Vinayak Ranade

“The only true moat now is taste” - guy wearing Patagonia vest

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again we are all just QA now

There are a surprising number of sales reps that are bad at documenting closed lost reasons and a surprising number of account managers that are bad at documenting churn reasons. I also haven't seen great AI for this (yet). Part of it is due to the incentive misalignment - commissions don't depend on accurate documentation for any of the people involved, and in some cases bad documentation actually helps the rep on their comp plan.

There IS a way for lastgen enterprise SaaS to survive vibecoding. It's not easy but it's possible. The core issue for lastgen enterprise SaaS - It's true that no one would want to vibecode and maintain their own Salesforce (or Workday or choose your fav SaaS), but this is not the correct framing of the problem. Historically, if you wanted to be a CRM (or ATS or whatever other system of record + workflow tool) - you were going after a massive TAM, which aggregated multiple verticals. Most customers tolerated that the product was not a "perfect" fit but it got the job done. Now, if someone makes a CRM specifically for dentists, it won't be able to scale to a massive TAM, but it would be a better experience for dentists using that CRM. If you suddenly have to compete with the best CRM for dentists and the best CRM for plumbers but you're the "CRM for everyone" that's difficult because your product will necessarily have more config knobs - the user has to _do more work_ to get your product to work perfectly for their use case. Another issue is with pricing & packaging, and having to run multi-vertical GTM orgs, which is harder than having a single vertical operation for GTM. So are you toast? Not exactly, but now you have to necessarily fight a war on multiple fronts (unless you are Toast in which case you're serving restaurants instead). So what is the founder-mode lastgen enterprise SaaS CEO to do? Let's start with the constraints / assumptions 1. Someone will build the CRM for dentists at the lowest cost / highest ROI possible 2. To compete with them, you need to be able to accomplish the same or better customer outcome. 3. You have to be able to do this simultaneously across dozens of verticals (if not hundreds) 4. You have to do this at similar if not better margins as the vertical-focused companies How can you do that? There are a couple of ideas here. 1. If you could wave a magic wand and have your product transform into "the best CRM for dentists" or "the best CRM for plumbers" on demand - with near-0 overhead, that would help. Btw this is why Salesforce et al are both so successful but also so cumbersome - infinite switchboard knobs. 2. To save the customer from the complexity of turning all the knobs on your switchboard, you have to do it for them in a perfectly personalized way. #2 historically was accomplished with great account managers and sales engineers etc, but that's a very high cost. The good news is that now you can have AI do this for you. But this doesn't quite exist out of the box yet, and is not trivial to instrument reliably. If I was a lastgen enterprise SaaS, I would threfore focus on something that allows "vibeconfig" that automatically does the job of the best sales engineer and onboarding account manager perfectly and modifies the UX of individual product instances on the fly.

Will Figma be the #1 design tool in 18 months?

The number of “successful” founders I know who need to read this is significant

I successfully connected my AirPods to the seat-back entertainment console for the first time today - what a time to be alive

Cringe: Never doing paid ads because someone famous said it's lame Based: Figuring out the best channel for growth depending on your market Cracked: Doing paid ads very loudly and brandmaxxing as a contrarian

out of context from an @andrewchen tweet but oh so timeless

nailed it

@matt_slotnick the secret is friendship

@Kazanjy Crazy part is that you can do this even if you aren’t the founder and it works pretty well

One of the most powerful things you can do as a founder is to jump into a job and demonstrate the “art of the possible“. Have an opportunity creation issues in your SDR team? Demonstrate that you can put five meetings on the calendar per week. Have a meeting activity problem in your account management team? Block a couple weeks of your own time and demonstrate how you can do three customer facing meetings today without breaking a sweat. It’s amazing what happens when you erase excuses from parts of your organization.

When an ex-FAANG engineer tries to operate without FAANG resources. Adapting is not happening. 😂😂

@noornet “This argument could have been an email”

You don't have to attend every argument that you're invited to.

Out of 20+ high agency tech operators I’ve met or spoken within the last 4 weeks, almost every person is one of the following three, and sometimes multiple of them - starting a company - working through M&A options - quitting their job From a fairly random sample (ie I wasn’t looking for any specific category of people, most are people I already know) 2026 looks to be a year of great migrations

I hate it because it’s true

@spang @englishpaulm Just pre ordered my copy

@englishpaulm Sounds awesome Paul! Can't wait to check it out

Why do most of your employees think most meetings are a waste of time? I spent a year interviewing managers at top tech companies, and wrote a book with practical tips about how to run amazing meetings. See themeetingbook.org to pre-order, thanks! And share this tweet with your managers...

Very proud of Keith and the team for being insanely gritty and building something their customers love.

Hard to describe the exact moment a VC decides you’re of zero value mid-convo and finds the fastest possible exit