Fascinating that Figma's IPO has private SaaS investors licking their chops (and looking through their portfolio wondering what to list this fall), meanwhile SaaS stocks overall (WCLD) were down 3% today.

Not remotely surprsingly that Figma has a top 15 Grindscore amongst all venture backed companies with >100 Glassdoor reviews. Grindscore = % of employees "Positive Business Outlook" / "Work Life Balance." Low WLB + employees who believe in the company = success.

People have asked about our culture and recent employee communications. Cognition has an extreme performance culture, and we’re upfront about this in hiring so there are no surprises later. We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into

This is true except in use cases where demand for intelligence is relatively elastic (coding, adversarial problems like stock trading, etc.). In those use cases, still lots of app-layer value but access to models at reasonable prices is a big competitive edge.

The #1 issue I see scaled SaaS companies having as they try to benefit from AI is a framework mismatch. SaaS companies are used to being (and are perceived as) tools. Users bring context, data from other apps, motivation, etc. and use them to get work done. AI-native

Not sure how much this really matters outside of certain use-cases. OpenAI is almost definitely right to focus on usability and marketing. Once Google search was established as the verb, it didn't matter if Bing "tested better." The war was over as long as they were close.

I completely disagree with this. IMO it is a classic generalist take that comes out in periods of pervasive pessimism. The worst-case scenario for software is that it misses the boat on AI monetization. We're arguably trending there now, and it's not good for the sector. But

Amazing how investors can forget the implications of investing at peak hype. Consider SaaS in 2020-2022. I took the Wing VC enterprise tech 30 from 2020, filtered down to the 23 companies that achieved unicorn valuations, tracked their peak valuation and compared to their

The handwringing around GPT-4o disappearing shouldn't be so surprising. It is hardly unprecedented for people to seek emotional solace via technology. See: novels, TV shows, etc. Have you ever visited the subreddit of a popular TV show after its cancellation was announced?

Happy/sad to report that GPT-5 still can't do basic cap table math.

This piece by ethan ding 📊 is great. In domains where demand for intelligence is elastic, pricing models that worked for tools (i.e. flat per user pricing) could be fraught for a very long time. ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscript…

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A win for survey data $SNOW