Following the collapse of Builder.ai, one of the most commonly mentioned quotes by its founder is where he said about wanting to make building an app as easy as ordering pizza. 

Could it really become that? Possibly so, for there is no dearth of “make your own pizza” options around the corner of any London high street. Or a lack of imagination among pizza aficionados when thinking of pizza toppings. 

You can’t fault a startup founder for building a vision. Outrageous as it may be. On the contrary, the more the better. There are numerous examples throughout startup history. We thrive on, enable and reward a “fake it till you make it” culture.

The product is being pulled apart for being more human than AI, as was being claimed. The approach in itself isn’t wrong to begin with – how else does a startup validate, build and refine its value proposition? But a line needs to be drawn where the MVP needs to become the product it set out to become. A few hundred million in investor money later, and you can’t still be cranking up the machine by adding more horses to pull the cart. It needs to transform into the swanky car that was promised.

That’s not what I want to talk about though. Because what brought the company down was its sales function. It had to correct its sales figures, with last year’s number being revised to less than 25% of what had been claimed.

The Recurring Nightmare: Five Ways Sales Culture Destroys Startups

Builder.ai’s implosion isn’t some freak accident. It’s a pattern repeated across the startup landscape, driven by the same systemic failures that infect companies like a virus. 

Leadership Skills

Founders, many of whom come from purely technical backgrounds, often lack the understanding of building a sales org. Sales ends up becoming a black box which should magically conjure sustainable revenue. Unrealistic revenue targets become the norm. The processes aren’t supportive, and feedback to and communication with various teams like product and customer success doesn’t happen.

Misaligned Incentives

Sales teams get bonuses for closing deals, not creating customers who’ll stick around. This creates a perverse dynamic where success is measured by signatures rather than value delivered. The rep who overpromises gets promoted while the one who sets realistic expectations gets questioned about their “hunger.”

Investor Pressure

Venture capital has turned exponential growth from nice-to-have into must-have-or-die. The pressure becomes so intense that sustainable practices get sacrificed on the altar of hockey stick projections.

Product Hype

Startups market products as revolutionary breakthroughs without sufficient proof they actually work. The gap between marketing copy and product reality becomes so wide, an elephant could walk through. Everyone becomes complicit in maintaining the illusion because admitting the truth feels like defeat.

Toxic Culture

A culture that prioritises revenue above all else inevitably becomes one that justifies cutting corners, bending truths, and burning people out. What gets called “high performance” is often just dysfunction operating at scale.

The Question That Matters

Any company’s sales organisation is the most visible manifestation of what a company actually believes about itself. When sales culture is grounded in reality and focused on genuine customer value, it becomes a force for sustainable growth. But when it becomes corrupted by hype and misaligned incentives, it metastasises and kills everything else.

The question every founder, investor, and operator should be asking isn’t “How fast can we scale?”

Instead, it should be: “Are we selling something that actually exists, delivers real value, and can be delivered as promised?”

You can promise the world’s greatest pizza, but if what you deliver is cardboard with ketchup, no amount of wizardry will save you.

The Builder.ai story isn’t just about one company’s failure. It’s about an entire ecosystem that has lost sight of the difference between ambition and delusion, between growth and sustainability. Until we acknowledge that difference, we’ll keep creating conditions for the next Builder.ai to rise and fall in exactly the same way.