SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll

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 you can't afford.

You'll learn:

• Why we're spending half a trillion dollars more than we're making in AI, and what that means for software founders and investors over the next five years
• The breakdown of what actually happened to pre-GPT software companies, and how to honestly assess where your company sits
• The six types of defensibility that Rory believes can survive the foundation model companies rolling over you
• Why the trillion dollar question is how enterprise chooses to consume AI, and what it means for who captures the value
• When compute intensity is a feature and when it's a death sentence, and the heuristic for telling the difference
• What T2D3 means now that SaaS multiples have collapsed and the growth bar has moved