Vliegvrees

Introducing Ship OS: The agent-native way to ship software. Run your entire product development cycle in Notion, from customer feedback to a merged PR. Agents handle the triaging, routing, and summarizing. Your team handles the judgment calls. Set up Ship OS → notion.com/ship-os

The SaaS bloodbath has been beyond brutal. Wix for more than any other. This company is doing $2.1BN in ARR and they are valued at $2.1BN. Like WTF. And, they have Base44, one of the leaders in vibe coding, now doing over $170M in ARR. What is going on? How is this being priced at $2.1BN? I sat down with @Avishai_ab and have shared the biggest lessons below. 1. How Public Markets Are Getting Both Wix and SaaS Wrong Public markets routinely misprice tech cycles, hyping vibe-coding startups while discounting core SaaS engines. They ignore the moat of enterprise trust. Giants like Salesforce win because institutions trust them with sensitive data, creating security and compliance barriers automated code projects cannot easily replicate. 2. Was the Buyback a Terrible Decision? Timing the stock market is a fool’s errand. If your balance sheet has cash and your team is focused on core products instead of distracting M&A, a buyback during a dip can be rational. Capital allocation should be judged over three years, not a three-month panic. 3. How Do You Keep Talent When Your Market Cap Is Cratering? Stop treating talent attrition as a failure. It can be a healthy refresh. Bull markets make companies forget that elite teams are forged by solving hard problems, not coasting. When market caps fall, protecting your top tier can uncover hidden stars and make room for a hungry new generation. 4. How Do the Business Models Compare Between Wix and Base44? Scaling newer AI platforms requires ruthless focus on unit economics over expensive, generic LLM usage. The margin breakthrough comes from fine-tuning and combining smaller, custom models to match top-tier performance. Within two years, infrastructure cost declines could make AI COGS a non-issue for platform margins. 5. Why Wix Customers Will Not Churn to Vibe-Coded Solutions Mainstream SMBs have neither the desire nor capacity to build their own tech stacks with automated coding tools. Seemingly simple workflows, like vertical business logic for a hair salon, are surprisingly complex. Even elite engineering teams struggle to rebuild them quickly, proving vertical SaaS remains highly defensible. 6. Why Teams of the Future Will Not Be as Small as People Think The idea that future tech giants will run on skeleton crews managing thousands of AI agents is overhyped. The ecosystem gives too much credit to standalone AI capabilities. On granular business workflows, models still stumble, which means dense, capable human teams remain essential. 7. I Would Be Terrified if I Were in University Today, and My Advice to Students Entering the workforce today is uncertain, but current LLMs will not instantly replace white-collar jobs. Today’s models are strong at reframing data, not deep reasoning, and still make frequent mistakes. True disruption to human capital likely requires two or three more major breakthroughs. (links below)

As if this day couldn’t get any better, this package just arrived from @robin7331 It’s the Pixel Pump 2 and SMD magazines, the ultimate vacuum pump to assemble PCBs. This is going to be one of the biggest game changers in my entire workflow. Unboxing coming ASAP!