SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll
About this episode
Rory O'Driscoll discusses the evolving landscape of software investment in the age of AI and the challenges faced by founders.
SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll When you've spent 30 years making money in software, "is software dead?" feels like a personal attack. Rory O'Driscoll, who has been a software investor since before most of the companies in this room existed, decided to actually answer the question. He went back through his portfolio. About 10% of pre-2022 companies were DOA the moment ChatGPT launched, solving problems that foundation models made trivially easy overnight. Another 30% are genuinely threatened and need to move fast or die. The rest are either insulated, made stronger by AI, or sitting on opportunities that didn't exist before. The answer is not that software is dead. The answer is that the standard deviation of what you're dealing with has gone way up, and most founders haven't figured out which category they're actually in. In this episode, Rory lays out the framework he and his team have been wrestling with in real time: where defensibility actually lives, what the $688B in AI CapEx vs $110B in revenue means for everyone in the room, and when AI is genuinely the new sales and marketing versus when it's just a cost…
More episodes of The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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- SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.
- SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer
- SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering
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