If Growth Isn’t Accelerating, You’re Not an AI Company. And 9 Other Hard Truths for SaaS in 2026.
I had a great conversation with the TBPN crew the other day, and we covered a lot of ground — from the state of the SaaS market to PE exits to vibe coding to how agents are already reshaping how software gets bought and sold. I wanted to pull together the key themes here, because I think founders need to hear some of this, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Let me walk through the big takeaways.
1. If Growth Isn’t Re-Accelerating, You’re Not Really an AI Company
This is my simple rule, and I think it cuts through all the noise.
Every public company, every startup, everyone is talking about their “AI strategy.” They’ve built an agent. They’ve shipped a copilot. They’ve got an AI tab on their website. Great. But has growth actually re-accelerated?
That’s the bull case for Meta. They genuinely accelerated growth. The AI they baked into their ad-matching platform is working. Retail advertisers generating ads with AI tools — it’s all compounding. It’s real.
Now look at the flip side. Microsoft’s AI business is still blowing up, but they missed on the software side. The Trade Desk has been destroyed. Figma is trading below 10x revenue despite essentially creating and owning a category.
The point is: AI talk is cheap. Revenue acceleration is the only metric that matters now. And I’ve lost patience — with founders at $1M, at $10M, with public companies — who haven’t seen the lift. ElevenLabs just crossed $350M. MongoDB dramatically re-accelerated. Show me the money.
2. The Transition from “Deeply Tough Love” to Just “Tough”
Last year, my advice to founders was deeply tough love. The market was brutal, and most people hadn’t adjusted.
Now it’s just tough. Here’s why: you’ve had time. Claude got really good at 3.7 — that’s why Replit and Lovable blew up. That was a year ago. Whether you’re Agentforce or one of my portfolio companies, you had a full year to re-accelerate growth. Some did. Most didn’t.
And honestly? Salesforce is doing better than some startups I work with. We’re actually probably the only organization of our size using Agentforce for real, every day. It works. I can’t tell you how many startups whose “agentic product” is still basically a copilot.
3. 80% of Your Team Wants to Work Like It’s 2021
There’s a narrative that AI has reinvigorated SaaS founders — that people who got to growth stage a decade ago are suddenly back in the arena, fired up, tinkering with tools, pushing teams harder.
It’s a great narrative. In the real world, it’s not that common.
I talk to public company CEOs in B2B, my own portfolio, others — a lot. Behind the scenes, off the record. And since our agents blew up, everybody thinks we’re some kind of GTM agent gurus. So they come to us.
The consistent theme: 80% of their team wants to work like it’s 2021. Everyone has to create a skunkworks team or something. And meanwhile, the AI-native companies are crushing it precisely because they don’t have to deal with 20,000 pre-AI customers who still have feature gaps, clunky software, and legacy competitors. Then you’ve got 10,000 new AI competitors who don’t carry any of that baggage.
I’d love to tell you I know dozens of companies that went from 40% growth at the start of 2025 to 80% or 110%. I can think of a handful.
4. The Vibe Coding Problem Is Worse Than You Think
Six months ago, the problem was 10 companies running at every exciting category. Today it’s worse.
A very successful seed investor — relatively new to the game — told me yesterday he’s giving up because everyone can vibe code something. He can’t even tell the difference between founders anymore.
Now look, I’ve vibe coded 20+ apps that have been used over a million times. I’m in the top 0.1% on Replit. I know a bit about this. You’re not going to vibe code Salesforce. But you can vibe code something for Demo Day that looks really good. Stuff that 18 months ago would have made your jaw drop — “oh my god, an agent for dental follow-ups that’s fully automated!” — that’s now table stakes. I built my own version on Replit a week ago. It was already obsolete today.
Here’s the real unlock though: if you want to build super-niche software for real — not for an hour, not one-shot, but actually commit to it — you can now do it without an engineer. RevenueCat, a company I was the first investor in, powers mobile subscriptions for 50% of mobile apps. Andreessen published data showing the number of new mobile apps basically quintupled at the end of last year because of vibe coding. And it’s just starting.
The very bottom of the market is exploding with possibility. Salesforce isn’t going away. But that middle is going to be harder.
5. Investors Want Insane Growth. And There’s No Great Answer.
The challenge isn’t just the clones. It’s that investors now expect insane levels of growth. Going from $1M to $100M ARR in a year used to be almost unprecedented. Now it’s what you need to be fundable.
HigsField for video is over $200M. But that’s not the one getting talked about every week — that’s Harvey, Lovable, Replit.
And some great businesses will compound to solid rates but remain unfundable. They would have been unfundable two years ago too. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is for these founders. A company projecting 3x growth this year? Beautiful deck. But that growth rate is now a nightmare for fundraising because it doesn’t look best-in-class.
6. PE Has Said Goodbye to B2B SaaS
I know this for a thousand percent sure, and it’s slightly inconsistent with the data Carta and others put out: these pre-AI B2B companies at $50M, $100M, $200M, even $800M — no one wants to buy them.
