Jason M. Lemkin says SaaS valuations crashed 60-70% as markets soured on traditional metrics, but AI-powered platforms are spawning a "B2B Cambrian explosion." Harvey hit $9B valuation and Replit neared $1B in revenue in just a few years. He calls it a golden moment for builders.
We started this year where the stock market said, oh my God, I just don't believe a lot of these public companies are going to be worth anything. They plummeted. The SaaSpocalypse was the public market said, we don't believe in NRR anymore. We don't believe that 110% NRR is trustworthy. You believe your 3-year contracts are hiding the fact that nobody's going to buy your products in 3 years. The public markets gave up. They sent leaders, epic products like Monday, HubSpot, Atlassian down 60 to 70% in a couple of months. We are actually in a B2B Cambrian explosion. We are seeing Millions of new applications and species. Look at folks out here that are doing tens, hundreds of millions of revenue that weren't even— barely existed a year ago. If you were just on our product panel, Harvey just raised at $9 billion. They didn't really exist years ago. Replit, Lovable, they didn't even— Lovable didn't exist 2 years ago. Replit did a total tilt, which should inspire you, was founded in 2016 as a pre-AI and now is doing coming up on $1 billion in revenue. So Because we can all build apps, because we can vibe code apps, because we can build more, we're seeing an explosion. Now it's stressful because competition is exploding. That is a blossoming of B2B and AI apps. It is a great time to be in B2B.
