SaaS Challengers

Everyone's talking about how AI coding means the end of SAS. Investors have wiped billions off software company market caps. Well, that might be bad news for incumbents, but it's good news for startups. If the incumbents really are this vulnerable, you should go build a challenger. AI has collapsed the cost of producing software by 100x or more, and that changes everything. The moat that once protected legacy SAS, millions of lines of code built over decades, is gone. There's a spectrum of ways to attack this. The most obvious is to clone an existing product and sell it for onetenth the price. But you can go much further. You could build a product that's AI native from the ground up. You could take 10 SAS point solutions and bundle them into a single suite. You could build an open-source replacement for a product and give it away, then monetize through services and hosting. Most people drawn to this idea start with simple targets like product management tools. I'd encourage you to think bigger. Go after the products that seem invulnerable. chip design software, ERPs, industrial control systems, supply chain management, the giant 10 million line code bases that have been untouchable for decades. The last generation of great software companies was built by replacing on-prem software with cloud. The next generation will be built by replacing legacy SAS with AI native software.