Listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
“No one could ever take this over,” Jake says. “If he left or somebody else had to manage it, no one knows what’s going on here.”
Jake Stauch tells me a story about a CFO and an expense report, and it changes the way I think about no-code tools.
The CFO had a simple request for his IT team: when someone submits an expense report, get approval from an M5 manager or above, go up the chain, but if you reach the CEO you have gone too far -- drop down to the closest manager for review. One sentence. Clean logic. Makes perfect sense.
Then the IT leader pulled up Okta workflows to show Jake what he had built. “He has to scroll and scroll and scroll,” Jake tells me, “because there are hundreds of nodes and connectors and if-this-then-that and error handling.” Two months of work for a one-sentence business rule. The IT leader was proud of it. He should have been. It was technically impressive. But Jake saw something else entirely.
This is the dirty secret of every no-code workflow builder. They are supposed to make automation accessible to non-technical people, but the moment the logic gets even slightly complex, you end up with a sprawling visual spaghetti that is too technical for the business users who wanted a simple solution and too constrained for the engineers who could have written the code in a fraction of the time.
“It’s too technical for non-technical users,” Jake says. “It’s not technical enough for the folks that really want to get in the weeds.”
The worst of both worlds. I feel this in my bones. I spent two grand hiring someone to teach me how to wire together Airtable and Zapier for podcast production. The planning phase was the hardest part. You have to know what the tools can do before you can design the automation, and once you build it you are managing 20 interconnected flow charts that will break in ways nobody can debug.
I ask Jake what Serval does differently, and his answer is architectural, not cosmetic.
“Everyone who’s ever approached automation has started with this idea of a drag-and-drop workflow builder,” he says. “Every generation of these systems has basically said, okay, we’re gonna build a better workflow builder. They make the UI better, they make it easier to configure, but they fundamentally don’t change the structure.”
Serval changed the structure. Their insight: if AI can write code from a natural language description, then the code is the source of truth, not the blocks. And if the code is the source of truth, the visual layer -- the flowchart the user sees -- does not need to map one-to-one to the underlying logic.
“The block is not real,” Jake says. “It’s just a visual representation of what the code’s doing.”
I stop him. This is the line I keep coming back to. Every no-code tool in history has assumed that the visual representation is the logic. The blocks are not just a display layer -- they are the actual mechanism. Move a block, and you change the code. Add a connector, and you create a dependency. The visual and the logical are fused. That fusion is what creates the spaghetti.
Serval severed it. The AI writes concise, efficient code that handles all the branching, looping, null checks, and error handling that would stretch into hundreds of visual nodes in a legacy tool. Then Serval generates a clean visual summary that makes the workflow easy to follow -- but the visualization is an abstraction, not the system itself.
This is the equivalent of what happened with iOS design. I bring up the Jony Ive story -- how early iOS used skeuomorphic metaphors like green felt and Rolodexes to teach people what a touchscreen could do. Once users understood the paradigm, Ive stripped the metaphors away. The training wheels came off.
Jake’s customers went through the same transition. In the early days, they would see Serval’s interface and reach for what they knew. “You could see they almost missed the old way of doing it,” Jake says. “They’re like, well, what if I wanna click into that block and change the configurations?” And Jake had to say: there is no block. Just chat with the system. Tell it what you want changed.
“I think in the early days, that was an unfamiliar user action,” he tells me. But consumer AI moved the culture. Enterprise buyers go home and use ChatGPT. The expectation of a chat-based interaction went from unfamiliar to obvious in about a year.
The compression of build cycles is staggering. What used to take weeks or months now happens in a conversation. An IT team member describes an onboarding workflow. Serval writes the code. Generates a visual representation. The whole thing is live. If the business process changes -- and it will -- you just tell the system what to change. No scrolling through hundreds of nodes trying to find the right branch to modify.
I think about this in the context of Mike Tyson’s line: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Every legacy automation is one business process change away from obsolescence. The two-month Okta workflow is already out of date by the time it ships because the CFO changed the approval threshold. With Serval, the CFO changes the requirement and someone on the IT team tells the system in plain language. Done.
Jake tells me that the really cool part is what happens next. The IT teams that start building with Serval become evangelists. HR wants in. Finance wants in. Legal wants in. IT transforms from ticket processors into what Jake calls an automation center of excellence.
“The block is not real” is not just a technical insight. It is a liberation. Twenty years of workflow tools built on the wrong assumption, and Jake Stauch had the nerve to throw it out.
About Jake Stauch
Jake Stauch is the Co-Founder and CEO of Serval, an AI-native platform that automates enterprise employee support through natural language-to-code workflow generation. Rising to prominence in the mid-2010s as a founder and product executive at the intersection of hardware and enterprise software, Stauch became known for identifying friction bottlenecks in IT automation and building infrastructure-first AI systems before the underlying technology fully matured. Serval, co-founded in April 2024 alongside CTO Alex McLeod, reached a billion-dollar valuation within 18 months of founding after raising $125 million across three rounds led by General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures ($47M Series A), and Sequoia ($75M Series B).
Previously, as Director of Product at Verkada from 2019 to 2024, Stauch spent five years conducting customer discovery with enterprise IT departments across physical security hardware and software. There, he identified the automation paradox that would become Serval’s founding insight: despite a growing landscape of automation tools, most IT requests were still handled manually because the friction of building workflows exceeded the cost of doing the tasks by hand. His product work at Verkada spanned new product lines in physical security cameras, access control systems, and alarm hardware sold to Fortune 500 IT departments.
Earlier, Stauch founded NeuroPlus, a brain-sensing hardware and cognitive performance software company, which he led as CEO from 2012 to 2019. He was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2017 for this work, which included a patent for an EEG-based neurofeedback system. He holds a degree from Duke University.
Listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
