#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo

A GitHub repo, a Cursor cloud agent, and a public Slack channel replaced Notion AI at a $25M-funded HR integration startup, and became the whole company's shared brain.

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Two failed startups, a Y Combinator batch, and a $25M Series A later, Aike Hillbrands and his co-founders built Kombo into a $10M+ ARR HR integration platform, and then, almost by accident, built a company-wide AI brain out of a GitHub repo and a Cursor agent. Aike joins Tobi to explain why files and grep beat MCP tools for agent reliability, what the "lethal trifecta" of AI security actually means in practice, and why he doesn't think AI will commoditize his own business anytime soon.

chapters:

00:00:00 — Intro 00:01:00 — Meeting his co-founders at CODE University 00:03:00 — Founding Kombo — the YC S22 pivot 00:04:00 — Nerd origin story: graphic design, Delphi, and Windows Forms games 00:06:00 — Selling an early company, and the open-source interception tool 00:08:00 — The Workday pain point that became Kombo 00:10:00 — Grayish markets: intercepting API traffic, and when it's not worth it 00:12:00 — Team size, the $25M raise, and staying a bootstrapper at heart 00:14:00 — From Notion AI to a company-wide brain 00:16:00 — Why the MCP experiment failed — and files + grep won instead 00:18:00 — Eliminating the "ask an engineer" bottleneck 00:20:00 — Two hours to build the repo, five minutes for Slack 00:22:00 — Linking files together so the agent connects the dots 00:24:00 — Public-by-default culture, and what data they'd feed the brain 00:26:00 — Exposing the company brain to customers 00:28:00 — The "lethal trifecta" framing, and why the market isn't investing enough 00:30:00 — The scariest failure mode: exfiltration, not just leaks 00:32:00 — The wife/prompt-injection story 00:34:00 — Why the risk can't be zero — and the "blue worker suit" analogy 00:36:00 — Public Slack as a social guardrail against prompt injection 00:38:00 — Shopify's "River" and Tobi Lütke's Lehrwerkstatt 00:40:00 — Buy vs. build: is anyone doing this well already? 00:42:00 — An internal app store made of markdown files and PRs 00:44:00 — Will AI commoditize Kombo's own business? 00:46:00 — Why enterprise integrations resist commoditization 00:48:00 — Integration teams of 10–15 people, and Kombo's end-to-end bet 00:50:00 — Is SaaS dying? System-of-record inertia 00:52:00 — What actually changes vs. what doesn't 00:54:00 — Time travel: advice to his younger self 00:56:00 — Outro

Quotes:

00:17:29 – "The agent will just run a grep command and find 200 files where something is discussed, and it will actually look at 50 or so of them. It's not stopping too early." (verbatim) 00:24:26 – "We also share with employees the money in our bank account monthly. This is the kind of public-by-default that we run." 00:35:52 – "By having it in the Slack channel, our people see what the customer is doing with the agent, but also the colleagues of the customer see what's going on. That's reducing the amount of exploiting you can do, by a lot, just because other people have visibility." 00:32:14 – "My wife accidentally prompt-injected it without any bad intention. Now imagine people with bad intentions." (Tobi)