Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…I get it now. There you go. And we'll link to it. It's really funny to watch. I wish I understood the German. I want to come back to this idea of malleable software from a perspective of SaaS and the SaaS apocalypse. There's all this talk about, we will not need SaaS tools any longer. We will build all our own tools. We don't need Salesforce. Imagine some people are like, "We don't need Notion. I'm going to build my own Notion." You have a hot take there. Talk about what you think is going to happen. If you just think about what SaaS ... The problem is the moment you have an acronym, it means a lot of very specific things. And if you're going to say, "Hey, is this type of SaaS that we've built in the 2010s just as relevant as it was in the 2010s?" The answer would be, it would be silly to say, "No, nothing's going to change. It'll be the same." Because I think you can say a lot of SaaS in the 2010s was a very, very fancy form around a spreadsheet or something more generic. And the thing it did is it just guided people in the right direction to fill out that form, as in it is less malleable than a spreadsheet and that is the value. The as a service part is I think the thing that actually matters, which is I don't think most people actually want to maintain the full stack of software. And so whenever I see someone and I am someone here say, "Oh, I just rebuilt this piece of software." I've tried rebuilding Notion in a weekend for myself just to push at the edges of frustrating things. I don't think people want that. I think, for the most part, it's nice if you can just ... People don't want to go hunting either. They just want to go to Costco and have the steak in a styrofoam packaging and pretend that it wasn't hunting or an animal in the first place. I think with software, Bret Taylor says this too, software is like a garden, you need to tend to it. And the thing you pay for as a service is the maintenance and a bunch of specialists thinking really hard about a problem. And so I don't think that's going away. What I would probably say is that tools will become more general. I mean, I'm obviously biased. I work at Notion. I like Notion and I consider Notion to be fairly malleable, not enough. I think it should become more malleable. We internally joked, Joanna Stern, a journalist, recently tweeted something along the lines of, "Oh, thanks to Notion AI, I finally understand and use Notion." I don't know what that says about Notion. And to me, this is a great example of Notion wasn't SaaS in the traditional way. It's kind of hard to get started, but because of AI now, people can ... they have a tutor essentially and can build more things. And so I suspect that software will go more back into the '90s of general tools, WordProcessor, spreadsheet, FileMaker Pro, that kind of thing, but those will still be as a service. And then you'll still have specialized tools around security and so on of just people who go the extra mile to really solve a user problem. So I think to some degree the SaaS apocalypse is greatly exaggerated. At the same time, are things going to stay the same? Of course not. Why would they?…

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