Krish Subramanian

Sequoia just called the end of an entire go-to-market era and most SaaS companies won’t realize what hit them for 18 months. Product-led growth was built on one assumption: humans would try the software. The entire playbook since 2010 optimized for human discovery. Beautiful landing pages. Frictionless free trials. Viral invite loops. Slack, Dropbox, Zoom, Calendly. $200B+ in market cap created by winning the user’s first 5 minutes. None of that matters if an agent is picking the software. Claude doesn’t care about your hero image. It can’t be impressed by your Dribbble awards. It’s reading documentation, parsing user reviews, checking API reliability, and matching features to use case. All the surface-level polish that convinced lazy humans to click “sign up” becomes irrelevant. The new PLG funnel isn’t landing page → free trial → activation → conversion. It’s agent query → documentation scan → feature match → recommendation. Which means the new moat looks completely different. You don’t need the best onboarding. You need the best documentation. You don’t need viral loops. You need structured data that agents can parse. You don’t need a beautiful UI for the first session. You need an API that an agent can actually call. The companies that won PLG hired designers and growth hackers. The companies that win agent-led growth will hire technical writers and developer relations engineers. And here’s the part nobody’s pricing in yet: agents don’t have loyalty. They don’t have switching costs. They’ll recommend Supabase today and something better tomorrow if the documentation is cleaner or the pricing is more transparent. The stickiness that made PLG so powerful, the network effects and learned behavior, doesn’t transfer. Sequoia is telling you the entire distribution layer is being rewritten. The question is whether your product is optimized for human attention or machine parsing. Most are built for the wrong audience.

The more I hear from first-time startup founders about the advice they are getting and taking today, the more I feel like we lost a ton of tribal knowledge in the last 3-5 years.