What Tom’s Seeing in Tech Right Now: Trust Is the Real Differentiator

Since 2007, I’ve been lucky enough to work across every stage of the SaaS lifecycle. From being part of an early-stage business riding the first wave of SaaS and mobile, to working inside a soft bank-invested Unicorn, to supporting scrappy founders trying to get something off the ground.

 

Over the past 17 months, I’ve hosted hundreds of Strategy and Exploratory meetings and AI workshops with pre-seed entrepreneurs, global enterprises, and everything in between. From sports tech to fintech, there's one consistent theme that keeps coming up:

 

Trust.

 

Not tools.  Not tactics.  Not tech stack.

 

Trust.

 

The first hurdle here is do we still trust the processes we followed last year or even last week? In software development, what used to be a fairly stable process from prototype → dev → deploy now feels much more fluid. Code is shipping quicker, product decisions are happening in real time, and the pace is outpacing a lot of teams.

 

CTOs are being caught off guard. Founders are adjusting as they go. Things are moving but not always in sync.

 

And in the middle of all that noise, one thing keeps standing out:  In-person connection.

 

Roundtables, events, and face-to-face conversations cut through the ambiguity. The kind of honest, unfiltered discussions you can only have when you're in the same room.

 

I've seen this firsthand.  Real momentum is coming from real meetings, not just intros, but actual working relationships being built in person. There's no better example of this than the booming events space that seems to be back in vogue right now.

 

In a market full of noise and speed, trust is the differentiator.

 

And trust doesn’t come from pitch decks or polished demo flows.  It comes from conversations. From showing up in person.  From asking hard questions, and of course, actively listening. (Ref: 80/20 rule)

 

When the stakes are high, and they usually are, people don’t just choose the best tech.  They choose the team they trust to deliver it.

 

And that’s not built overnight.  It’s built one real conversation at a time.

 

AI will inevitably take the business world to new efficiency highs. But it won’t replace relationships. It will only make the human part more important.

 

The future of business still starts face-to-face.