Jason M. Lemkin says AI is making enterprise software obsolete at unprecedented speed. A large software company grew revenue 50% to $12 billion in three years without hiring anyone. AI can now do enterprise-grade security audits instantly, something Lemkin once thought impossible.
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My life is shorter. And the thing that is stressful on this, and it's a way to make money, is the stressful thing is that if you're— and again, I don't want to endlessly talk about vibe coding apps, but I have so much experience, right? I'm shocked everything is faster than I would have ever and better than I would have ever expected. If you told me when we started this podcast that today I could just talk to a vibe coding platform and it would do like an A-tier security audit while I was on an airplane and I didn't have to do anything. I would have said, guys, it deleted my whole database. There's no way it's going to do a friggin enterprise-grade security audit. Yet here we are. And then we turn around and everything and everyone's— everything Anthropic can do this year is faster and better and bigger than we thought. BirdDoge being disrupted by Base44 next week is dumb. But God, this acceleration, it's just— it's hard to— it's so fast. Almost all the B2B software we use today is terrible now. It's terrible. All these products are terrible. A lot of the ones that, that we, the founders we love that Harry talks to, the products are terrible now because the software is like, AI software is so good. Blow your brains out to input data for 2 hours into your system, right? And if that, if nothing else, that is accelerating so quickly that the leaders cannot keep up with the fact that their products are so dated. They're so, they're so dated.
I think that broadly true. And I think when you narrow it, that's why I said when you narrow it down to the micro of the impact of AI on the million to a million and a half workers in the US in the software and tech industry broadly defined could be way more disruptive, right? So my point is again, differentiate the micro discussion of are B2B software companies in trouble and how much are they in trouble is a really good discussion. And if you make your living investing in B2B software companies, it's the only thing that matters, right? But jumping from there to saying civilization as we know it ended is just, as you say, Jason, clickbait and we should just ignore it. Don't hold your breath thinking they're gonna come for us and say, if the only thing that's impacted here is the B2B software industry, my suspicion is the rest of the world will go, yeah, I'm willing to lose those guys, right? The question is who wins, who loses in the, you know, 2% of GDP software business with AI? And I think that's a valid, that is the question. You're right, is all that software, so do you, all that software is crap and looks outdated today. A lot of it. That's what you're buying.
Same number of employees it did 3 years ago. It has not added a single net headcount in 3 years and has grown 50% at $12 billion in revenue. It has grown its revenue 50% to $12 billion and not added a single net headcount. That already is an economic loss to the tech lifestyle we lived just a couple years ago, right?
