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Anish Acharya

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119
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2026-02-12
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2026-02-12
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  1. “I mean, when you think about a firm that's organized the way we are, which is we actually do stuff for our companies, it becomes very difficult to invest indirectly competing companies because then you've got the same resources, the same sort of Fortune 500 buyer, the same engineer that both companies want to hire. And I just like, I don't think we can run our business by investing in directly competing companies. Now, with that said, I think we're in a part of the market where companies are diverging very rapidly. So even companies that appear to be directly competing today tend to be not competing in 12 months, 18 months.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I don't think it looks like Uber and Lyft, right? I think Uber and Lyft are, to my mind, the most extreme examples of pure substitutes. And a lot of the sort of price has been computed away. You look at cloud, you sort of have this oligopoly, where they all actually have pretty reasonable margins, right? And, you know, you can squint and say, of course, they have their specializations, but they're roughly substitutes, and yet they've all done well. I think the foundation model companies look a little bit like that. And I think in the apps layer, you're just going to have people that want to consume the code they generate through a rich IDE and those that want to be closer to the metal. And that's probably closer to AWS, Google Cloud than it is Uberlyft.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I think the thing that we are underappreciating is that we assume efficiency is increasing, but ambition and number of customers is staying fixed. And I think this is one of the incorrect assumptions that keeps getting made around AI. It's like, well, what are all the people going to do? Where will all the jobs be? You know, it's like our ability to be ambitious for wanting more things always grows so much faster than our means. And in the same way, if you look at software, the desire and demand for software, both to make it and to consume it, is dramatically more than the supply that we have today. And I think there is a developer and developer adjacent archetype for whom cursor is going to be perfect, codex as an app, codecs as a CLI, cloud code, like all of these products are going to find market fit and all grow. And if you look at any of the other markets like Creative Tools, they're going to specialize and fragment in their own directions.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, I think we massively overestimated the durability of revenue of AI companies more broadly as well. I think there's a chance that Curser loses half of their revenue this year with the cannibalization of them by Claw Code. I don't know anyone who's not moved to Claw Code. When I hear that someone's still on cursor, I'm like, wow.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “If you're somebody who's working as a creative at a big company, sometimes you're doing graphic design and sometimes you're just doing beautiful photography for print ads, you want to actually have access to both. And to do that, you use an apps company.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Arguably is where a lot of the value is they are all specialists. So because you live in this world of multi model, where for some use cases are substitutes, for some use cases they're actually specialists, there's a lot of value in having an aggregation layer, and that is the apps company. So let me tell you two categories specifically. One is coding. I think that if you actually look at coding, you might know that Gemini is great for front end. Codex is great for back end, right? If you're vibe coding your project, you probably want to use both and you don't want to switch between two CLIs all the time. It's just a pain. So being able to use cursor as a single way to orchestrate all the models is valuable. Similarly for creative tools, right? We're seeing this specialization, fragmentation specialization, mid-journey in Kreo with their Creo 1 model. These are the most aesthetically opinionated models, right? They create this incredible, beautiful imagery. Conversely, if you look at Ideogram, Ideogram is often used by graphic designers. It is intentionally not opinionated from an aesthetic perspective.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I don't know if it'll create more value, but I think that it is under discussed how much value it's going to create, right? If you think of what the models are. So if we lived in a world and we were actually thinking about this a lot in 2022 and early 2023, which is if you had a single foundation model company, which at the time was Open AI, which was a whole generation ahead, then they essentially were this unique supplier to everybody downstream in the innovation ecosystem. And they could do what you would do if you, for example, controlled the Beatles and you're the only record label that had the Beatles, like it's like, do you want the Beatles or not? You can charge 99% of your customers gross margin, and you do. And you actually tend to charge 100 or 110%. So that actually was a big risk to the ecosystem. What has instead happened is we have all these foundation model providers. They're all innovating roughly in lockstep. 80% of what they do, I think that they're actually substitutes for. And then there's the open source models, which also do the same things. And then in the 20%, which”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “What you instead see is the native categories that did not exist before the product cycle being owned by startups. So I think that's a little bit of what we're going to see. If you said something like software movies or AI movie making or sort of AI assisted movies, that's just not a category in which there is an incumbent. And I'm betting that a native company will actually win that. It probably won't be Adobe. Will Adobe make a better sort of Photoshop and Illustrator than ever before? Probably, right?”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, if history is any guide, and to reference Alex, he would say that it often is those who have actually studied history tend to do better than those who have not. And what I would say is that when you have this product cycle and you have a capable incumbent, what happens is they usually make their product better for their existing categories. So Microsoft will make a better WordProcessor than they've ever made. Google will make a better search engine than they've ever made. And we're actually starting to see that some of that anyway.