Andrew GazdeckiSerial Entrepreneur Driving Startup Acquisitions

The Real ROI Of Buying Instead Of Building

29 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this concise monologue, the speaker argues that purchasing existing software solutions is often a smarter choice than building from scratch, especially in the current AI-driven landscape. While AI can generate code quickly, the speaker emphasizes that the "last mile" of software—quality assurance, branding, bug fixing, and overall product readiness—still requires significant effort and time. By buying, companies can bypass years of iteration needed to achieve product‑market fit, jump straight to market, and focus on their core competitive advantage (their "secret sauce"). The speaker acknowledges AI’s power but stresses that the final stages of software engineering remain a bottleneck, making the time‑saving benefits of buying a major strategic advantage.

Chapters

What would make you choose buying over build? I think in this world of AI, we think that we're just going to hand AI a prompt and it's going to build us just a turnkey business. But that last mile of software, it takes time still to do the QA and get the brand right and get all the bugs out. And so you're saving so much time buy versus build. And so instead of having to play catch up and maybe iterate for a couple of years finding product market fit, you basically get to skip to the head of the line. And start competing in that industry right away and end up taking your secret sauce of what you do best and growing the business. And so I think the time-saving aspect is huge. I fully recognize that AI is incredible with what it can do now, but that last mile of software engineering, it still takes a while to really build a product that's ready for customers and ready for production.