#341 - Raphaëlle d'Ornano - Behind Decoding Discontinuity 

In this episode, I welcome Raphaëlle d'Ornano, founder of Decoding Discontinuity, both an advisory firm and an investment fund, for a conversation about agentic AI, architectural resilience, and what it really means to invest in a world where business models are being fundamentally rewritten.

We talked about:

• Orchestration as the real competitive moat of AI labs: why only 11% of enterprise builders switched AI providers last year despite the switch being technically trivial, and what that paradox reveals about where lock-in actually lives
• The concept of architectural resilience: why analysing classical competitive advantages no longer makes sense if a company's terminal value is drifting toward zero because of AI
• Warren Buffett's castle metaphor revisited: attacks now come from the sky and from the foundations, not through the front door
• The choice of a hedge fund over a venture capital structure: how her framework, companies going to the moon vs. going to zero by 2030, maps better onto public assets across global markets
• The SaaSpocalypse: why historical SaaS categories (horizontal, vertical, infrastructure) are dissolving in a world of agent fleets, and why many companies' defensive positions are, in her view, short-lived
• The gap between US and European allocators: not a difference in intelligence, but in physical proximity to the AI labs, creating a lag of several months in real-world understanding
• The human side of the transition: how companies that face the truth honestly are beginning to redesign their workflows with intelligence at the core, rather than resisting the inevitable

A sharp, unfiltered conversation that gives concrete tools for thinking about company value in the age of agentic AI.

 

Raphaëlle's recommendation: 

“Letters” by Albert Camus & Maria Casarès https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313959/letters-by-casares-albert-camus-and-maria/9780241400425

 

Useful links:

Raphaëlle d'Ornano: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphaelle-d-ornano/ 

Decoding Discontinuity : https://www.decodingdiscontinuity.com/ 

 

Finscale is also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@finscale 

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