Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

It's hard to overstate the significance of a collapse of growth in the SaaS market, as is it hard to overstate how dangerous generative AI is to its fortunes. While these companies had costs before, generative AI is multitudes higher than regular cloud compute costs, meaning that any new revenue growth from this software will be burdened by leveraging an increasingly-expensive solution to a problem that most of them have trouble describing.

And if the revenue never arrives, they'll be faced with the same problem as the rest of the tech industry — that they've run out of ideas to generate growth.

At that point, they'll have to reckon with the fact that there are too many software companies incapable of solving any problem other than "how do we find a new way to charge customers for something?"

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