A short transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation (hosts: Jason M. Lemkin and another speaker) discussing how AI is 'maiming' companies — exploring whether the effect comes from faster competitors, build-vs-buy decisions, or accelerated internal development processes — and asking why businesses are slowing down.
And AI is maiming them.
Yep.
So can you dimension that maiming a little more? Is it more competitors moving faster?
Yes.
It internal build. Yes versus build versus buy. Or is it the internal development process speeding?
Why are they all slow down?
Yeah. What's. What's driving this context? What's the.
It's probably compounding effects. First of all, one of the biggest. There's probably. There's probably two issues. Not the first two have. There's probably a bunch. But the first two have nothing to do with AI. One is too many didn't go multi product. If you listen to Tope. I don't know if you're with Tope for calendly, he's not telling you what's coming this year, but when you heard him say multi product, they're at well over 200 million. I don't know where they are. I don't know if they're past 300, but they're well over 200 million. Multi product is the game. Okay. Too many folks got to 100 million with one product. Too many. I call too many folks got 200 million pretending they had a second product, but it was really an extension of the feature. Right. I. There are some folks like Parker Conrad that disagree with me, but we'll do something with him on it soon. I don't actually think we disagree, but I think if your second product is smaller than your first, you're not multi product because it doesn't get you anywhere. If you get to 100 million and it takes you two years to launch a product that can only do 50 million, it doesn't get you anywhere. Right. It's gotta be bigger. So too many folks didn't go multi product, pretended it was multi product. It was just a second feature. It wasn't a whole new product. Right. So that's root cause number one of the slowdown at 100 million. Root cause number two. And so the lesson learned. And it was funny. I was rewatching the chief product officer of Samsara, which is one of the most top 10 most. He said last year at Saster, you got to go multi product by 10 million in revenue. You got to go multi product by 10 million. And I think it's the right way to think about it. Okay. Second reason they're decelerating, which is. Which is they just couldn't recover from how easy it was in 2021. They couldn't recover culturally, they couldn't recover the fact that in 2021 anyone would buy their product and they couldn't Recover that because of that, their product is the same as 2021. And so in 2021, they grew 70%. And then in 2022 they grew 40%. And then in 2023, oh shit, it's, it's 20. It's, it's 20%. And then they hit this year that what did it decelerate to so many folks went whatever that some version 70, 40 and then 40. The investors are like, oh, we're nervous. But 40 still pretty good at 100, right? And then you see the 20s and you're like, well, as long as Jason turns it around 20% and then you fall into the teens and everyone gives up. And then where do you go from the teens? You end up like just ripping off your customers because there's. And then what happens after the teens is you start getting investor update and it's no new customers. The customer count is the same. But they raised prices again. They raised prices again, right? So living in 2021 killed people. Not going multi product killed people. That alone led to this. And then the AI competitors so fierce because not only is all the discretionary budget going into AI, which you heard from everybody, that's bad enough that, that, that, that CIOs especially want to put money. They CIOs want to do two things. We ran out of time in my opener. They want fewer vendors. And even Tope said that's happened in Calendar. We want to consolidate vendors, but we're putting more money into AI. So you're either benefiting or getting screwed by that. Either you're getting consolidated out of existence or you're benefiting from the AI too. So too many folks we're getting are getting consolidated away. Right? That's the third trend. And then the fourth one, to answer your question longly, and then this is it is. Look, even if none of that is an issue, if AI just creates, if you just got five new competitors here and they each have 1% market share and you lose 5% market share, that even 5% is really stressful. It's really stressful, right? So that's the nick. All these things can like nickel and dime you and make your growth go from okay to not okay. Right? The line between okay, it varies at your stage. But after 100, if you're growing less than 30%, it's big yellow light, right? And if after 100 million you're growing less than 20%, you fell out of product market fit 100 million, you have so many thousands of customers, they should be telling their friends and they should be leaving and going to new companies and bring you in and all the stuff you've seen. It's almost impossible to grow less than 20% at scale if the engine's working. So your engine is not working. That's a red effing flag, right? So I don't know if that helps, but those are all the causes. It's a lot.
