The Calm Before the Cutting

1. The Crack of the Bat

There are moments in startup lore so perfectly orchestrated, even the cynics look up from their Slack notifications in disbelief. This was Incremento's latest funding round—a rare celestial alignment of hustle, luck, and timing that made the founding team look suspiciously competent because of the A-team assembled by the savvy Ekaj Grebmenolf.

Tapmas, the perennial swordsman, steps up to the plate. With the unhurried grace of someone who knows precisely how many caffeinated all-nighters it takes to break a probability curve, he swings—both literally, at his desk with an invisible bat, and metaphorically, at the cap table with uncompromising bravado. The resulting “crack!” seems to echo across every VC firm in the region.

Meanwhile, Ajar, in a haze of rhetorical flourishes and algorithmic flair, has prospective customers dangling off every syllable. It’s as if he’s coded FOMO directly into their synapses. For the sales team, fueled on a forbidden blend of optimism and energy drinks, reality shifts: quotas become trifles, objections dissolve, and next quarter’s targets appear achievable by lunchtime.

Momentum builds with all the suspense of a home-run ball arcing above the floodlights. Investors—jaded, calculating, hungry—find themselves swept up in the spectacle. They lean forward in their ergonomic chairs, slack-jawed, as Tapmas, Ajar, and their battalion of slightly jittery salespeople eviscerate every doubt and demolish every distraction.

Even in the hallowed corner offices, where Rui Gremalati’s calendar was ostensibly full of “urgent hike” and Rui Vitan was engaged in an intense, silent battle with the office clock, something stirs. Gremalati, the erstwhile cloud-chaser, finds himself—against all previous evidence—actually grinning. Vitan’s eyes flicker briefly, almost perceptibly, before he sinks back into his chair, pretending not to care.

Was this a victory? Maybe. Triumph, or at least the illusion of it, hummed warmly through the company’s digital veins. For a half-glorious heartbeat, the slack channels burst into virtual backslaps and emojis. And across the Incremento Slack workspace, Tapmas had everyone believing that the ball would not just clear the fence, but would fly off into the distance where it could not be seen anymore.

2. Free Money? Surely Not.

What happened next at Incremento was the kind of unicorn-adjacent twist that most founders will insist “never actually happens”—at least not to them. Out of the blue (or maybe thanks to relentless networking and the demonic charm of Ekaj Grebmenolf), a term sheet materialized that can only be described as… disconcertingly generous.

It was funding, yes, but not the kind that telegraphs desperation or sells control of your soul for the price of organic-sourced office snacks. The offer came in at the “upper-middle”—enough to skip ramen budgeting, not enough to appear reckless, and yet so devoid of caveats it triggered an allergic reaction among the naturally suspicious.

Typically, such checks originate from people who show up with complex Excel models and a list of non-negotiable board seats, each one promising an existential audit that leaves founders questioning their birth certificates. This time? Not a single suit insisted on monthly status reports. No quarterly strategy sessions dominated by middle-aged PowerPoint. No shareholder elbow-reaching to “add value.” Just… money. Documents zipped around for signatures, wire instructions appeared out of the ether, and before anyone could refresh their browser, the cash had landed, accompanied only by a wink from Ekaj and his fabled “friendlies” list—a shadowy cabal of investors whose approval meant more in the demo day back-channels than any VC newsletter.

Rui Vitan, ever a devotee of the low-expectation lifestyle, was the first to break the team’s premature reverie. With the barest lift of his eyebrows and a muttered, “No strings?” he voiced his entire risk assessment. “That’s… not normal.” Satisfied he’d done his due diligence, he resumed his preferred work activity: hunting for a misplaced coffee mug while earnestly avoiding deadlines related to the product roadmap.

Across the open-plan expanse of video squares and muted backgrounds, Rui Gremalati—flamboyant as ever—interpreted deal closure as a green light for his full arsenal of celebratory excess. He unmuted, straightened his jacket, and boomed to the assembled: “Let’s enjoy this amazing market!” before launching into a surprisingly lithe Kermit dance, green limbs flying against a backdrop of warp-speed stars. Was it ironic commentary on the irrational exuberance of venture cycles? Pure, unfiltered joy? A warning that madness lurked beneath the bubble? Only Gremalati knew for sure, and even he wasn’t certain.

For one disorienting moment, Incremento basked in the glow of a win that required no apology, compromise, or due diligence marathon. Surely, someone whispered in the recesses of the Zoom chat, “What’s the catch?”

