Salesforce, Inc.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 📈 SaaSpocalypse is overdone for compliance-moat enterprise software E287 · 2026-08-29 ▶ 14:39

I think the horizontal platform companies, these tools that are horizontal, CRM works across many different verticals, industry verticals, and Gmail works across many industry verticals, and Slack, and so on, Excel. No one's going to go rebuild Excel... I think that's how I view the real SaaSpocalypse. It's more of a vertical SaaSpocalypse, which is software that's designed for just one vertical.

Chamath support ×3 ▲ on 📈 SaaSpocalypse is overdone for compliance-moat enterprise software E287 · 2026-08-29 ▶ 12:09

I don't know, it was pretty obvious to me in May that Salesforce specifically was meaningfully oversold... the large systems of record, what I said before and what I'll double down on now is that those guys hold an incredibly special place in the ecosystem if they do it right... that's why his net dollar retention is strong, that's why his revenue is strong, that's why he's guiding up and that's why the stocks ripped, I think was like a 43% since I said it had bottomed.

Sacks support ×3 ▲ on 📈 SaaSpocalypse is overdone for compliance-moat enterprise software E287 · 2026-08-29 ▶ 18:00

Well, this narrative of the Sass apocalypse was totally overdone. I mean, this whole Sass is dead narrative is just getting shredded today with Salesforce being up over 20 percent. You could go back and look at some of the clips I've been saying now for months. I do not believe that core systems of record like CRM are going to get ripped and replaced with something vibe-coded... Enterprises want certainty, they have compliance, they want professionally managed software that's been running and debugged for years.

Gavin Baker support ×2 ▲ on 📈 SaaSpocalypse is overdone for compliance-moat enterprise software E285 · 2026-08-14 ▶ 1:35:15

the return of a private equity bid for software really changes the investing landscape. ... the rise of open source and the increasing competitiveness of open source is a godsend for the American software industry. It is an absolute godsend.

Jason support ×1 ▲ on 📈 SaaSpocalypse is overdone for compliance-moat enterprise software E284 · 2026-08-08 ▶ 1:02:32

some of these SaaS companies with great founders who are in it for the long term and ... passionate user bases, I think they will make the jump to AI first products.

Sacks support ×2 ▲ on 📈 SaaSpocalypse is overdone for compliance-moat enterprise software E284 · 2026-08-08 ▶ 1:01:06

It's painting with too broad a brush to say that all of SaaS is going to get obliterated here... Nobody buys Microsoft because Microsoft writes the best code. They buy Microsoft because Microsoft is the rail that everything else runs on... The government is not going to rip and replace Salesforce. Not all SaaS is equal in this dimension.

Friedberg support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E208 · 2024-12-20 ▶ 1:15:46

Well, I try and encourage the teams to build stuff that better meets our needs, and then it can actually be a better solution, and it can be built in-house.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E208 · 2024-12-20 ▶ 1:13:43

there could be two things occurring here, Chamath and Aaron, at the same time, which is a deflation in legacy systems, and they'll be replaced.

I think we've already seen this, though, and it hasn't exactly played out as you're saying. And so you already have like a Zoho is this really interesting business.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E208 · 2024-12-20 ▶ 1:09:14

I'm pretty sure that the market here shrinks by an order of magnitude. And instead of fighting over 5 trillion, I think we'll be fighting over 500 billion.

Gavin Baker support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E206 · 2024-12-07 ▶ 1:21:35

But I think next year, the human language will be the dominant programming language

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E206 · 2024-12-07 ▶ 1:19:27

You don't need to buy SaaS tools. You don't need to have service providers do stuff for you

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E197 · 2024-09-27 ▶ 34:14

The AI-first ones, I think, are going to come to it with a totally different cost structure. The idea of paying for seats, and some of these seats are 5,000 per person per year.

Sacks oppose ×3 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E197 · 2024-09-27 ▶ 35:57

So, look, I think that on the whole, I agree with Benioff here that there's more net new opportunity for AI companies, whether they be startups or existing big companies like Salesforce that are trying to do AI, then there is disruption.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E197 · 2024-09-27 ▶ 24:48

The radical idea that I would put out there is I think that systems of record no longer exist because they don't need to.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E196 · 2024-09-20 ▶ 29:30

So why not just watch people use Salesforce or Workday? And those are very expensive products, thousands of dollars per user, right?

Sacks oppose ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E196 · 2024-09-20 ▶ 30:27

I saw the Clarnas story where they said they were going to rip out Salesforce and Workday because they were able to write their own bespoke code using AI. I mean, I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical of that story for a couple of reasons.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E196 · 2024-09-20 ▶ 27:54

And then you run that against that counterfactual, against Workday or Salesforce. And then at some point, you're like, it's the same. And you just turn it off. And you're saving yourself tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Friedberg oppose ×2 ▲ on 📈 Founder-CEO public companies outperform any index E195 · 2024-09-06 ▶ 20:19

there are some really great leaders that have run organizations that are already scaled and then taken them to an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude beyond where they were when they step in.

Sacks support ×2 ▲ on 📈 Founder-CEO public companies outperform any index E195 · 2024-09-06 ▶ 17:41

people figured out that the best-performing companies are indeed the founder-led companies, the ones that keep the founder engaged for a long period of time. They tend to build the most value.

Chamath reversal ×3 ▲ on 📈 Founder-CEO public companies outperform any index E195 · 2024-09-06 ▶ 10:42

These are all just like a handful of examples of people that have just tacked on collectively trillions of dollars of market cap, way more than all founders added together in most companies, but for one or two.

Sacks support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 The software recession is over — net new ARR re-accelerates E189 · 2024-07-26 ▶ 7:49

Well, all the cloud service providers are doing extremely well. I mean, cloud is still the future of software, and the cloud service providers are still growing really strongly.

Friedberg support ×2 ▼ on 🤖 Software without real lock-in loses its pricing power to AI-built clones E185 · 2024-06-29 ▶ 1:12:48

What's the monopolistic lock-in? The amazing thing about SaaS is that there's no switching cost.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Microsoft's bundle playbook gets an antitrust remedy E185 · 2024-06-29 ▶ 1:16:59

if left unchecked, you will see people abuse this. It is not a big ass to have a la carte pricing and that will make the playing field much, much more competitive.

Friedberg oppose ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Microsoft's bundle playbook gets an antitrust remedy E185 · 2024-06-29 ▶ 1:11:11

I don't buy the antitrust arguments on a lot of these cases. I don't think that you're keeping competitive solutions in the market if the benefit of the lower cost product is actually there for the consumer, the customer.