Hooray, you got profitable. That means you’re not going bankrupt. You have not solved your existential problem in AI.
I’m advising a company at about $140M in revenue with decent growth. We did an M&A review recently, and I was shocked at how many companies much bigger than them are also on the block. They’ve already gone to Thoma Bravo, Vista, Insight. Those firms aren’t doing a $140M ARR cram-down combo exit unless everyone else in the PE chain already said no.
Until late 2023, if you got to $20M in revenue, you were still growing, and you were efficient — someone was going to buy you. The question was whether it was 5x, 6x, or 10x. That playbook is dead for PE and it’s dead for exits.
I do think the Thoma Bravos of the world will figure out how to accelerate AI in their portfolios. If you can own the agents on your platform, that’s how you re-accelerate. But if you don’t, the agents will take away all the value. And I’ve lost patience with founders in la-la land about this.
7. How We Went from 8 Salespeople to 1 Human + Agents
We’re running four different sales agents right now: Agentforce, Artisan (hot YC company), Qualified (Salesforce just bought them for almost a billion), and Clay (just raised at $5B valuation). All of them, for different use cases. It’s work. But it works.
The specific use case where Agentforce shines for us: reactivations. Folks who used to be sponsors or attend our events that a human was simply too lazy or too busy to follow up with. We scored them, sent them out with the agent. 70% open rate.
We went from eight people on our sales team to one human plus AIs. The agents do the work humans gave up on — looking up who replaced the person at Ramp or Brex, following up without shame, closing deals on Saturday night.
An agent closed a $100K deal on a Saturday night. How many humans want to do that? They’re streaming Netflix. The agent doesn’t quit, doesn’t take vacations, doesn’t need onboarding, and doesn’t demand a raise six months in.
That’s why last June, Amelia and I just said: we’re going all-in on agents. We’re going to push every agent to its limit. Now three people are doing the work of 15, and we replaced two agencies with apps we built ourselves.
8. GEO Is Real, But Deeper Than People Think
People are underestimating how LLMs are reshaping software discovery. “GEO” — generative engine optimization — is nice as a concept, but I think it undersells what’s actually happening.
I did this experiment yesterday: went into Replit and asked, “What’s the best CRM for me to use?” It said HubSpot. That’s where the money is.
We’re not going to Google anymore for this stuff. We’re asking the agent. Or even more interesting — we’re not even asking. You say “I need a website” and the agent picks a database for you. You don’t even know what it picked.
I built a digital JSON tool that’s been used 175,000 times where people just ask “what should I use?” Why would you go to Google and pay? Why sit through endless webinars with a sales rep who doesn’t know the product?
Look at Resend vs. SendGrid. I couldn’t get SendGrid to work in Replit — the founders are long gone, they throttled the free tier into uselessness. The agent said “use Resend.” I’ve never gone back. WorkOS was around for years trying to do OAuth, going through layoffs, going nowhere. Then every agent started recommending it and the company blew up.
This is still nerdy-early, but some version of this is how everyone will pick software. The companies that win agent-driven discovery win the next decade.
9. The Only Niche AI Investments Worth Making: Show Me the 10x Pricing
Will a lot of niche AI-powered software blossom? Absolutely. Dairy farms, hydroponic operations, spa management — all great. But to make money investing in these, the question is: can the agent deliver so much ROI that you can charge 4x, 5x, 10x more than the previous category leader?
If it’s the same unit economics as deals I looked at five years ago, I’m out. Even getting to $100M is tough.
But look at the AI SDR companies — Artisan, Qualified, Clay. They’re charging $100K+ to start. The last generation (SalesLoft, $2.3B exit to Vista in December 2021) struggled to get customers to pay $100K. Now it’s table stakes.
Mangomint, a company I invested in, does software for spas and salons — a crappy, hyper-competitive category with 10 solid incumbents. After they hit $30M, they blew up with agentic and automation features. Not because it made the product marginally better, but because it made the product dramatically more valuable. An $8K/year product that can now credibly charge $80K because it genuinely eliminated ten back-office positions? That’s the math I want to see.
10. Don’t Quit Your Job
One last thing. I was at an event this week with a lot of C-level B2B executives. I’ve gone every year for a while.
This year, they finally admitted it: they can’t find jobs. People with 2021-2024 tech tool skill sets — nobody needs them anymore. It’s finally sinking in.
So whatever you do, don’t quit. If you like it at your company — stay. The wealth creation happening at the top (20,000+ NVIDIA employees have made $20M+ in the Bay Area alone) is about to explode further. The best VCs and best engineers will make money like we’ve never seen before.
But the middle is going to have a very rough ride.
The IPO market is open-ish but discriminatory. EquipmentShare crushed it. Wealthfront bombed. We’re entering an era of wealth creation from IPOs unlike anything we’ve seen — trillion-dollar exits are becoming conversational, not aspirational.
Just make sure you’re on the right side of it. Build something real, show the revenue lift, own your agents, and don’t wait for PE to save you. They’re not coming.
