Now that this guy is selling AI, surprise, surprise, its going to revolution everything else...But its misleadingly written as "we" are cooked.
Its another ad, no?
10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#22It’s worth asking: what do Wall Street traders know about building software companies? Almost nothing. Anyone who has attempted to start a startup knows that the software is always the easy part. Building the business is hard. The notion that we’re going to undo 100K+ years of specialization just so that companies can run mediocre, buggy versions of SaaS tools just to save a few bucks is crazy to me.
SaaS stocks are currently the buying opportunity of a lifetime.
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#23> The S&P 500 Software & Services Index, 140 companies, fell 20% year to date. The overall index has been pretty well flat. What sectors gained? And surely there aren't 140 "software and services" companies in the top 500 by market cap?
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Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#24It’s worth asking: what do Wall Street traders know about building software companies? Almost nothing. Anyone who has attempted to start a startup knows that the software is always the easy part. Building the business is hard. The notion that we’re going to undo 100K+ years of specialization just so that companies can run mediocre, buggy versions of SaaS tools just to save a few bucks is crazy to me. SaaS stocks are…
Also, has nobody thought about operations? I pay SaaS companies so I don't need to think about operations. It is insane to me to think that people think a restaurant company is going to suddenly want to get into managing the operations of its vibe coded accounting app. Absolutely not.
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#25> Now consider what the same analyst does with an LLM agent: "Show me all software companies with over $1B market cap, P/E under 30, and revenue growing over 20% year over year. Build a DCF model for the top 5. Run sensitivity analysis on discount rate and terminal growth." While I think LLMs can improve the interface and help users learn/generate domain specific languages, I don’t see how a professional can trust an…
Yes, I balked at this point as well. Moreover, how do you accommodate new analysis concepts? What are you training the model on?
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#26Was this generated by AI? Anyway, I dispute that there's "zero switching" costs to go from proprietary keyboard shortcuts to english sentences as the interface. In the bloomberg example, the shortcuts are precise. LLM's responses are not always what you want. Imagine being a vim or emacs user and have those replaced by something you have to type entire sentences for functionality. "Public Data Access → Commoditized"…
> Imagine being a vim or emacs user and have those replaced by something you have to type entire sentences for functionality.
This has already happened for a non-negligible amount of people on this site. I still use magit to prepare commits and review diffs. Everything else is English and Claude code or opencode.
Ironically, part of the reason I like emacs and formerly liked vim was because it reduced the amount of time my hands had to leave the keyboard. I simply look where I want to type, press the chord to jump with avy, and then begin typing. New tools are spiritually aligned with this goal. I look at the screen, I think about what I don’t like, and now instead of translating the criticism into code changes, I just stream my thoughts directly into the tool.
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#27It’s worth asking: what do Wall Street traders know about building software companies? Almost nothing. Anyone who has attempted to start a startup knows that the software is always the easy part. Building the business is hard. The notion that we’re going to undo 100K+ years of specialization just so that companies can run mediocre, buggy versions of SaaS tools just to save a few bucks is crazy to me. SaaS stocks are…
Also, has nobody thought about operations? I pay SaaS companies so I don't need to think about operations. It is insane to me to think that people think a restaurant company is going to suddenly want to get into managing the operations of its vibe coded accounting app. Absolutely not.
Yes, I’m very aligned with “minimal dependencies, live off the land, roll your own” to avoid lock-in and vendor bullshit. Shit I’d rather rent baremetal from Hetzner than VPS from EC2/GCP/etc if I have enough workload to justify it.
But for my startup I still use a ton of SaaS services for things that I could probably do just fine myself. (Clerk/StackAuth, Supabase/PlanetScale, Cloudflare STUN/TURN, Clickhouse, Vercel, Calendly, Google Workspace, ngrok, Tailscale).
Spiritually, I hate using these. Any one of these would be dead-simple to replace. But my time is genuinely better spent on my startup’s particular value-add. Maybe I’ll replace these some day when we can hire someone to manage internal replacement services - some of which are as easy as “a postgres database” or “wireguard on some VPS instances”. But it’s just not worth my time right now when I’m focused on building revenue.
Even if they all cost $300/mo in total, and we’re bootstrapped, it’s a lot easier to cut back on UberEats or shiny nerdy toys than it is to replace all of these SaaS offerings. I recognize there’s a lot of ”I don’t know what I don’t know” and I’m liable to subtly misconfigure something in a potentially disastrous way.
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#28My experience is that in most of small companies, the revenue extraction cycle from big SaaS suites has gone far enough that people are moving to self-hosted (or rather colocated with a local-ish provider that installs and provides unofficial support) software, like they used to do before the great plague.
Considering how Zipf's law works, there might be a huge discrepancy coming on as we see the products deteriorating from all the AI and H1B spaghetti code to the point where LibreOffice appears quite competent by comparison. Most of the people I worked with just want to sell lamps or furniture or trumpets or whatever they do, and the inventions of modern SaaS make this a lot harder to do. Once enough small businesses stop paying their 5-user subscriptions, I think this whole thing will pivot heavily into the favor of those that just maintained their product well and didn't ensloppify it in the mantime.
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#29> The S&P 500 Software & Services Index, 140 companies, fell 20% year to date. The overall index has been pretty well flat. What sectors gained? And surely there aren't 140 "software and services" companies in the top 500 by market cap?
> The overall index has been pretty well flat. What sectors gained?
Data centers and AI.
The current US economy is flat except for AI and data centers.[1]
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-...
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#30Getting really sick and tired of the AI doomerism.
I’m sick and tired of people forgetting that with every field, the first 95% is easy, the last 5% is almost insurmountably hard and what people get paid for. Yelling “it’s 95% there, we’re so cooked” when anyone can be 95% there for any field since Google was invented doesn’t show much.
That may be true, but it can mean layoffs of 95% of the employees.