Which SaaS is dead? Ask the VC who funds it.

Josh Farrugia calls himself a failed founder and a non-technical AI engineer. He has built Black Nova's own AI-native operating system on Claude Code, replacing tools the fund paid tens of thousands of dollars for, while keeping LP data, bank details and personal information well away from it.

So the sharper question becomes:

Which software should you build yourself, and what should AI never touch?

In this episode of Agents After Dark, Matt Doughty sits down with Josh Farrugia, Principal Investor at Black Nova VC, to talk about building real systems without a technical background, and why the best AI builds start with structured data rather than a model.

Together they discuss:

• Why "SaaS is dead" is true for some software and nonsense for the rest, and how to tell which is which
• How Josh learned to build: hackathons, workshops and borrowing best practice from builders who know more than he does
• Drawing the line on data: why LP data and bank details stay out of the operating system, and how encryption tools like CipherStash fit in
• How a team of five core staff and 26 venture partners supports 60 portfolio companies, with fund three adding more
• Measuring ROI through response times, intro tracking and backlogs cleared
• Why staff building 15 dashboards to watch their agents is a warning sign, and why enterprise adoption will follow the same path as the cloud
• Why, if we stopped making new models today, the world would still change overnight
• How deterministic to be before an agent touches anything, and when that starts to hold better models back

Josh's view is that the gap is no longer the technology. It is knowing what AI should do, what it should not touch, and being able to see what it is doing once it is running.

This conversation is for founders, investors and operators deciding what to build, what to buy and how far to trust agents with their data.

About Josh
Josh Farrugia is a Principal Investor at Black Nova VC, an early-stage fund now investing from its third fund. A former founder with a product background, he leads Black Nova's work on AI-native systems. Black Nova is an investor in Prefactor.

About Prefactor
Prefactor makes AI agents better.

Prefactor learns how your agents are supposed to behave, evaluates what they actually do on every run, and shows your team how to improve them. Engineers, product managers and the subject matter experts who know what good looks like all work from the same picture, so the agent gets better with every release.

Learn more at prefactor.ai