team before they slow everything down

→ Why 95% of enterprise AI investments fail — and the metric mistake behind it

→ The case for decentralizing AI across every team, not siloing it in an innovation lab

→ What "pump your tires before tuning your car" means for founders bringing AI into legacy products

This one's for founders and operators navigating the gap between AI hype and what it actually takes to ship something that works.

----------- Episode's Chapters -----------

0:05 — Introduction: Meet Leo from Albato

1:35 — From Corporate Life to Co-Founding a Startup

6:30 — What Albato Does & 7 Years Bootstrapped

10:44 — The B2B Pivot: Albato Embedded

18:53 — Building AI Without Dedicated AI Engineers

27:38 — Mistake #1: The AI Skeptic on Your Team

35:54 — How to Actually Measure AI ROI

42:27 — Biggest Win & Biggest Failure at Albato

49:07 — Founder Hack: Trust Your Team, Let Go

54:10 — Fix Your Foundation Before Adding AI

Leo Goldfarb - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leo-goldfarb-7b743449/

Albato - albato.com

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The wrong way to bring AI into your company | Leo Goldfarb @ Albato