Michael Martin

Ticket-driven software development is slowly dying. For years, the workflow looked like this: - PM writes the ticket - Engineer picks it up - Engineer ships the code Repeat. That model made sense when writing code was the bottleneck. But it isn’t anymore. AI tools can generate large chunks of implementation. Scaffolding, tests, refactors, even entire features. The constraint moved. The hard part is now: - Choosing the right problem to tackle - Structuring the system correctly - Deciding what not to build That is why engineers are increasingly expected to own outcomes, not tickets. Instead of: - “Implement this API endpoint.” The work becomes: - What problem are we actually solving? - What’s the smallest thing we can ship that users will use? - How do we know it worked once it’s live? The engineers who adapt to this shift will thrive.

To my fellow founders and CEOs, who keep saying “nobody is going to vibe code a CRM or ERP or ,” sharing a few thoughts: 1. You’re right that most companies will not vibe code their system of record. Some startups will experiment (remember Klarna?), but larger enterprises will continue to value secure, reliable systems of record. That’s not the real shift, though. 2. Businesses of every size increasingly want to operate in an AI-native world where their tech stack seamlessly works with agents. Why? The company that can spin up digital workers at scale will run circles around the one that cannot. 3. So the question is whether your software product can exist in this agentic ecosystem. Is it open and interoperable? Can it plug into the systems being built around it? If it’s closed, customers will eventually reconsider (see point above!). 4. Opening up will put pressure on seat-based pricing, especially when agents can query data and execute workflows without needing to buy seats for every human. This is both a crisis and an opportunity. 5. Instead of just being a place where data is stored, your product becomes a highly valuable data and context node for real work happening across humans and agents. In many cases, you may be able to deliver this work directly to your customers. Real opportunity to sell work, not software! In summary, if you do nothing, you risk drifting your company towards irrelevance. If you act, you're going to affect your own business model. In moments like this, the only path forward is to lean in and be willing to disrupt yourself. The agentic future is coming either way.

@adamdotdev This “adult in the room” framing is pretty rude to the Claude Code team that built a product hitting $1B run-rate revenue faster than probably anything in history. Bun made like $2.50 total (stickers). Engineering is relative to time & tradeoffs & they made fantastic tradeoffs

Being "AI native" will mean a complete rebuild of the entire tech stack to run a business. Every tool. Every system. Every workflow. The companies that figure this out first will make everyone else look like they're still running on fax machines.

So @HarryStebbings @rodriscoll and I will have done 37 podcasts together this year. The final one is up next week! My top learnings ... and what's changed: #1. I Won't do a T3D2 Investment Again. I know this can be triggering, and I know it sounds unfair and wrong. But the rate at which the best AI + B2B startups can scale today is utterly unprecedented. It's not just the ones you know. @higgsfield_ai growing at rates I've never seen coming up on $200m run-rate in < 12 months. It's not just Replit and Lovable and Cursor. It's amazing there are 20+ others you've never even heard of getting to $100m ARR in 12-18 months now. Vertical B2B + AI leaders like @owner accelerating at scale. You just have to find those ones. #2. Agents Will Change Everything in B2B Software. For Real. We're just getting started. It's not just start-ups. Leaders like @salesforce will be almost nothing like they were before, when most of their functions are run by agents. These "AI Agents" in B2B really didn't work for the first half of 2025. They didn't. They got better with Claude 3.7, better with Claude 4, and I think, even better with Claude 4.5. @Replit got truly great only with Agent v3 just a few months ago. Today? My agents talk to other agents, debate features, and run almost infinitely. And that's just the change in the last 90 days. The rate of change here is difficult to see, but it is epic. AI Agents really will work in 2026 in B2B in a way they were mostly experiments in 2025. #3. You Just Have To Find Your AI Tailwinds The difference between the leaders in B2B this year, and hte ones that struggled? The ones that ended the year with stock prices up + 40%, vs. -25%? They >really< tapped into AI Tailwinds. Not just claiming they added AI to their products. #4. There Is No B2B or Cloud Without AI This sounds obvious today, but it wasn't 100% clear when we started the pod Cloud is "dead". "SaaS" is dead. But B2B AI is attracting more budget than ever before. AI Cloud, AI SaaS, AI B2B, AI datacenter. Per Gartner, total enterprise software spending is accelerating faster than ever before. Go get that budget. #5. Vibe Coding Turned Me Into a Builder. For Real I'm now "@replit Fluent." 9 apps in production. 780,000+ uses already. 6 months ago I couldn't finish my first project. 10 months ago this would have been impossible. Now I can will almost anything I want to build for the SaaStr community into production - the only limit is time. The learning curve in AI is real, but if you push through, it's a superpower you never had before. #6. Founders Should Stay This is not the time or age of professional CEOs. Stay. Founders, stay. The rate of change in the Age of AI is just too fast. Your startup (or large) will fail or fall far behind if founders aren't at the helm. Not always, but almost always. #7. It Only Counts as "AI" If You Deliver Insane Value Co-pilots were the great failure story of 2025. They didn't add enough value to justify the pricing. But Gamma, ElevenLabs, Palantir, Replit, Cursor all showed there is massive budget if the ROI is huge and often, near instant. #8. Humans Have to Train AI Agents For Them to Work "FDE" isn't just a buzzword. Maybe by late 2026, enterprise AI Agents will truly be able to self-train. But we aren't there today. Almost every complex AI Agent requires 30+ days of human training and work to deploy it. Set-and-forget is a myth. At least for now. #9. Wealth Creation is Staggering. Staggering. The numbers are almost hard to believe: Nvidia: 80% of employees are now millionaires. 50% have a net worth exceeding $25 million. Wealth creation at a scale we've never seen in tech history. Cursor: $29.3 billion valuation. $1B+ ARR. With roughly 300 employees. That's $100M+ in enterprise value per employee. Scale AI: Alexandr Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 24. Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake -- just to get him and a handful of top AI engineers. Wang's net worth: $3.6 billion at age 28. As This was all almost brand new in 2025, the massive price for talent h/t @rodriscoll The AI wealth creation machine is producing outcomes we've never seen before. #10. Venture Capital Is Nothing Like It Was 18 Months Ago The transformation is staggering: 2023: AI funding was $55.6 billion (27% of all VC) 2024: AI funding hit $100 billion+ (33% of all VC) — up 80% YoY 2025: AI funding reached $202.3 billion (50% of all VC) — up another 75%+ YoY AI now captures half of all global venture funding. But more importantly, half of it is all going into very late stage growth deals. And that % isn't going up. Venture $$$ are way up, back to 2021 pace, but into more and more specific, ultra-high growth, often late stage opportunities. And the pace of valuation acceleration is breathtaking: 1⃣OpenAI: $29B in 2023 → $500B today, $800B soon 2⃣Anthropic: $4B in 2023 → $350B today 3⃣xAI: Didn't exist in early 2023 → $230B+ today 4⃣Lovable: $1.8B (July 2025) → $6.6B (Dec 2025) 5⃣ Harvey: $715M (Dec 2023) → $1.5B (July 2024) → $3B (Feb 2025) → $5B (June 2025) → $8B (Oct 2025). Meanwhile, traditional B2B? Mega-rounds ($100M+) collapsed from 147 deals in 2021 to just 21 in the 12 months through mid-2025. The money didn't disappear. It just moved — all to AI. If you're not building AI-native, you're competing for a rapidly shrinking pool of capital.