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Is the cost of transitioning from one SaaS provider to another going dramatically down? So systems integration. If you and Alex said this funny thing, and I know that you laughed and I laughed too, which is that like some companies have hostages, not customers. Yeah, I love this statement. I love it too. And if you actually have an SAP system, you are a hostage of SAP and they need to do nothing after they win you as a customer except the bare minimum. If you want to switch to Oracle, oh my God, that's like a multi-year high risk. It's probably going to fail and you're probably going to get fired. It doesn't happen. But now with coding agents, the complexity of transitioning from SAP to Oracle is”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Price is a measure of product market fit, right? And if you have enormous competitive pressure, you are not raising prices. You're typically cutting prices. So I think one, you've got this sort of this dissonant fact that prices are going up. Two, if you look at the incumbents today, like ServiceNow is not IBM. They're a highly capable incumbent. They just went public and they raised guidance. So I think it's very easy to look at these things and say incumbents, incumbents, incumbents. Like again, like they're not seers. They're very, very capable and I think they actually have a right to win and deploy technology in the context of these workflows. Now, will there be disruption? Of course, we've talked a bunch about, you know, companies that can now, that were once priced on seats, which are now going to be priced on outcomes and like that is going to be a big drag. But I think for the majority of SaaS, it has so little upside in being rewritten and vibe-coded and so much downside. Why would you do it? Now, an interesting topic that's not discussed.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, I don't know if that's what we're seeing across the board. Like, I looked at the data this morning, and if you look at SaaS public market SaaS companies, 75% have raised prices since ChatGPT was released. 75%. And they've raised prices meaningfully. The mean is 8 to 12%, but there's a large group that have raised it 25% or more”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think software is completely oversold. I think it's a silly story. I heard it called SaaS Apocalypse today. It's very funny. Bloomberg is trying to get that to stick. Look, if you look at Saas Bend today, if you look at IT spend overall, it's 8 to 12 percent of enterprise spend. So even if you vibe coded your ERP and your payroll with all of the kind of risks and dangers that that entails, you're going to save eight to 12%. You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM? You're going to take it and use it to extend your core advantage as a business or you're going to take it to optimize the other 90% that you're not spending on software today. So I just think that, of course, there will be secular losers. There are like specific business models that are now going to be disadvantaged. But I think the general story that we're going to vibe code everything is flat wrong and the whole market is oversold software.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I mean, three to five billion is an extraordinary outcome, don't get me wrong. So, in no way, no way am I like minimizing that. And look, I do think that those types of venture outcomes stack to create really meaningful funds. So this is not about working backwards from venture economics, but the biggest companies in the world today are trillion dollar companies. If you want to build a trillion dollar company, if that's your intention, you've sort of got to start with a set of assumptions that can lead to that. If your intention is to build an extraordinary enterprise and you build a $3 to $5 billion enterprise, like you are one of the few people in the world.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You said the word sufficient there. Yes, you can build a sufficient size business, say, in the UK, three to five billion dollar business, say, as an example. Respectfully, when we look at companies being created today, three to five billion dollars just doesn't seem like it's interesting enough. Has the world of venture changed so significantly on what is sufficient for a venture outcome”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Tel Aviv. I think Tel Aviv, you can be incredibly ambitious and uncompromising on that ambition and have a really, really good reason to be there. I think the other nice thing about the Tel Aviv ecosystem is that the country's so small, it's 10 million people, that you can't possibly fool yourself into thinking that the domestic market is going to be big enough for whatever you're doing. So you immediately go outside. Whereas if you're in London, there's 60 million people here, okay? And you might say, well, that's actually a lot of people. And you know what? There are parts of the market like FinTech where the LTVs are so high that perhaps 60 million is sufficient. But for most mass market products, it's just not sufficient. And if you end up starting focused on the domestic market, it's often hard to actually move on to a bigger market. So there are all of these reasons that it's just not that it can't be done and there are incredible counter examples like 11, but I do think that it is just that much easier in SF and that's why that's where I focus.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Disagree with you. I wish it was true. I simply wish it was true, and I want it to be true, and maybe it will be true that it will be, you know, the whole thing that we always love to say to ourselves around sort of talent and opportunity, not being talent is equally distributed opportunity. It's not. The truth is that cities are the original network effect. And for technology, there is a network effect for builders in SF. And for this moment in technology, right, where so many of the secrets are these sort of things whispered down shadowy hallways, the benefit of being an SF is enormous. There's also, we just talked about this, there's a selection bias question. Do you care enough to make it happen in SF? You can make it happen anywhere in New York, London, Toronto, Tel Aviv, you name it, but there's something different about saying I'm going to give everything else up and be singular in my focus and move everything to SF to make it happen.”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Diving right in. We were just chatting now, and I was saying, I think it's better to build in London than in SF or in other places other than SF. Talent is cheaper. It retains for longer. You don't have the promiscuity of people jumping from role to role. And you've built a company now, both in Canada and in SF. How do you reflect on what I just said?”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Have this innovation bazooka with these models, why would you point it at me building payroll or ERP or CRM? The general story that we're going to vibe code everything is flat wrong and the whole market is oversold software. Now an interesting topic that's not discussed is the cost of transitioning from one SaaS provider to another going dramatically down. So systems integration. I don't think we're allowed to believe in luck, Adam Andreessen. We have to see 100% of the deals in our domain and that we win 100% of the deals that we go after”

    2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source