3. Tapmas Takes the Riviera

With the deal signed, sealed, and the last streamers of virtual confetti still settling in the far corners of Incremento’s Slack workspace, Tapmas—eternally the sharp-eyed visionary, never the victim—finally took a well-deserved break. Not to shirk duty, but to embody the paradox of modern leadership—elsewhere, yet everywhere.

He set his Slack status to “OOO” in twelve languages (including Latin, just in case), an inside joke layered with plausible deniability. Airline seats were booked with the same almost supernatural finesse he reserved for negotiating multi-year SaaS contracts: from the luminescent coastline of the French Riviera to the sun-warmed hills of Tuscany, and down to the Roulette-lit bars of Monaco. If you zoomed in on a team photo, his outline would always be a blur—elusive, in motion, glimpsed only in reflective surfaces.

But disappearance was only ever an illusion. No matter the hour, no matter the timezone, every urgent message pinged through—never “snoozed,” always acknowledged, as if Tapmas’s brain was running on a custom firmware immune to fatigue. Replies would fly back: sometimes a strategy nugget, sometimes a cryptic meme that, upon later inspection, proved to be precisely the guidance the situation required. “I’ll be offline,” he declared, and yet…the responses never stopped.

As Tapmas pressed send on his now-legendary note—“Zabash has the con. Don’t break the company.”—the torch passed with definitive clarity. Zabash Dilakh, his most trusted lieutenant, stepped into the operational spotlight. Calm, thoughtful, and dignified, Zabash carried an air of composed assurance most leaders only fake in LinkedIn posts. Experienced in the trenches and lauded in every corridor (digital or otherwise), he was both Incremento’s quiet north star and its undisputed stabilizer.

The team’s collective pulse slowed a few beats: if anyone could keep the ship steady through the exhilarating weirdness to come, it was Zabash—respected by veterans, relied upon by the greenest recruits, and, if pressed, even admired by Tapmas himself.

4. Skunkworks in the Shadows

Zabash Dilakh, now the undisputed custodian of Incremento’s day-to-day reality, moved through the office—real and virtual—with the dignified confidence reserved for those quietly holding the company together. While the new funding added zeros to specific line items, the real windfall for Zabash wasn’t in his bank account, but in the level of trust and total reliance placed upon him by the leadership. With Tapmas away and the team’s collective attention span already stretched thin, it was clear: this was his moment to shape Incremento’s trajectory.

Zabash spent those early, oddly serene hours of newfound autonomy searching Incremento’s labyrinthine Notion boards and color-coded Airtable pipes—not for vanity projects, but for something worthy of the trust he’d been handed. That’s when he unearthed an idea shimmering with promise: an audacious skunkworks initiative as hush-hush as it was ambitious.

The mission: build an AGI-powered Slack chatbot that could not only match the most jaded product expert in wit and wisdom but also overperform in every scenario—sales, support, deployment, and damage control. This bot would slip between threads, untangling sales objections, quashing post-sales panic, or drafting immaculate follow-up emails with a single, eerily effective prompt. Its knowledge base wouldn’t be cobbled together from sanitized job descriptions or fluffy onboarding decks. Instead, it would be nourished on a diet of Ajar’s intricate, unfiltered, and occasionally psychedelic technical epiphanies—a knowledge base equal parts digital ambrosia and linguistic fever dream.

Codename: v.jar.ai—whispered throughout management chats and encrypted Notion documents, rumored in passing, but strictly off-radar for the masses. The junior staff, finding only vague references buried in Airtable fields, shrugged and decided it was “some workflow automation thing” or a pet side project to justify the C-suite’s niche coffee subscription.

But for Zabash, it was the torch he’d long hoped to carry: the chance to unify the scattered brilliance within Incremento into something enduring, accessible, and quietly revolutionary. An organization forever teetering on the edge of the next big stumble could, with one bold algorithm, become a hive of actual collective genius.

As for Gremalati and Vitan, the entire undertaking earned approximately half an eyebrow each—so long as it required no personal effort and stayed out of their way, they were more than happy to let Zabash and his hidden prodigy hum along in the digital shadows. For now, the machine in the metaphorical basement was thinking—for itself, and soon, for everyone else.

5. A Hero in Waiting, A Spark in the Chaos

Sir Nairakahs—often celebrated for his spectacular marketing catastrophes and uncanny knack for picking the wrong campaign for the right audience—stumbled, almost poetically, into competence.

It wasn’t in a messaging pivot, mythical dragon SaaS marketing campaign, or Tesla giveaway. Instead, it emerged in the quietly potent realm of hiring—a realm he’d never been accused of mastering. Yet, somehow, Nairakahs’s relentless search for “someone different” aligned with the universe’s sense of irony. Fresh on the onboarding roster was Mit Eplink: a newly anointed member of the tech world, all nervous energy and earnest, bug-eyed hope. No pedigree, no big network, just determination thick as concrete and metabolism powered by curiosity and half-hearted confidence.

