AI, Ashby Engineering, and the future

I believe not. It shows they dont truly understand the nuance of what they are talking about.

This (correct) thesis should illicit an interesting question about the future of SaaS markets: What happens to the SaaS markets when the cost of code approaches zero?

Coincidentally, the company that authored this post is a perfect case study.

Few people truly grasp how hard bringing a software product to market is. The feature density required to even begin selling your product often requires more human capital than early stage investors are willing to underwrite. Some founders have the background to command those terms, but most have to wedge into a market with some very small insight.

I was at a dinner with the CEO of Greenhouse in 2021 and vividly recall him explaining just how deep the feature set of a new ATS needs to be to even enter the consideration set of a buyer.

One serendipitous way companies could enter these markets is by being founded in one market, and pivoting into another. Ashby didn't start as an ATS. They were originally targeting a mid-market ERP (a hot thesis at the time). Ashby is a prime example of a company that likely could not have entered their current market because of the sheer engineering resources required to break through (and kudos to them for doing it!)

But as the cost of code approaches zero, the deterrents of entering the market also drop to zero. The next Ashby could just pursue ATS from day one. In a sense, this is the entire story of humanity and especially software (consider the cost of building an ATS in 2012 when Lever was founded vs the cost Ashby faced in 2019).

But the slope of this change is unlike anything before it.

ATS, like many other markets, has a handful of big players and a long tail of smaller offerings. No matter how many long tail providers there are, the economics of entering a market suppressed that number compared to what can and will exist tomorrow. The cost of building an ATS a decade ago was literally orders of magnitude more than it is today.

In 2016 I heard a A16Z partner describe a future where every software market would have offerings in virtually every little niche one could imagine. Years before the LLM renaissance, this sounded insane. How could the market afford to build and sustain each offering?

I don't think companies are going to start building their ATS in house, but I do believe that cost of producing code is approaching to zero, and that means hundreds or even thousands of offerings will exist in every shape, way and form we can imagine.

"We must think more" - unless your industry wakes the hell up and standardizes its work. In that case you don't have to think more, because you have reliable standards that remove the need to think. I hope I'm not dead before the industry finally grows up.