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Software-as-a-service valuations have been in the doldrums for several years. After the peak hype of 2020–2021 and the COVID-fueled pull-forward of demand followed by the end of the zero-interest-rate era, SaaS valuations have been under consistent pressure.

If you read commentary online and talk with entrepreneurs and investors, three main explanations usually come up.

First, AI investments have sucked much of the oxygen out of the room. On both the entrepreneur side and the corporate buyer side, there is simply less capital available to invest in traditional business productivity software.

Second, valuations for tech companies are still primarily driven by growth rates. With growth rates down dramatically—whether due to increased AI spending, fewer employees (since most SaaS products are priced per seat), or other factors—high valuation multiples are difficult to justify. Without high growth, you are not going to get high multiples.

Third, and possibly the most disruptive argument, is the rise of “vibe coding” and tools like Cursor for developers, and Replit and Lovable for building custom applications through simple prompting. The idea is that companies will increasingly build their own internal software rather than pay $100 per user per month for generic tools, when they can build exactly what they want and customize it as their needs change.

This feels far-fetched once you consider how complicated edge cases and real-world nuance become beyond surface-level CRUD apps. Yet here we are, and these are the arguments being made.

What’s missing from the conversation is another explanation—one that is likely the biggest long-term challenge and is closely related to the third point. While some companies will indeed build their own internal tools, I believe the much larger threat to incumbent SaaS companies is the rise of new SaaS startups created by non-technical subject-matter experts.

As the cost of building software approaches zero and the cost of hosting software on cloud infrastructure enables near-infinite scalability in line with customer growth, the barrier to creating new SaaS companies has never been lower. Instead of paying $20,000 per year to an incumbent vendor, why not pay $2,000 per year to a new SaaS company that delivers 90 percent of the functionality at 10 percent of the cost?

These new companies do not have large customer bases that slow down product development. They do not have immense pressure from existing investors and financial partners. In many cases, everything will be AI-native. The era of a few hundred thousand dollars of recurring revenue per employee may be coming to an end. No technical debt. No outside pressures. Just high-quality, vibe-coded software built by small teams that orchestrate it, and customers who love getting more value for their money.

Entrepreneurs looking for new ideas should lean directly into this. They should find the most unloved SaaS software they can and vibe-code their way into a new entrant in that market, grinding away to create a product customers love that delivers maximum value for minimal cost. It will not be glamorous, but I am confident thousands of entrepreneurs will do exactly this and build strong small businesses.

Incumbent SaaS companies are already under tremendous valuation pressure, and things are only going to get more challenging as a Cambrian explosion of vibe-coded SaaS applications comes online.

Last week I was talking with a board member about how to be helpful to an entrepreneur we both know. A few minutes into the conversation, the board member said, “We need to get him from being a 10/90 entrepreneur to a 90/10 entrepreneur.” I had never heard this phrase before, so I asked for clarification. He explained that a 10/90 entrepreneur spends 10 percent of his time on the most important things and 90 percent on the less important things. From his perspective, we needed to help the entrepreneur reorient how he thinks so he could become a 90/10 entrepreneur, spending 90 percent of his time on the most important priorities and only 10 percent on activities that don’t add as much value.

After he said this, it struck me how common this pattern is in the entrepreneurial world. Human nature pushes us to focus on whatever is right in front of us, whether it’s busywork, an annoyance, or something that can be handled immediately. For entrepreneurs, a real shift in mindset has to take place. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

When I was in college, our economics textbook used a popular example to explain competitive advantage versus comparative advantage. At the time, Michael Jordan was the most famous athlete in the world, and the example suggested that he might be the best and fastest lawn mower on the planet. Even if that were true, mowing lawns would not be where his greatest value lies. His value is in playing basketball, so that’s where he should spend his time. The same principle applies to entrepreneurs.

Of course, in the early years most entrepreneurs don’t have this luxury. There is a period when you have to do whatever it takes to keep the lights on, including the most basic and mundane tasks. I personally spent years doing exactly that. Once we reached some modest scale, it required a huge rewiring for me to delegate responsibilities and find great people who were better at many of those tasks so I could focus on where I could contribute the most.

Entrepreneurs would do well to think intentionally about the journey from 10/90 to 90/10 and to develop the discipline and prioritization needed to spend the majority of their time on the areas where they are most uniquely skilled and suited. The path from 10/90 to 90/10 is often bumpy, but the entrepreneurs who grow and develop faster than their startups ultimately achieve the greatest success.

Last week I was catching up with an entrepreneur who told one amazing story after another. When I left the conversation, I could not stop thinking about how impressive his storytelling ability was. It made me reflect on the power of stories and how entrepreneurs should lean into them and deliberately work to get better, especially if it does not come naturally.

Many entrepreneurs are visionaries, dreamers, and big-idea thinkers. But there are also plenty of engineers and logic-driven founders who prefer dealing in facts rather than stories. I fall into that nuts-and-bolts camp myself, which means I have to work at storytelling.

Like any skill, storytelling can be improved with practice. Whenever I hear an interesting anecdote, a witty saying, or a compelling quote, I save it in a note on my iPhone. With a quick voice dictation, it is captured in seconds and stored indefinitely. Using the same approach, it would be easy to record a story or anecdote every day. Over time, you build a personal library you can draw from in future conversations.