Mit found his way onto the org chart with barely a ripple. There were no grand introductions—only a profile photo that appeared one morning, half-cropped, slightly blurry, radiating an optimism not seen since Incremento’s founding days. Seasoned staff paid him little mind. After all, Incremento was a place where fireworks were expected from the top, and newcomers were best measured by the length of time it took before they were recognized in the customer wins Slack channel.

Yet, within this quiet onboarding, the seeds of something vital were planted, with each fine-grained entitlement assigned by meticulously crafted no-code workflow actions. Sometimes, as the fabled Greek chorus reminds us, salvation creeps in sideways: not with a flourish, but through the faint hum of a new name in the corporate SSO tool. Mit’s thirst for all things uncertain and his absurd persistence largely went unnoticed amongst the startup’s noise—but destiny, as ever, favors the unassuming.

And for once in his rocky tenure, Sir Nairakahs’s instincts had landed on something genuine. A single good hire, one spark in the chaos—a move that, when history retells it, will mark the line between blunder and brilliance by pure luck.

6. The Gathering Clouds

For a brief interlude, Incremento basked in a rare, collective exhale. Funding accounts were flush; dashboards pointed skyward; and, like clockwork, the founders sprinkled their idiosyncratic brands of satisfaction over the proceedings. Gremalati swaggered through Zoom corridors, soliloquizing in caps lock and sporting a rotation of vacation avatars. Vitan measured out his contentment in microexpressions and the occasional extra-long “…” in Slack, seemingly at ease—so long as no one mentioned the D-word (deadline). Tapmas, somewhere between a hillside in Tuscany and a baccarat table in Monaco, sent back meme-rich replies that landed like Socratic riddles.

In the meantime, Zabash worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Ajar—building ambition, line by meticulous line, transforming Ajar’s torrents of genius into markdown-ready, machine-ingestible knowledge. Their days became a dance of tokens, MCPs, prompt injection debates, and the endless calibration required to feed a future-hungry language model. Every markdown file filed, every prompt refined, pulled v.jar.ai one step closer to sentience (or, at the very least, to HR-complaint-proof internal comms).

And in the quietest corners, Mit Eplink hovered quietly in the wings—destined, perhaps, to be much more than the sum of his onboarding demos to peers on the sales team.

Yet, beneath this tableau of triumph and barely-earned bliss, a subtle fretwork of worry curled through the company’s foundation. Veteran founders—especially those who specialized in mistrust—couldn’t help but squint at the absence of oversight. Who, in this or any market, doles out fortune with no expectation of payback or power? Numbers danced merrily across forecasting spreadsheets, but in late-night strategy calls and quiet corners of Airtable, Incremento’s best minds found themselves peering forward, searching for clouds on the horizon.

Sure, the ride had been wild, the victory sweet. But even in the sun-washed afterglow, instinct whispered that a company this lucky might soon be called upon to pay an invisible toll.

[TEASER]

Next up: “Cost Cutting Circus”—where the true price of governance-free funding is unveiled, and every sacred cow in Incremento’s gilded pasture would do well to duck.

FAQ

1. What is AGI, and how is it different from regular AI?

Most people are familiar with AI tools like ChatGPT or virtual assistants, but "AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence) represents a significant leap forward. While current AI systems excel at specific tasks, AGI refers to artificial intelligence that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across diverse domains—much like human intelligence. The key difference is versatility: where traditional AI might be great at writing or image recognition, AGI can seamlessly switch between complex reasoning, creative problem-solving, and technical execution without being limited to narrow specializations.

2. What are prompt injection attacks, and why should I be concerned about them?

Prompt injection is a security vulnerability where malicious users attempt to manipulate AI systems by crafting inputs that override the system's original instructions. Think of it like tricking an intelligent assistant into ignoring its rules. For example, someone might try to make a customer service chatbot reveal confidential information or misbehave by embedding hidden commands in their questions. For businesses using AI tools, this represents a real risk to data security, brand reputation, and operational integrity—especially when AI systems handle sensitive customer communications or business processes.

3. What is MCP (Model Context Protocol) and why does it matter for AI integration?

MCP is an emerging technical standard that defines how AI models communicate and share context with external applications and tools. Think of it as a universal language that allows AI systems to seamlessly integrate with your existing software ecosystem—from Slack and email to databases and project management tools. MCP compatibility matters because it determines how well an AI assistant can access information, execute tasks, and maintain context across different platforms, making the difference between a helpful tool and a truly integrated business solution.