Episode 836 | The 5 A.I. Moats Acquirers Value Most

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
You're listening to Startups For the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I talk with Einar Vollset about the 5 AI motes that SaaS acquirers are looking for in 2026 In this episode, Einar effectively gives us a market report of what's happening in SaaS M&A right now. In the middle of 2026, how things have changed, given the fear, uncertainty and doubt being sown by SaaS Apocalypse? Then we talk about motes that you can build into your SaaS to help protect the value of your company in this age of AI. Before we dive into the conversation, I want to tell you about MicroConf Connect. That's our online gathering spot for SaaS founders. In Connect, we have focused discussions with other founders and SaaS experts. You have access to our MicroConf Content Vault, which is more than 400 talks from the last 8 years of MicroConf events. And we have monthly Connect Live sessions and AMAs with yours truly. My AMAs are once a quarter. And our next Connect Live session is Jim Zarkadas talking about how to build a user-friendly onboarding workflow. If you join before June 17th, you can attend that live.
microconfconnect.com if you're interested. And if you haven't already, you should subscribe to the MicroConf YouTube channel. We've been releasing the talks from MicroConf Portland, including Jason Cohen's keynote about breaking through growth ceilings. That was one of the top rated talks at the event. That's youtube.com/atmicroconf.
And remember, that channel is separate from the Rob Walling channel, which we renamed a few months ago. So youtube.com/atmicroconf.
And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Einar Vollset.
Einar Vollset, welcome back to the program.

**Einar Vollset** (2:03)
Thanks for having me.

**Rob Walling** (2:05)
We are here to talk about motes, and really about, well, it's about the state of SaaS exits between 2 and 20 million ARR and the shifts that you're seeing. And let's date this. This is May 15th we're recording, 2026
And you know, if we had recorded in 2021, you'd have been like, oh my God, money's coming. Everybody's buying everything. Mark it up. And then if we recorded in mid-2022, right, sentiment shifted way, way down.

**Einar Vollset** (2:34)
Terrible. Yeah. Russian invasion of Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera. Like, it was in the ****.

**Rob Walling** (2:39)
Yep.
And so in your role as the founder and principal at Discretion Capital, which is sell-side M&A advisory for SaaS founders doing between 2 and 20 million, you see a lot of deals. You have your pulse on the sentiment of acquisitions. You've in fact written a book on the topic. Remind me of the title.

**Einar Vollset** (2:59)
The title is, hang on, let me just grab the book so that I can actually remember exactly what it's called.

**Rob Walling** (3:03)
Can't remember his own book title. It's so long.

**Einar Vollset** (3:05)
That's how it goes. I'm not a professional author like you.

**Rob Walling** (3:08)
Buckle up, listeners. Here it goes.

**Einar Vollset** (3:10)
It is, are you ready? The definitive guide to M&A for B2B SaaS between 2 and 20 million of ARR.

**Rob Walling** (3:16)
Wow. Is that a...

**Einar Vollset** (3:17)
And there's actually a physical copy. If you'd like a physical copy, you can email me and I'll send you a physical copy.

**Rob Walling** (3:21)
That's the title for three different books, right? Because it's very long. That's the first chapter is what you've just said.

**Einar Vollset** (3:27)
Why stretch it out like you, you know, with like, oh, my fancy three books? I don't know. I just put everything in one, you know.

**Rob Walling** (3:34)
And folks can get physical copies. You also have... It's discretioncapital.com/guide if they want to read the whole thing.
That's your that's your bona fides, right? That's why folks should listen to you in this episode. And I wanted to kick off by having you. You were telling me offline right before we started about how this acquisition market has felt, how it's been since, let's say, 2021 So talk us through it.

**Einar Vollset** (3:57)
Yeah, I mean, on and off. I mean, I think people understand pretty well, you know, like in the public markets, there's sort of like sentiment. So it's like risk on, risk off sentiment, right? And that is also true in sort of the B2B SaaS acquisition world. And particularly when I'm talking about this and this is, you know, it applies to pretty much every revenue range, but it definitely applies sub 20
And that's because 20 million of ARR, just because in that universe of like potential exits, there's a lot of private equity. And so like the sentiment, the public market sentiment and the market sentiment is quite well expressed in terms of the private, the way the private equity works and how they're feeling about the market. And so we've gone through a number of cycles, you know, like since I've been doing this, because like unbelievably, I've been doing this now for nearly 10 years. So if you think back to like, I think back to like 20, even before 2021, like 2020, actually during COVID, like just when that spring of 2020 seems kind of like ancient history now, although it doesn't feel that long ago. It was complete risk off, you know, like the public markets were crashing. There were stories about like population that are going to decrease 30% globally, you know, horrible time, you know, not good. I remember in particular, we had one deal going in in Diligence for Discretion. It was selling to a US Fortune 500 company. All of a sudden, they went quiet and it was right around the quarter end. And we were like, what happened? And then we saw their like quarterly report and they stated that they are suspending their M&A program in their quarterly reports, which is not great if you're about a month away from closing. So terrible risk off type sentiment.