SaaS is Dead — Software Needs to Actually Create Value

A super talented friend of mine just decided it was time to move on from his job. When looking around for what he wanted to do next, he felt pretty disillusioned. So many tech companies say things like they are making the world a better place or disrupting… something. In reality, they just extract margin dollars from real companies. In exchange, they usually save them time or create convenience. For example, Airspace provides genuine value to the world by connecting drivers, airlines, and logistics partners into a supply chain that moves things faster than ever. This makes things like organ transplants and clinical trials safer.

The value: A faster and safer supply chain for everyone.

However, in order to do that, we use dozens of different services that really just extract dollars from our margin in exchange for convenience. For instance, we use Bill.com and Netsuite just to make tracking different payments easier. Those are only software services. They don’t come with people to help actually do the work, expert opinions, or even neural nets that learn so they increase value over time. They just… marshal data from one place to another. We obviously pay for them so they are useful, but in 2026, when software can be produced faster than ever, the main reason we use them is because we have so much other software we want to write. We just haven’t gotten around to replacing them yet and would rather not do all of that in Excel.

So many other SaaS applications are just this. I always think of Superhuman when I think of lazy SaaS software. I would absolutely pay (and do pay) for an email solution. Writing an email server that handles both spam and deliverability is soooooo hard. Sender reputations, DMARC, blacklists, etc all make creating a great email solution very complicated — which is why people happily trade their own privacy for Gmail, which just works.

Instead, Superhuman decided to build itself on top of the hard thing that someone else made and marketed a dream instead. No spam filter. No MX records. No storage. No abuse handling. No deliverability. Nothing. They simply sold the vision that people would be more effective with Superhuman on top of Gmail — and they did an amazing job. In August 2021, they raised a Series C round and were valued at $825M on just $35M in annual recurring revenue¹ — that’s a 23.5x revenue multiple. For a really thin product that was just a UI layer on top of Gmail.

I cannot imagine a $825M valuation for that same product today. Building an inbox zero-inspired email client on top of Gmail? That’s a weekend project for Claude. Maybe even an afternoon!

How many other companies fit in this bucket? Dozens, probably hundreds. But that number is shrinking every single day as AI tools make it trivial to build thin wrappers on top of existing infrastructure. The companies that simply marshaled data between systems without actually creating value are evaporating — and good riddance!

So when you’re thinking about starting your next thing or hunting for your next gig, find something that actually creates value instead of extracts margin. Build the hard thing that solves a real problem. Because that is all that is left for us humans to do anyway!

Check out Valuable Software in the Age of AI if you’re interested in what software I think actually is valuable in the age of AI.