Jason M. Lemkin and Speaker A discuss how Microsoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce are moving fast on AI, deploying hundreds of engineers at once. The real threat to incumbents isn't speed but pricing: shifting from per-seat subscriptions to usage-based models could hurt their revenue in ways startups don't face.
Chapters
The other thing I think is a little bit different about this than other platform shifts is it feels like everyone has read and learned the lessons of Clay Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma, and the incumbents seem to be moving very quickly, whether it's Microsoft or HubSpot or Salesforce, you name it. No one seems to be sitting on their hands in this one. So I like, as I play on both sides of this, but I, but In this particular case, I think the incumbents have a little bit more of an advantage than in most platform shifts.
Yeah, I advise founders. I think they get bigger, big company, maybe HubSpot's bigger or not big, depending on how you think about it. I think they misunderstand agility. When there is a core priority and it's truly core, they move fast, not quite as fast as a startup, but when they put 200 engineers on something, 300 engineers, It's a force of nature. What you get wrong is when they put 10, when they put 10, it's weird because they launch a really cool product. There were even in my little team at Adobe, we had 10 extra engineers, extra. You never have extra engineers at a startup, so you could build anything, but you can't sell it and support it. You give up, right? But when HubSpot says, and Dharmesh really early saying, we're going all in, be careful. And Mark Benioff putting 1,000 new sales folks, like just You can still beat them, don't get me wrong. Everyone beat somebody before them, but it's a force of nature, isn't it?
It is. I see it. We were early on it. Our message was early. Let's just say 3,000 engineers. So if we make a bet with 20% of them, that's 600 engineers with this unique proprietary data source. We're just hard to compete with. We get the opportunity here. But it's hard.
Yeah. So I think we don't know. We will, I think, I certainly personally don't think incumbents lose that. Maybe just to be con— there's no reason HubSpot in the, in B2B, I don't think there's any reason HubSpot or even Salesforce, even with age, I don't think there's any reason they should lose. There's no reason to lose. There may be many winners, but I don't see any losers there.
I agree. I think the tricky thing for HubSpot and Salesforce and the rest of the bigger players.
Yeah.
Molten Bridger Salesforce, but it's the business model disruption. Like instead of charging per seat or a subscription model, you're charging per, I don't know, per chat, or you're charging instead of hiring that sales rep, you hire that agent. That's tricky, but I'd, I have even on that, I think HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft, everyone's looking at those pricing models, but that's a harder thing almost for bigger companies to deal with the pricing and business model disruption.
