Jason M. Lemkin warns that Claude AI and cloud agents are squeezing out SaaS companies like Supabase, Figma, and Vercel, using a Fortnite shrinking-circle metaphor. Two of his own investments have already lost relevance as the cloud handles databases, websites, and app previews inside Claude. Companies that build agents on cloud code could hit $1 billion in revenue.
If they change their mind, there's no reason an agent. There's no reason they can't. They can't license Supabase or Neon or fork their own Postgres. They're pretty good there at that company. They can build their own database. They've already got plenty of servers. They can spool up a few more to host websites if they want to. They can. And I just think Fortnite's the game. You know, at the end of Fortnite it gets. The circle gets. And so if I'm at Replay Lovable or even Figma like don't. I would be Figma like the circle is just starting to shrink. But I think many companies that that circle shrinking. And I have two investments I made last year. I love them. Those products no longer have a reason to exist today because of cloud. I made two and that's not going to bankrupt the fund. And they've. They've tilted, they've evolved. But these were standalone investments last year. I'm not going to go into it. That were great that, that blew up in the early days and they just have no reason to exist today in that prior form. Just no reason. And to. When we turn around and all of a sudden you can preview your entire app inside of Claude, which you couldn't do last week. I. If I'm any of these. Figma, Replica, Lovable, Vercel. All of them. All of them. I love that. Just the Fortnite circle shrinking. So you, you know, you gotta, like, you gotta do something about it, right? And will it stop, like at the end of the game? It does get pretty small though, right? It's stressful. But. But the flip side is if you nail the agent, look how much revenue these guys did building essentially an agent on top of cloud code. They built $1 billion of revenue building the agent that didn't exist. So that's the flip side.
