MCP: Build on It or Skip It?

You are the CTO of a Series-B SaaS company (~$15M ARR, 80 customers). Your product is a CRM for sales teams with deep integrations into email, calendar, and call-recording tools.

Anthropic's MCP (Model Context Protocol) is gaining traction — major foundation-model providers and AI agent frameworks are adopting it as the way agents discover and call into third-party tools. Building an MCP server for your product would let any AI agent (Claude, OpenAI's, Cursor, Linear's agents) query and modify CRM data through a standard interface.

Your engineering team has 6 people. The MCP server is roughly 3-4 weeks of work for a senior engineer. Your Q3 roadmap is already committed to enterprise security features (SSO, audit log) that two paying customers asked for. You can't do both.

The principle: Standards become moats only when they're inevitable. Investing in an emerging standard early is a bet on its trajectory, not on its current adoption. The right question isn't "is the standard popular today?" but "does its momentum show it will be a default in 18 months?"