Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…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? I completely agree. I think people think about just the, okay, I'll create something that's pretty cool and close and then they don't think about exactly as you described. I have to maintain this thing forever and I have to keep adding features, taking people's feedback. One of the funniest things that I see again and again, I just had the head of product for Claude Code on the podcast, Cat Wu, and she talks about how Slack is basically the OS for Anthropic. Everything runs through Slack. And you think of all companies that would just like, "We'll just build our own. What are we doing with Slack?" No, they're using Slack like crazy. And I think that's just one example of nobody wants to rebuild a tool like Slack and Workday, I think is another example. I don't know. I think it's maybe even more unique in the US, but one of the great things about the US is actually specialization. It's that I get to spend dollars on something like Notion because it's not that expensive compared to me building it and then why would I waste my time? I want to do other things with my life. So I don't know, that's not going to go away.…

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