Software's Cloud & LLM Disaster: Companies Face Terminal Decline #shorts

Name: Software's Cloud & LLM Disaster: Companies Face Terminal Decline #shorts
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T10:45:45+00:00
Duration: 54 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this brief YouTube short, venture capitalist Jason M. Lemkin delivers a scathing assessment of public software companies and startups for failing to…

12 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief YouTube short, venture capitalist Jason M. Lemkin delivers a scathing assessment of public software companies and startups for failing to capture the unprecedented cloud and large‑language‑model (LLM) spending surge. He labels this failure an "own goal" and a disaster, arguing that firms have not turned the massive spend into profitable agents or LLM‑driven products that customers would pay extra for. Lemkin urges companies to allocate their top engineers to clone successful AI services (e.g., Harvey, ElevenLabs, LoveWall) and build agents that automate work for their user bases. He warns that without such aggressive engineering, firms are sliding toward an "event horizon" of terminal decline, losing ideas and talent. A second speaker reinforces the need for "bloody‑mindedness"—relentless, ruthless focus—to push these initiatives forward. Lemkin concludes that any software company not matching or exceeding Salesforce’s AI capabilities is effectively hopeless.

Chapters

It's just brutal because there's been the amount of spend that has gone to cloud and LLMs is like nothing we've ever seen before. And if you're a public software company, you've captured none of that. It's a disaster. It's worse than it looks because you can't figure out any way to take all of that spend and turn it into an agent, an LLM that your, your 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 customers want to pay you more for. I mean, it is The biggest fail and own goal in our history. And it's going to get worse. It's all worse than it looks because you can hide under multi-year contracts and annual contracts and price increases. And but like you, it's too— you had so much time. Like these 3 kids from Stanford that figured out how to use Opus. Why couldn't you? Why can't you put your 20 best engineers and just freaking clone Harvey or ElevenLabs or LoveWall? You all deserve to be fired.
But probably a year of feeling ridiculous because you're talking about the small things. And the big thing is so much customers are saying, why aren't you focused on the big thing? And he just described very well what it took to be bloody-minded enough to make that happen. That's the kind of bloody-mindedness it's going to take to push through.
I just don't see it across startups and I don't see it in the public companies. You can go out there and say on Twitter LLMs are fungible and that systems of record should benefit because we own what matters and LLMs are commodity. I mean, give me a break. They're dragging their companies with real product into the future. And I think everyone else, they're gonna— they're already starting to fall into the event horizon, into a state of terminal decline, that their teams don't want to do the work and that they're losing— they don't have the ideas. They don't have the ideas. Where's your agent that goes out and does all the work for your customer base, right? Um, they're just headed in the event horizon and they're trying to put on the jets, but it's, it's getting tougher each day to recover Anyone in software, you got to be doing as good or better than Salesforce. I think you're hopeless. You're hopeless.