The Vertical AI Wedge Hiding in 25-Year-Old Software
About this episode
Birju Kadakia is the CEO of Rec, an AI-native platform live in 100+ US cities, quietly displacing 25-year-old software in a $400B market no one talks about. Ex-early Uber Eats PM. Raised $17M. Runs Refund Agents that hit 100% accuracy on real city money. The interesting part is what he thinks most AI founders are getting wrong.
Key moments
- 0:00 Why most AI founders are looking in the wrong place
- 1:24 Who is Birju Kadakia and what is Rec Technologies?
- 3:47 What is the activity economy?
- 7:17 Why is a $400B industry still running on pen and paper?
- 10:25 What made you decide to solve this?
- 15:37 How does AI fix the Taylor-Swift-style ticket rush?
- 17:41 Why can't an AI agent wait in line for you?
- 22:28 Why is Indianapolis (800K residents) going live on Rec?
- 24:37 Inside the Rec recreation passport
- 25:58 Live demo: the Refund Agent
- 30:39 How workflows and skills stitch into end-to-end agents
- 33:18 What is "recreation taste" and why does vertical AI need it?
- 36:34 Is vertical SaaS dead? The three pillars that survive AI
- 38:49 How Rec got its first customers
- 39:25 How does Rec avoid AI hallucination on refunds?
- 41:36 What accuracy level do Rec's AI agents actually hit?
- 44:24 How do you handle rejection as a founder?
- 45:42 What roles is Rec hiring for in the AI era?
- 50:38 Why token usage is a false positive for engineer metrics
- 53:01 The one framework Birju would teach every founder
- 56:18 outro