Anthropic and Cursor each claim around $1 billion in revenue, but that money overlaps. For multiple AI companies to reach Microsoft-scale billions, the total market has to grow way faster than SaaS ever has. Otherwise there's just not enough money for everyone.
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I don't think that's gonna stop. I think the interesting thing about that, there's a ton in answer to unpack, but I just wanna highlight the, "You have to be good," sentence. 'Cause when we're gonna talk about all the, oh, what happens to SaaS and all that, I think Mike's big picture comment we should remember every time. It turns out if you wanna make a lot of money, you have to be good, right? And you have to compete with everyone else for the same dollars. And my guess is that will be a recurring theme. It's not impossible to succeed, you just quote unquote have to be good. There's such a lot of complexity here because you're right, you have the margin stacking. So, a classic example is you look at Anthropic, it's doing $1 billion in revenue. You look at Cursor, it's doing $1 billion in revenue, but it's pretty much the same billion dollars. So, you have to think about the margin stacking. Then on the other hand, you have to say to yourself, if say, Anthropic hypothetically was doing $100 billion and all of it was through third-party ISVs that were also adding value and getting more money on that, it would point to the end market would have to expand a lot, right? If everyone's going to eat and grow, you're going to have to buy into big TAM expansion. And you're right, Mike, software's grown nicely over the years. My guess is for this kind of growth, you probably need more than the trend line of the last 20 years. You probably need some acceleration on top just because the numbers are so big. I mean, if Anthropic goes from 4.5 billion to— and I'm not for a second saying I think they will, it's just like their number— to $150 billion in a world where Microsoft does $200 billion, you're basically saying to a rounding error, Anthropic is another Microsoft, OpenAI is another Microsoft, and that's two more Microsofts, which are pretty voracious mouths to feed out of the same pile of cash. There better be more money coming or it's going to get pretty short around here.
