“Extinction level event for software…for companies that don’t embrace AI…”. “The death of SaaS.” Big statements big humans are making and yes, things are shifting. It does feel legacy SaaS applications will be under attack as a) the cost to build and distribute new applications / agents contracts significantly and b) AI agents take away some of the need for an application interface (which is a big part of SaaS’s “ease of use” advantage these last ~20 years) altogether as they render the information we need in a much more human way. Jamin Ball at Altimeter pens Clouded Judgement (below) which is an awesome read and last week’s post hits on some of this. AND (maybe most importantly) hard to find knowledge workers who actually like the systems of record they have to interact with / update which compounds the issue for SaaS. Awesome time to build the next the next generation of software. Buckle up. https://lnkd.in/gK_-P2bT
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Great post / follow and good read for sales and success humans (and really anyone in software) about the environment for selling. "CFOs are blocking a ton more purchases in 2024.". Noted. Aligning to 1 of: revenue enhancing, mission critical (i.e. security), improves efficiencies (i.e. cost optimizing) are imperatives. "Candy" (nice to have) is the dead zone. Got it. They also discuss challenges for startups (the "will they be around in 24 months" challenge) are more acute right now. All true but tons of nuance (as always) and could another area of opportunity exist which is product led (potentially selling at an ASP below the radar directly to end users) AI native tools users begin to adopt as they supercharge their productivity that could ultimately replace other (heavier and more expensive) SaaS applications the CFO is already scrutinizing? Always tons of opportunity to "go sell some software" as a great human once told me! https://lnkd.in/gDCF7Bar
Winning Software Budgets in 2024
onlycfo.io
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Absolutely love this and what comes next! Applying the VC model to this opportunity can only accelerate future progress and solutions for those with spinal cord injuries. Super exciting!
Big news! Today is the launch of SCI Ventures, the first venture philanthropy fund focused on accelerating the development of innovative therapies for people living with paralysis – and Shepherd Center is part of it! As a co-founder of SCI Ventures, we’re on a mission to spark innovation and bridge the gap between lab research and making discoveries available to help restore functions for those with spinal cord injury and ultimately cure paralysis. At Shepherd Center, we’re honored to come together with Wings for Life - Spinal Cord Research Foundation, Spinal Research, Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, and Promobilia Foundation to support this single, first-of-its-kind, and truly game-changing investment vehicle. Through our combined network and knowledge, we plan to attract more capital to the SCI space by lowering the risk for additional investors from across the VC and healthcare industries. Through our combined network and knowledge, we hope to attract more capital, investment, and awareness to develop therapies that will help people begin again after spinal cord injury. Read more about the launch: https://bit.ly/3VxEsxE
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AI is everywhere and I am getting excited to announce what we have been working on (coming soon). It is NOT healthcare centric so not necessarily related to this post per se but too important not to share. On top of absorbing all I can around AI and enterprise software (hint hint), I have also been reading about AI and healthcare and 2 topics that hit home with me - AI + spinal cord injuries and AI + Alzheimer’s. I am watching Alzheimer’s real time and all I can say is it is brutal. Tons of focus and my hope is AI accelerates progress here. Interesting overview of some of the work happening here specific to Alzheimer’s + AI. https://lnkd.in/gagpbSjc Many of you probably also heard about or read about the Neuralink work happening. A few know but I have been a quadriplegic for 30+ years now. My injury is “incomplete” and I am beyond lucky to have lived a life since my injury that I’d like to believe isn’t much different than the life I would have had sans-injury (although in my head I would definitely have never lost to my son in basketball and I would have been a pro golfer with multiple green jackets:). In fact July 1989 likely formed much of my approach to life and taken me places I may have never been. The Shepherd Center was and is a magical place and this is insight into my experience there and the last few decades: https://lnkd.in/gzAXkAFw Neuralink and other work happening with spinal cord injuries, with the aid of AI in many cases, is picking up pace. The below is incredible and I am actually lucky I’m not eligible for what they are doing yet but you can start to see a path to so many more amazing things. AI is scary at times but wow so much good is ahead imo. And maybe just maybe, my green jacket.
Redefining the boundaries of human capability requires pioneers. If you have quadriplegia and want to explore new ways of controlling your computer, we invite you to participate in our clinical trial. https://lnkd.in/emjcUvvR
Shape the Future of Assistive Technology with Neuralink
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"...democratize knowledge work...". This is a great perspective (not shocking given the author) specific to AI agents. You could push this a step further as could these AI agents disrupt the same SaaS applications that democratized software? There are still so many businesses that are priced out of software (at least some tiers of providers / categories of software). AI could change that as simply taking notes, building a personal (and ultimately a team, function, company) knowledge graph and leveraging AI (and modern toolsets) to provide the same insights / perspectives many SaaS tools provide today at a fraction of the cost may provide 80/20 solutions (80% of the functionality at 20% of the cost) that ultimately disrupts the SaaS incumbents of today.
