#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo

alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical LeadersThursday, July 30, 2026

Show Notes

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Aike Hillbrands co-founded and killed two companies before Kombo, now a Y Combinator-backed HR integration platform with $10M+ ARR and a $25M Series A. Along the way, his team built something almost by accident: a company-wide AI brain made of a GitHub repo, a Cursor agent, and a Slack channel, built in two hours, that replaced how the whole company gets answers.

In this episode, Aike explains why files and grep beat MCP tools and vector search for agent reliability, walks through Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" of AI security risks and how a public Slack channel acts as a guardrail against it, and makes the case for why AI won't commoditize enterprise HR integrations anytime soon, despite that being Kombo's own bet.

Topics covered:

- How Kombo went from Notion AI to a Git-based company brain - Why files and grep beat MCP tools and vector search for agent reliability - The architecture: per-customer summary files, cross-linked support tickets, BigQuery CLI, Slack integration - Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" and practical mitigations - Why a public Slack channel works as a security guardrail - The buy-vs-build question for internal AI tooling - Why enterprise HR API integrations resist commoditization by AI

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