SaaSpocalypse Revisited, Singer x Louis Vuitton, Aman vs Ryan Walker | Igor Babuschkin, Brannin McBee, Garret Langley, Sonya Huang, Sean Cole

**John Coogan** (0:00)
And you are watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:03)
Today is Thursday, August 13th, 2026 We are live in TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
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**Jordi Hays** (0:28)
It just might happen.

**John Coogan** (0:30)
We got to take a victory lap. You want to start taking a lap, Jordi? You want to take a lap while I tell everyone about our SaaSpocalypse victory lap?

**Jordi Hays** (0:37)
Yeah, so I was just appreciating some various software as a service companies.

**John Coogan** (0:44)
There's some real-

**Jordi Hays** (0:45)
Charts yesterday.
Bunch of companies up like crazy. And I was thinking, I texted John, I was like, when did we cancel the SaaSpocalypse?

**John Coogan** (0:53)
Yep.

**Jordi Hays** (0:54)
And you pulled up our original sub stack we sent back in February. We just decided at that time.

**Igor Babuschkin** (1:03)
It's not happening.

**Brannin McBee** (1:05)
It's not happening.

**Jordi Hays** (1:06)
We canceled it. And there was a lot of fear. Maybe too early to take a victory lap.

**John Coogan** (1:11)
Yeah, of course.

**Jordi Hays** (1:12)
But in hindsight.

**John Coogan** (1:13)
But there were some good arguments. There were some interesting arguments and there was a lot of fear. But there were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SaaS bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe code it. And while that thesis might play out over a few years, it was a little bit too soon. It seemed a little bit too aggressive. And so we wanted to revisit the SaaS apocalypse and the cancellation of the SaaS apocalypse, see where things are now. So just to set the stage, the SaaS apocalypse is a rough, rough go. Two trillion dollars of market cap lost across the SaaS apocalypse, the major sell off of technology software companies broadly.
Two, two trillion dollars wiped out, gone. Over. A moment of silence. But a lot of it has come back. The iShares, ETF, the tracks, tech and software is up 30% just over the last six months.

**Jordi Hays** (2:05)
Wait, did we want to do a moment of silence?

**John Coogan** (2:07)
Yes.

**Jordi Hays** (2:07)
Brought to you by CrowdStrike.

**John Coogan** (2:10)
Absolute tear. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.

**Jordi Hays** (2:14)
This moment of silence is brought to you by CrowdStrike.

**John Coogan** (2:16)
Your business is AI, their business is securing it, CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. No, CrowdStrike's been on a tear.
So yeah, it appeared only logical at the time that every company would be vibe coding their own CRM and this would happen imminently and that any company built on a big pile of code would go to zero. Of course, the core thesis still holds over the long term, but it's a lot messier in reality. So yes, having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago. That's for sure. Competition is increasing, especially for point solutions. But many of those SaaS companies that were so beaten up in the SaaS apocalypse were revealed to have sources of strength that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket. So babies were thrown out.

**Jordi Hays** (3:08)
1,000 business development representatives.

**John Coogan** (3:12)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (3:12)
Source of strength.

**John Coogan** (3:13)
That's big. Also, just another thing that's very valuable is, what percent of revenue are you claiming from your customers?
So if you are going to a customer and you're saying, I'm taking 30 percent cut, you're probably at more risk than someone who's saying, I'm an IT solution and you're going to spend one-tenth of one percent of your revenue.

**Jordi Hays** (3:37)
Where Shopify is the best example, right?
A lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs ask them, what's your biggest expense? None of them will say Shopify, even a brand that is a Dale.

**John Coogan** (3:52)
Shopify Plus, for a business that I know very intimately, I think is around $1,000 a month in cost, and the business is doing almost $100 million a year.

**Jordi Hays** (4:04)
And even with how good the models are today, you would need multiple people, basically, vibe-coding around the clock to have a product that was comparable, and that's not even to mention a lot of the applications that already tie into the product.