Jason M. Lemkin tells SaaS founders that AI adoption is mandatory: embrace it and become a category leader like Finn, or face down-rounds, talent loss, and irrelevance. The mobile and social era is over. Companies must transform now or get eclipsed.
Chapters
And the reason is because AI is inevitable. To say like AI is the next technology cycle isn't even a new thing to say. That happened ages ago. We're like 3 years in now. AI is inevitable. Whatever you loved about SaaS and the last decade of mobile and social and the internet before that, it's gone. It's gone already. So you have to change. You've no choice. And you can do, you can kind of like, I feel like everyone, most SaaS companies at least, SaaS companies at scale are at this crossroads. They have, 2 paths to go down. Opportunity or whatever the opposite of that is. Death. If you nail it, if you truly change, you'll become a category leader like Finn is. You'll grow to like $100 million in ARR very quickly. Finn's on that path, very close to it. You'll be on the front page of Forbes if you care about that. You'll have all the series, you'll raise all the money that you want, no problem. But if you don't do it, and if you fail— and deciding not to do it, I think, is failure— you'll slide into irrelevance slowly but surely. New competitors will eat your lunch. You'll have down rounds. All your best people will quit because they'll go work at the true AI companies, and ultimately the company will die. And this is a really important— we're at this crossroads, a lot of companies, and it's really important that the people pick the right lane. The AI revolution cannot be negotiated. It's not something that you negotiate with people and you negotiate with staff. You negotiate with your peers. Remember all those people that will not say no, but they'll say to other things.
