The End of SaaS: the Next startup You Join Should Be a Service Company

For two decades, SaaS was the dominant model for software startups: build a horizontal product, sell it by the seat, scale with digital distribution. But the world is shifting. AI is eroding traditional moats — what used to require years of engineering effort can now be delivered by tiny teams. Meanwhile, the biggest disruptions are happening not in horizontal tools, but in full-stack service businesses: neobanks, insurers, law firms, and even real-estate companies are building software around services, not the other way around. In this talk, I’ll argue that the next great startups will look more like service companies than pure software ones. We'll explore how agentic AI changes the economics of service delivery, why usage-based models beat seat-based ones, and what that means for engineers thinking about their next role. This is a talk about shifting landscapes — no code, just strategy and ideas — but the implications are deeply technical.

Speakers