PAUL PIPER
SOFTWARE ARCHITECT & FOUNDER

The recording from last year’s Gründungsmesse Mittelhessen in Giessen is finally out. Big thanks to TiG for organizing the event and making this available.

In the talk I get into something I think about a lot: the cultural gap between Germany and the US when it comes to founding companies. Why did I end up starting my company in the US? It’s not because Germany lacks talent or ideas - it’s about the environment around those ideas. Risk tolerance, access to capital, the social stigma around failure - it all adds up.

Okay, so… we built another product for AIVory: AIVory Architect.

And the reason is simple: AI or not, it took me weeks to actually setup Terraform/Kubernetes, make it secure etc etc. So I looked around, noticed that there isn’t many visual editors around and decided to do that as a side project.

So this is an exciting one: I spent 48 hours at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub hackathon building SIMS - an AI-powered incident reporting system. Point your phone at a threat, record what you see, and AI handles the rest: transcription, threat analysis, GPS coordinates, automatic routing to responders. No more fumbling with phone calls during emergencies.

A quick personal note: we published the Cloudflare AI Markdown Worker. It’s a simple tool that detects AI agents (Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.) and serves them markdown instead of HTML. Regular visitors get the normal site, AI agents get clean, token-efficient content.

Writing this from San Francisco - back in the city with self-driving cars and people actually building stuff. Perfect timing, because I’ve got news.

Remember AIVory? The AI assistant we launched in May? Yeah, that didn’t work. And I am not hiding it.

So I accidentally built a JetBrains plugin.

You know how it goes - you’re working on your main project (AIVory in my case), hit a wall, need to clear your head. Some people go for a walk. I… do projects like this.

Alright, I’ve been keeping quiet about this for too long… I finally get to talk about AIVory!

What is it? AIVory is a smart assistant that I’ve been working on for the past months. The basic idea: it helps you manage information overload by keeping track of your emails, messages, and other communication channels. It’s an AI that actually helps you rather than creating more noise.