System resilience: ROI vs. COI (examples)

The year of “vibe coding” and “agentic systems” also happened to be the year with strong turbulence, outages, and major security breaches across global organizations like:

• Salesforce (and Salesloft’s Drift application)

• Oracle

• Microsoft (SharePoint)

• Alianz Life

• Coca-Cola Middle East

• Google (through the Salesforce gap)

• Workday (social engineering)

• McDonald’s (tens of millions of job applicants)

• Ingram Micro (ransomware)

• Louis Vuitton

As Patchstack’s own CEO said today:

Security is a complicated topic. We all want it inherently, and don’t want to pay a massive premium to have it. It should be “given”, which is where the system breaks naturally.

Just like speed. We were anxious and impatient with 33.6Kbit modems, then the next 56Kbit/s, ADSL, and slowly creeping speeds up. WAP, GPRS, 3G, 4G, 5G and onward.

UX follows similar principles; stability does, too. And many of these are not compatible with one another.

Return on Investment vs. Cost of Inaction

Leaving aside the physical impact of geopolitical tension or certain aircraft manufacturers, the current layers of stability and security are dictated by the following two principles:

1. Return on investment: What is the perceived gain of investing in better stability or a more secure system

2. Cost of inaction: What are the risks of not implementing said measures, calculating severity and probability levels

A mid-tier brand or a vendor in a competitive/commodity space can win dramatically with “conversion rate optimization” through better stability, faster performance, better UX - even 2 to 10% improvements.

Underdogs who need to establish themselves as industry leaders can maintain bulletproof stability and continuously win trust and reputability on that ground alone.

Second-in-class players can reach the industry leader through resilience as well.

This is the ROI proposition that over 90% of all businesses, often 95%+, ignore and push back on. And the top 1% or 2% cannot afford to miss - even as they make mistakes every year or two.

The second aspect is COI, or cost of inaction.

• What would a breach cost?

• What would a slowdown cost?

• How much does this matter?

Take a speeding ticket as an example. The law remains the same, but in case number one, you pay a $100 once a year if you get caught. In a parallel world, with cameras and patrols everywhere, you can’t speed more than twice before you’re stopped, and this is punishable by 6 months in prison.

If your speed meter is broken, faulty, or inaccurate, this barely makes a difference in the first case.

The same “cost of inaction” in the latter scenario can put you in jail. Period. Doesn’t matter why it’s not working, you’re driving faster than allowed, and the third ride is a strike, and ends up with 6 months in jail.

Europe is often put in that spot with GDPR haunting most businesses. This is why pop-ups and double clicks in email and everything else is looming over the European web. This is the cost of inaction.

What is deemed acceptable is largely a function of tolerance and social norms.

Societal norms and accepting mistakes

A close friend of mine is an R&D lead for a robotic startup working across Europe, the US, and Japan.

The margin of error in most actions today is around 1% (between 0.5% and 2.5% in a specific set of activities the robot performs).

In most US and European tests, that’s working fine. The product is rolling out in different regions and executing different actions.

But… not in Japan. Any mistake is audited, scrutinized, and actively pushed against.

Putting stereotypes aside, different cultures have different tolerance toward errors.

Europe is known to see bankruptcy and business failure as a doomsday scenario. Thousands of founders have publicly complained about. This is definitely NOT the case in entrepreneurial America.

Similarly, product quality in Japan is known to be higher than average for different products. Car safety indices vary a lot, but finding Toyota, Honda, Subaru on top of the reliability charts is more common than not.

While certain cultures and ecosystems value speed, disruption, and innovation first, others bet on stability, safety, and security, compromising on the former.

And those who want to balance both, should do the math and decide on the ROI opportunities vs COI incurred here.

Mario

📚️ Books I read this month

• “Hooked” - on habits and cues and product alignment ✅ 

• “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz (65% in)

• “The Sweaty Startup” by Nick Hueber (85% in)

• Ray Dalio’s “How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle” (55% in)

• The FP&A Handbook: Mastering Financial Planning & Analysis (40% in)

• “Revenue Architecture” by Jacco van der Kooij (55% in)

• “The Sales Acceleration Formula” ✅ 

• Next up, one on RevOps and one for sales leaders, plus 3 HBR mini books I bought from Seattle.

🔖 Boost ERP results with custom APIs. Smarter data flow and faster integration come from custom ERP API development.

🔖 Streamline disaster recovery plans. Hybrid cloud DR automation helps cut recovery time and reduce compliance risk.

🔖 Reinforce memory with simple habits. These three science-backed techniques support stronger long-term recall.

🔖 How rivals help iconic brands grow. Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin show why healthy competition fuels progress.

🔖 Navigate leadership without a coach. These self-coaching frameworks help leaders handle uncertainty with structure and purpose.

📰 Internet reliability faces fresh challenge. An AWS outage reveals DNS risks and highlights broader Internet vulnerabilities.

📰 EU climate concessions ahead of 2040. von der Leyen signals flexibility on carbon pricing to shape EU’s climate path.

📰 Markets watch for catalyst cues. Investors track tech earnings CPI and U.S.-China trade as main factors.

📰 Strategic talent boosts global biotech growth. Clover Biopharma hires Dr. Nicholas Jackson to strengthen its global vaccine approach.

📰 Freshpet faces securities review. A recent downgrade and stock drop spark a legal inquiry into potential disclosure issues.

📰 Major investment advances domestic lithium. Lithium Americas secures a $435M DOE drawdown as a key funding milestone for Thacker Pass.

📰 Ukraine’s EU path gains momentum. Negotiators aim for a December breakthrough and explore strategic implications.

📰 zSpace regains Nasdaq compliance. The AR innovator moves to the Nasdaq Capital Market to achieve full Nasdaq compliance.

📰 Apna expands into voice AI. Apna.co unveils BlueMachines.ai with multilingual support and initial $6M deals for the voice future.

📰 AI shakeup transforms B2B marketing. AI-driven search shifts discovery from clicks to context via new AI search.

📰 Investors back AI-driven science startup. OpenAI and Google Brain veterans raise $300M for Periodic Labs.

📰 Apple adopts talent-first AI strategy. The company uses acqui-hires to secure engineers and signal a deeper play in smart home tech.

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Working with me

Here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling $30M - $100M+ companies on top of WordPress. DevriX provides full RevOps consulting + delivery with GTM enablement for PE-backed portfolio companies, traditional tech, healthcare, finance, and professional service businesses pacing toward revenue growth initiatives. Our standard retainers between $10K and $40K include revenue lifecycle services for marketing and sales leaders, FP&A for financial teams, pipeline enrichment through websites and dozens of lead sources, automations and delivery integrations, CRO and ongoing testing, product delivery and platform integration solutions, and more through our consulting solutions.

🚀 1:1 Consulting. At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($3,500/mo) for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($997/mo) for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

📈 Building US LLCs from Europe. I help European and Asian founders scale faster through doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Also suitable for US citizens (given their bookkeeping solution), but in very high demand across Europe.

📊 Post-Merger Integration. I support M&A initiatives through Flippa’s marketplace. Working closely on PMI initiatives for PE companies and fast-growing startups integrating new companies within their portfolios, enabling data pipelines, and securing more deals through my personal network.