Work becomes personal the moment you realize your output is a reflection of your internal standards. At that point, doing it well stops feeling optional.

Amazing 😂 posthog.com/trash

Where's the VMA's of the web?? @posthog has an entry 🤯 posthog.com

Introducing Kiro, an all-new agentic IDE that has a chance to transform how developers build software. Let me highlight three key innovations that make Kiro special: 1 - Kiro introduces spec-driven development, helping developers express their intent clearly through natural language specifications and architecture diagrams for complex features. This comprehensive context helps Kiro’s AI agents deliver better results with fewer iterations. 2 - Kiro features intelligent agent hooks that automatically handle critical but time-consuming tasks like generating documentation, writing tests, and optimizing performance. These hooks work in the background, triggered by events like saving files or making commits. It’s like having an experienced developer constantly reviewing your work and handling the maintenance tasks that often get delayed. 3 - Kiro provides a purpose-built interface that adapts to how developers work. Whether you prefer chat interactions or working with specifications, Kiro supports your workflow while keeping you in control of the development process. Kiro is really good at "vibe coding" but goes well beyond that. While other AI coding assistants might help you prototype quickly, Kiro helps you take those prototypes all the way to production by following a mature, structured development process out of the box. This means developers can spend less time on boilerplate code and more time where it matters most – innovating and building solutions that customers will love. Starting today, Kiro is available for free during preview and supports most popular programming languages. Here’s how to get started with @kirodotdev today: kiro.dev/blog/introduci… Excited to see how developers use Kiro, and to work with the developer community to continue to shape Kiro moving forward.

No idea what @opera is doing Neon, but signed up in the hope that the @operagxofficial guys run that account too 👀 operaneon.com

Underwhelming Dia reveal at least nudged me to sign up for @perplexity_ai's agentic browser waitlist, Comet perplexity.ai/comet

Gears of War original remaster is bringing the split-screen co-op! 🔥🔥 Can we please make this the norm again?? 🤩 youtu.be/vx8cUpL40Kc?si…

Best part of old Cursor dashboard was they proved you can make a bajillion dollar business on vanilla @stripe hosted checkout pages. Their prioritization is spot on most of the time 😄 Just don't forget URLs please 😅

I understanding shipping early, but @cursor_ai 's new team dashboard doesn't use URLs? Have "backed" to the public homepage a dozen times so far today. This was too early 😅

New!! @perplexity_ai's CBO @dmitry140 + @samdblond on AI in Sales: 🏃‍♀️You Must Move Much Faster 🚀 - No excuse to not be moving much faster than 12 months ago - Every question you'd ask in a meeting you can just ask an AI in advance. No excuses. - No excuses to be doing discovery in real-time. You should know well before the meeting how to close them. - You should know all the challenges your customers are facing >before< the first meeting. - Your competitors are also moving much faster. - Time you save with AI should let you go much, much deeper with customers. Much deeper. - Transparency is everything today. Can't hide with AI.

Seamless. Good riddance Apple tax 👋👋👋

Literally the difference between an interesting and a boring person 😅

100%! Never thought this way, but that 0 -> 0.1 is such an unlock in any new field for me at least 👀