In a brief on‑location monologue filmed at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, the speaker contrasts software‑as‑a‑service (SaaS) businesses with hard‑tech ventures. He argues that most SaaS products are commoditized—essentially a text‑box, database, and UI—and that success in that space hinges almost entirely on having a large, aggressive sales organization that creates market perception of ubiquity and leadership. By contrast, hard‑tech companies are defined by engineering breakthroughs; once a technical problem is solved, a massive market of organizations is ready to buy the solution, but the barrier is the difficulty of invention. He frames the continuum between the two models as a choice between “easy” textbook approaches and creating something truly novel. The speaker concludes with a personal mantra: “choose the hard thing,” suggesting that tackling hard problems yields greater learning and distinctiveness in a crowded market.
Chapters
Hello, good morning. I'm out here in Seattle's Pike Place Market and you can see some stuff behind me. There's like a Ferris wheel, there is a big giant cruise ship, and I just walked by the original Starbucks. Anyways, got me thinking a little bit about software as a service companies and hard tech and SaaS. Really the secret to this whole thing, it's not really a product challenge because there's so many different types of SaaS. Products out there. It's just like enter some text into a text box, save it to a database, and then surface it again. And there's thousands, tens of thousands of these companies. Product really isn't innovation in these areas. The only thing that really matters at the end of the day is do you have a large sales team and are you beating up the market and are you getting in front of customers. And basically the whole ballgame is just are you being perceived by the buyer that you're everywhere and you're the leader in the market. And aside from that, that's pretty much it. It's just like sales team and just crush it, crush it, crush it. A lot of touchpoints. Put that in contrast to hard tech, which is like all product, right? Which is the minute you solve this problem, there are tens, hundreds, millions, hundreds of millions of people in organizations just sitting there waiting to buy what you've built. But the challenge is one of technical engineering and invention. And so as you look at the continuum between SaaS and hard tech, like, where do you fall? Are you one of those people that likes to do something easy and just use the same old textbook? Or do you want to create something completely new and, you know, make a dent in the world? Okay, that's it. Little mantra this morning. I think choose the hard thing. 'Cause you'll learn a lot more and you will, uh, end up being unique in a sea of sameness. That's it. Have a great weekend.