AI Agents have the potential to democratize knowledge work in the same way that SaaS democratized software. And as we've seen in the past couple of decades with software, every time you make a service cheaper and more available, you dramatically increase the size of the total addressable market. Let's take, for instance, what happened in the early days of SaaS. The biggest mistake that most people and investors made was looking at the market sizes of traditional on-prem software to see how big the market could be for this new crop of companies. In fact, some even felt the markets would actually be *smaller* because the software may be cheaper to run for an enterprise. All these theories were wrong, by an order of magnitude. What we actually saw happen was not that SaaS initially replaced or went after traditional incumbent software products for existing customers, but instead, the biggest early customers were actually smaller businesses or teams in large enterprises that previously didn't have access to traditional on-prem enterprise software. Starting with Salesforce and NetSuite, for the first time small businesses had access to effectively the same tech stack that a large enterprise had. AWS ushered in an era where a one person startup could build an app and scale it without ever visiting a datacenter. Box let businesses of all sizes manage documents and content securely. Stripe gave any developer a full payment stack. All of these new services --and thousands more-- led to a 10Xing (or more) the size of traditional markets by serving customers that previously didn't have access to these types of tools. Now, if you extrapolate out what we're seeing in the earliest days of AI, the same dynamic could hold true for AI Agents. While large enterprises have traditionally had access to nearly every specialized form talent or an abundance of labor, the vast majority of businesses don't have this same luxury. For most small startups just getting going, they often don't have the resources to do outbound sales, full customer support, specialized legal work, and so on. And as a startup scales, you're constantly making resource trade-offs that are less driven by what's best for the business, but instead driven by how much capital you have. In the future, by making the barrier to entry to getting knowledge work done as simple as a website signup or API call, we will likely see a massive increase in usage of “services” that previously were near-impossible to access easily. And what's amazing is the vast majority of the usage of these AI Agents will likely come from previous areas of "non-consumption". That is to say, these will be customers that would not have spent anything on similar labor categories in a pre-AI world. We're in only the very beginning of this new era of AI-driven work, but the scale of the opportunity and the market will be massive.
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“Cognitive industrial revolution. It’s a steam engine of the mind.” This video by Reid Hoffman conjures up so many thoughts. AI is moving so fast and there are so many opportunities (and concerns). I posted earlier re: we are building a “digital chief of staff” and this video takes an aspect of this to a completely different place. McConaughey says “just keep livin”. With AI (and as always) it may be just keep learning (or "learnin" for us Texans:).
Co-Founder, LinkedIn & Inflection AI. Investor at Greylock.
Can talking with an AI-generated version of myself lead to a deeper awareness of how I think? That's what I wanted to find out as I continue to explore the latest AI technologies in hands-on ways.
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“Cognitive industrial revolution. It’s a steam engine of the mind.” This video by Reid Hoffman conjures up so many thoughts. AI is moving so fast and there are so many opportunities (and concerns). We are building a “digital chief of staff” (don’t hold us to the tagline) and this video takes an aspect of this to a completely different place (we will give you an app, not an avatar:). The opportunity for AI to give us superpowers is coming and embracing a beginner’s mindset seems to be an imperative now. McConaughey says “just keep livin”. With AI (and basically everything:) it is just keep learning (or "learnin" for us Texans). https://lnkd.in/gaz94a5U
Reid Hoffman meets his AI twin - Full
https://www.youtube.com/
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Every week there is more and more on AI. Good. Bad. Ugly. The bulk focuses on the future and the “what if” (like last week when I referenced a great Mckinsey study) use cases. Or the doom and gloom as in "all of our jobs are going away". They reference tech layoffs for 2023 = 262,735 per Layoffs.fyi, up 59% versus 2022. This headline from the New York Times in 1983 sounds familiar: "As Computers Eliminate Jobs" ) just replace with computers with AI and this could be a headline today). So many jobs have been and will be eliminated (many articles implicitly link to AI / its promise). This is significant (and gut wrenching regardless of the cause). But, many others highlight multiple compression / race to rule of 40 (or 50 or 60+) / end of ZIRP. Net it is unclear causation / correlation today to AI. So what? As one of the startups betting on AI to supercharge productivity in a disruptive way relative to existing tools (far easier to use, significantly lower TCO, less effort with more value, etc), it feels there is so much opportunity to get specific and give individuals super powers. Today. Take away time consuming / non value add tasks. Prepare them for their day, week, month, etc. The below study from Deloitte gets specific to opportunities within Success. Super interested to hear perspectives as to where you see AI being helpful TODAY in your organizations and in the near term. Success is one area and so many others. No matter where you are in this debate it will be very interesting in the months and years to come.
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“AI will take over coding, making learning optional.” - Jensen Huang Tons of thinking (and action) happening right now around Ai and what it will / will not do. Today. Tomorrow. In perpetuity. The above statement from Jensen Huang (and if you have seen / read about Devin feels like aspects of this for coding are coming REALLY FAST) is likely way broader, i.e. “Ai will take over / significantly impact ______ (name your function).”. A Mckinsey study (graphic below) highlighted a multitude of use cases and the potential $ / % of overall spend impact by function. All of this (at least to me) creates a super wide spectrum of feelings from excitement to scary (makes me think of my kiddos and what is on the horizon for them). I do know there is a massive opportunity to address so much of what today’s knowledge worker doesn’t want to do (i.e. administrative tasks / autonomous tasks) TODAY as this progresses. Would love your thoughts.
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Ai seems to surround us more and more every day. Below is one of the better quick takes on which functions are the most exposed (maybe also most likely to have the largest productivity gains) as we move further into this next wave. In these early days, there does seem to be an opportunity to tackle mundane tasks (no more begging people to update apps like a CRM opportunity record:) and repetitive tasks (see the SDR perspective below). Interesting perspective and the speed at which this happens (and what opportunities / roles are spawned by this movement) will be super interesting.
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