Ben Orenstein Co-founder and CEO of Tuple, a remote pair programming app, and a longtime speaker on SaaS and bootstrapping.

“If you don't provide an MCP for this soon, we are way more likely to churn.”

The Art of Product · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026

Context

Ben is describing a message he had just sent to a vendor that handles his company's bookkeeping. He says his team now reaches every piece of company data through an agent, so software that won't expose its data to agents is the first to get cut.

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Transcript

The Art of Product Around 23:25 into the episode

Ben Orenstein

Totally. Absolutely. I just sent a message to a pilot today who were like, do like our bookkeeping and accounting.

Derrick Reimer

And I just said,

Ben Orenstein

if you don't provide an MCP for this soon, we are way more likely to churn.

Derrick Reimer

Yeah.

Ben Orenstein

Because it's like every, I have, from Cloud Code or wherever, I can basically touch any piece of data that I want in the company, which is wonderful. And so anyone who's not prepared to give me that data directly is probably not going to last for us. Yeah.

Derrick Reimer

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Art of Product

“It's a sign that the work is requiring a different kind of attention… it comes back pretty fast with a lot of stuff. And if you want to keep some degree of understanding of what's going on, you are having to take in a lot of code, a lot of information, a lot of logic, and make decisions at a more rapid pace. So there's an exhausting element to it. And I think a lot of developers are feeling the loss of craft, which I think is really mentally challenging for a lot of folks.” — Derrick Reimer, The Art of Product