SaaS Math Doesn’t Work in an AI world

or "don't hate the player, hate the game....because it has changed."

This LinkedIn post by Sarah Guo has been stuck in my head. If you’re building in AI right now, or anything venture-backed, it’s worth sitting with. The rules have shifted. The expectations have changed. The pace, the benchmarks, the window to win—it all feels faster and tighter than before.

For a long time, triple-triple-double-double was the blueprint. Grow at that rate and you were on track. But that model feels slow now. If you’re not on a breakout trajectory, you’re at risk. You’re at risk of being out-raised, outpaced, out-hired, and out-built.

I was talking to an investor the other day about one of their companies. It’s doubling at real scale. And he said, “Unfortunately, that’s not going to be good enough.” Inside the business, that feels like progress. Outside, it might not even register.

That’s part of why we sold Castiron. The business was kinda sorta doubling. But in a venture context, that wasn’t going to cut it. We were not going to hit venture scale. The bar had moved.

I’m not saying this is good. I’m saying it’s real. The pace is brutal. The war for talent is more competitive and more expensive. Everything feels compressed. And if you’re a CEO who has taken venture, this is the game you’re in. Whether or not you like the rules.

You are at real risk of not making it if you’re not going for it. All in. That’s different from being deliberate. That’s different from carefully nailing each step. The speed is noticeably different now. And the margin for pacing yourself has collapsed.

What I’m seeing again and again: you can’t just build for where you are. You have to behave like the company you want to be in 12 months. That means hiring, resourcing, and operating at a different level before it feels comfortable. Whatever your goals are for next year, you can’t wait to start acting like that company. You need the team, systems, and motion in place now.

That might mean hiring the VP you’re not “ready” for. And yes, that can backfire. Sometimes hiring too early creates misalignment, burn, or confusion. But if you’ve chosen this game, you might not have the luxury of waiting. You’re on the clock. You don’t get to pace yourself. You have to build the company the market expects you to be. That’s the trade.

You still need repeatability. You still need precision. But you also need speed. Bigger bets, shorter cycles, faster learning. Hire ahead. Build ahead. Move.

History doesn’t quite repeat itself, but it is rhyming right now with other booms we’ve seen. So, I expect to see some normalization over time, so yhis isn’t advice. It’s just what I’m seeing. I don’t love it and it can be very stressful and hard to do, but, if you’re in the game, this is what the game looks like right now.

#startups #leadership #clarity #venturebacked #founders