Alright, let’s talk AI.
This week we’re calling out the Founding AE pitch that sounds great until you’re living it. Why SaaS isn’t dead but definitely down bad. And how selling AI with the same tired playbook from 2015 is a great way to lose deals fast.
Let’s get into it.
No, But Seriously…
The Founding AE Scam
I keep coming back to this. Is being a founding AE the fastest career accelerator in tech or the most glorified trap we keep pretending is an opportunity?
Because every time I see one of these job listings, the honesty percentage is near zero.
Here is what you actually walk into:
A base salary that makes you question your life choices
Pipeline targets written by someone who has never sold anything
Equity that would not cover lunch
A VP workload without the VP paycheck
No resources and no sympathy
The privilege of saying you built something right before someone gets hired over you
But if we put that aside, when done right this role can change your career. It is how you jump from seller to leader fast.
Because you are not just closing deals, you are building the system. And that system can turn into money, equity, and a chance to lead what you built.
That is the real truth. Done right, it is a launchpad. Done wrong, it is startup purgatory with equity shaped participation trophies.
Being a founding AE is not about getting in early. It is about staying long enough to make it work and having founders who actually honor that.
The Drop
SaaS Hit Its Limit
SaaS isn’t slowing down, it’s getting eaten alive. Bit by bit. Bite by bite. And anyone pretending otherwise is lying to themselves to feel better. Dave Elkington said it perfectly in his post this week.
Look at the Aventis Advisors chart. That isn’t a trend line, it’s a controlled demolition.
We went from 36 percent growth to 12 percent. Almost a decade of down and to the right. Forecasts say 11 percent and falling. That’s not “normalizing,” that’s an industry aging out of its own relevance.
SaaS is starting to look like utilities and pipelines, stable and necessary, but the days of explosive upside are gone. The story shifted. The money shifted. The value shifted.
Because AI is cannibalizing the very work SaaS used to monetize. And it’s doing it faster than most founders can rewrite their pitch decks.
Here’s what the chart doesn’t show, but every operator with a functioning brain feels.
SaaS sold workflows. AI sells outcomes.The UI is no longer the product. The labor is the product. Agents do the work inside the tool, so the tool becomes a commodity. The value moves to whoever controls the worker, not whoever ships the feature.
Budgets aren’t getting cut, they’re getting rerouted. CFOs aren’t buying more seats. They’re buying fewer humans. Digital labor fits the model. SaaS doesn’t. That’s why every procurement cycle gets uglier for pure software.
Feature parity turned SaaS into wallpaper. CRM, CX, MA, project management… everything looks the same. Every new feature is a checkbox. Every release note is deja vu. AI exposes how thin the moats always were and how little differentiation actually existed.
Enterprises hit peak-SaaS years ago. Now they’re consolidating and ripping out 20 to 40 percent of their stack. Not because they’re broke, but because they finally realized half their spend was “nice to have.” AI accelerates the purge because agents replace entire workflows, not just shave minutes off them.
AI startups are scaling at speeds SaaS can’t physically match.
Nine-figure businesses in months, not years. Investors aren’t stupid. They’re reallocating to wherever time compression is real. SaaS looks slow, expensive, and operationally bloated in comparison.The value is moving down the stack. Compute, data, agents, orchestration.
That’s where enterprise transformation is actually happening. SaaS is becoming a UI layer AI sits on top of, not the engine driving the work.And here’s the gut punch nobody wants to say out loud. SaaS isn’t dying, it’s settling. It’s maturing into a cash-flow asset class. Stable. Predictable. Boring. If you’re a founder, that might be fine… unless you thought you were building the next rocket ship.
The growth collapse isn’t a mystery, it’s a value transfer. SaaS had its run. AI is the new growth engine of the enterprise.
So founders have a choice. Build SaaS and optimize it like infrastructure, or build agents that replace the workflows SaaS was built to capture.
One path gives you stability. The other gives you velocity.
Pick one. Don’t pretend you get both :)
Read the full report from Aventis Advisors.
The Shortcut
Why are we selling AI like it is 2015 SaaS sales?
It goes like this “Let’s hop on a call.”, then you get on the call and sit through the over-rehearsed demo that breaks halfway through.
Then comes the cherry on top. We’ll talk about our 12-month enterprise agreement, complete with onboarding fees, hidden usage limits, and a fake case study
Are we high?
This is AI. Everything is new. Nothing is proven. Half of it breaks during the demo.
So why are we still running the same tired sales playbook that everyone already hates?
Nobody wants a free trial. It helps no one. You sign up, forget about it, and nothing happens. No commitment. No skin in the game.
Here is what people actually want:
A paid test drive
The real product
Real usage
One or two months to see if it actually works
Let people touch the product. Let the results talk. Stop hiding behind contracts and that one “success story” we both know had nothing to do with your AI.
That’s it for today. Connect with me on Linkedin if you actually want to understand what an Autonomous Organization looks like in the real world.
