Alfred Lin, Sequoia → AI won't k*ll SaaS Tech shifts rarely eliminate entire industries — they reallocate advantage to companies that adapt fastest. “Amazon was going to k*ll Walmart. That just didn't happen. Walmart is 20x larger today than it was in 1997.” “Every time we go through one of these paradigm shifts there's this desire to have very simple narratives.” “Every single line of code that's generated has a marginal cost of zero. So therefore software lines of code is no longer a moat.” Alfred Lin (@Alfred_Lin), @sequoia . . . "You know every time we go through one of these paradigm shifts I think there's this desire to have very simple narratives. And the simple narrative as we just talked about is AI is gonna k*ll SaaS. And I just don't think that's the case. And the reason why I know that that's not gonna be the case is because I lived it. When I dropped out of my PhD program in statistics it was 1997. And I had this proclamation that I needed to drop out of grad school because the internet was happening and I didn't want to miss it. And the statement I made, the simple narrative I made, was that e-commerce was gonna destroy brick and mortar, that Amazon was going to k*ll Walmart. And that just didn't happen. Walmart is 20 times larger today than it was in 1997. But it's because Walmart embraced the change and they changed with the time. If you embrace the change and embrace the technology many of the companies that we shop from today have both physical and an electronic digital website. And so I think that the same will happen here. We're going through a paradigm change here and some of the things that we believe to be true are not true. It's this tension and this balance of okay what were moats in the past, what are moats in the future. Those things are not going to be the same. And the very obvious statement is every single line of code that's generated has a marginal cost of zero. So therefore software lines of code is no longer a moat. That's probably overstated. If some company has written 10 years of code can it be replaced faster than 10 years? Yes. But that's always been true. A copycat competitor is going to be able to come after you and do it faster than you. And now with coding tools maybe we can do it much faster. But even then there's so many aspects of a business. What is the moat? How about distribution? How about your customers? How do you keep them on? And I think these are the questions that we have to struggle through. People want to snap to the endgame all the time. The end state is where all these companies that are going to survive — whether it's traditional software companies, SaaS companies, or native AI companies — all of them are gonna embrace AI. That's the end state. All these companies that shift will embrace AI."