{"id":474356,"date":"2026-02-12T04:51:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T04:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/474356\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T04:51:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T04:51:07","slug":"saaspocalypse-now-the-software-inferno-will-birth-an-intelligence-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/474356\/","title":{"rendered":"SaaSpocalypse Now: The software inferno will birth an intelligence era"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll be honest: being a SaaS CEO is one of the loneliest jobs I\u2019ve ever had. And I say that having worked in advertising, which wasn\u2019t exactly a warm hug in the early days (although it could be a lot of fun).<\/p>\n

I\u2019m venture-funded, running a company that\u2019s growing fast, and I\u2019m doing this for the first time. There\u2019s no manual for me to read. There are an extraordinary number of things I don\u2019t know \u2014 things that conventional CEOs probably handle before their second coffee. The hiring decisions (which I often get wrong), the board dynamics, the capital strategy, the product calls. I\u2019m figuring it out in real time, and mostly in the dark.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s lonely. Almost none of my peers my age are running their own companies. The few who are \u2014 other founders \u2014 are obsessively lost in their own businesses. We occasionally surface to swap war stories, but for the most part, we\u2019re all drowning in our own private oceans.<\/p>\n

The capital paradox<\/p>\n

The private capital markets are the lifeblood of companies like ours. But there\u2019s a tension that nobody talks about: every time you raise capital, to some degree, it\u2019s because your business model hasn\u2019t yet achieved the breakout you need.<\/p>\n

ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n

No entrepreneur wants to raise capital. We need to because we need to keep trying to solve the problem \u2014 and we need capital to back us while we solve it. But every raise, despite the Linkedin celebration posts and the champagne emojis, is really an admission: we haven\u2019t yet solved the problem we set out to solve in a sustainable way.<\/p>\n

I think the market knows this. It just doesn\u2019t say it out loud.<\/p>\n

The collapse<\/p>\n

So when SaaS multiples collapse \u2014 and they have, brutally \u2014 you have to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions. What does this actually mean for the economics of our business? Because to some degree, the lifeblood of any venture-funded company is the private capital markets. And those markets are dictated by the public ones. When public multiples crater, the whole ecosystem feels it.<\/p>\n

Last week, traders were literally saying \u201cget me out.\u201d The S&P North American Software Index dropped 15% in January alone \u2014 its worst monthly decline since October 2008. Bloomberg coined the term<\/a> SaaSpocalypse. That\u2019s not hyperbole. That\u2019s the mainstream financial press.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a scary time. I won\u2019t pretend otherwise. Although, honestly, I think the market was massively overheated anyway.<\/p>\n

Why it happened\"\"<\/p>\n

The author Henry Innis<\/p>\n

Two things drove this, and neither should surprise anyone who\u2019s been paying attention.<\/p>\n

First, interest rates have stayed too low relative to inflation for too long. The whole market was running hot. SaaS wasn\u2019t immune to that \u2014 if anything, it was the poster child.<\/p>\n

Second \u2014 and this is the one that really matters \u2014 AI is demonstrating that the current paradigm of designed screens stitched together is an increasingly defenceless moat.<\/p>\n

Think about what most enterprise software actually is. It\u2019s a complex set of UI screens, carefully designed and painstakingly maintained, that guide a user through a workflow. The moat used to be the sheer engineering effort required to build and maintain all of that. It was expensive to write all of that code. It was expensive to hire all of those people. It was expensive to keep it all working.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not true anymore.<\/p>\n

Stitching screens together is easy now. A prompt can do in minutes what used to take a team months. And that makes the economics of most SaaS businesses suddenly look very poor. Enterprises are unlikely to keep paying millions of dollars for UI screens that can be generated in a conversation.<\/p>\n

One of my earliest hypotheses at Mutinex has been that we must become a system of action \u2014 not just a system of screens \u2014 within a matter of years. A system of integration, a system of intelligence, a platform that doesn\u2019t just display data but knows what to do with it. If we were just building screens, I\u2019d be terrified right now. We\u2019re not, but I\u2019d be lying if I said every market shift like this doesn\u2019t induce waves of anxiety that are hard to describe.<\/p>\n

SaaS isn\u2019t dead \u2026 but it is evolving<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where I think the narrative gets lazy. The hot take is \u201cSaaS is dead.\u201d It makes a great headline. It\u2019s also wrong.<\/p>\n

The content industry gives us a useful analogy. Yes, magazines (basically) died. That\u2019s the easy version. But content didn\u2019t die \u2014 it evolved. And employment evolved with it. At the peak, magazines employed<\/a> roughly 180,000 people. In 2025, there were 1.5m working full-time<\/a> as digital creators. That\u2019s not a dying industry. That\u2019s an industry that exploded in a direction nobody predicted.<\/p>\n

I think the same thing is about to happen to software.<\/p>\n

Software won\u2019t become less ubiquitous. If anything, it\u2019ll become dramatically more so. But the form it takes is going to change radically.<\/p>\n

What any SaaS CEO already knows<\/p>\n

A few things are obvious to anyone running one of these businesses:<\/p>\n

SaaS is rarely standstill. It\u2019s easy to characterise as \u201cbuy X subscription.\u201d But the reality is that most SaaS platforms are continually rebuilding themselves \u2014 adopting new technologies, shifting their architecture, evolving who they are. The ones that survive are the ones that change. The ones that don\u2019t are the ones you\u2019ve forgotten about.<\/p>\n

The skillsets we hire are going to shift dramatically. I think it\u2019s really unlikely that the current hiring profiles that have dictated SaaS for years will continue \u2014 particularly in engineering. Engineering may be going the way of the print journalist. Laptops made it easy to write. AI makes it easy to code. The great ones will be venerated. The mean won\u2019t be.<\/p>\n

From SaaS to IaaS<\/p>\n

So what does all of this mean for those of us actually running these businesses?<\/p>\n

I think the old Andreessen line \u2014 \u201csoftware is eating the world\u201d \u2014 is about to accelerate in ways even he didn\u2019t anticipate. But software is going to move from building and stitching together screens to platforms with deep intelligence and real connections to data. Platforms that are genuine systems of record \u2014 that generate data, log actions, and recommend courses of action \u2014 are the ones that will increasingly win.<\/p>\n

The per-seat model breaks when AI agents do the work of ten people. The screen-stitching model breaks when a prompt replaces your product. What doesn\u2019t break is owning the intelligence layer: the data, the models, the decisions.<\/p>\n

To my mind, it\u2019s on us as SaaS businesses to become something new. Not Software as a Service. Intelligence as a Service.<\/p>\n

SaaS 1.0 was really Screens as a Service. We built interfaces. We charged for access. It worked.<\/p>\n

SaaS 2.0 \u2014 call it IaaS \u2014 is about creating intelligent systems that can think and act on a human\u2019s behalf. Systems that don\u2019t just show you a dashboard, but tell you what the dashboard means and what to do about it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where things are going. And for those of us who\u2019ve been building towards that, this isn\u2019t the SaaSpocalypse. It\u2019s the starting gun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ll be honest: being a SaaS CEO is one of the loneliest jobs I\u2019ve ever had. And I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,241861,125840,8257,105],"class_list":["post-474356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-henry-innis","tag-mutinex","tag-saas","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}