The real challenge is forming the habit. Do you spend ten minutes each morning reviewing the prior day for stories worth saving? Or do you train yourself to capture them the moment they happen? The best storytellers seem to do this naturally. They have an almost unbelievable ability to recall the right story on demand. Even without that natural talent, a simple, lightweight system can dramatically elevate your storytelling.

Humans evolved around campfires, sharing stories for thousands of years. The power of a story is unlike anything else. My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to exercise their storytelling muscle and actively look for ways to improve their craft. Writing, speaking, and every other form of communication becomes far more powerful when driven by compelling stories.

With the new year upon us, it is a great time to reflect on last year’s accomplishments and set new goals for the year ahead. As I read various “lessons learned” articles and annual recaps, I often think about what my single most important piece of advice for entrepreneurs would be.

Advice is extremely stage- and journey-specific. Many entrepreneurs consume a wide range of guidance that is simply not applicable to their situation. It may be too big, too small, too early, too late, or designed for an entirely different type of market. It is always important to understand the background of the person giving the advice and who it is really meant for.

That said, my number one piece of advice for entrepreneurs in the new year is simple: write and send a weekly or monthly update to anyone who cares about what you are doing.

This could include employees, advisors, investors, mentors, family members, friends, or fellow entrepreneurs. Who receives it matters far less than the fact that you do it consistently. Ideally, you set aside 30 to 60 minutes each week to write down what you accomplished last week, what you are working on this week, your main goals for the quarter and the year, your top priorities, and any specific asks, such as introductions, advice, or feedback.

This update should be a recurring event on your calendar. Each one can live in its own Google Doc and be sent to a BCC list maintained in a simple Google Sheet. You can certainly use email marketing software or a dedicated app, but I recommend starting with this straightforward, brute-force approach and adding tools later if needed.

Writing this regular update is incredibly valuable for your own clarity. It forces you to organize all the ideas swirling in your head, the highs and lows, and the messages you want to communicate. At the same time, it is one of the best ways to keep your network informed and to make it easy for them to help you.

Entrepreneurship is filled with extreme highs, deep lows, and long stretches of wandering in the desert. A recurring written update brings clarity, both internally and externally, through that entire journey. As a bonus, after years of doing it, you end up with a detailed journal of your entrepreneurial life that can one day become a book or something you pass down to your children and grandchildren.

My recommendation is simple: send a weekly or monthly update email. Include anecdotes, metrics, projects, and the things you need help with. Make it a habit, and make sure your audience receives it at the same time every week or month.

A couple of months ago, I was speaking at a conference when it came time for the Q&A. Several people raised their hands, and one question after another came out. Interestingly, every question that was asked was something I had already written about in a blog post, sometimes many years earlier. Because I had already put my thoughts on paper, my answers were more thoughtful, more structured, and more relevant.

After that experience, it made me reflect on something that feels obvious but is rarely said: the more you write, the better you speak.

Writing forces you to slow down and think. When you write an idea, you have to work through the pros and cons, document the anecdotes, and clarify the lessons. That effort crystallizes your thinking and refines your word choice. Writing is one of the best mental exercises for improving how you think, which directly improves how you speak.

There is also a powerful bonus. Writing captures your ideas for posterity and helps you retain them far longer than simply thinking or hearing them.

My advice to entrepreneurs is simple: start writing. It does not have to be perfect. It does not have to be groundbreaking. It just has to be done. The more you write, the sharper your thinking becomes, and the stronger your speaking becomes. Writing and speaking reinforce each other, and entrepreneurs should invest in both.

Last week, I gave a presentation to a committee focused on improving the technology and innovation ecosystem in our state. I had been asked several months earlier to deliver this presentation, so I created a note on my iPhone where I regularly jotted down ideas, solicited input from others, and ran searches to see what other ecosystems had done successfully in the past. Over time, all of that research and thinking lived in one simple note.

When it was time to build the slides, everything I needed was already in one place. The next step was to turn those raw thoughts into a polished, professional presentation. To do that, I created a new note on my iPhone, tapped the microphone button, and talked through the presentation out loud. I covered the audience, my goals, the desired outcomes, and then walked through each slide in sequence. Because the research was already done and the ideas were well formed, this part was fast.

It took about five minutes to talk through the entire deck: an introduction, my background and experience, the major trends I’m seeing, five core ideas—each with its own slide—and a closing thank-you slide.

With the voice-to-text draft complete, I copied and pasted the resulting (and admittedly garbled) notes into ChatGPT. At the top, I included instructions about the audience, goals, and format, and asked ChatGPT to produce a structured slide outline. Almost instantly, it returned a clean framework for each slide, including the slide title, key visual concept, on-screen text, and behind-the-scenes talking points.

With the outline done, the final step was producing the actual slides. I opened Google Slides, created a new presentation, clicked the Gemini button, and selected the Nano Banana image visualization tool. For each slide, I copied and pasted ChatGPT’s output into the visualization prompt and hit “go.” After a couple of minutes, it generated polished, visually compelling slides complete with graphics, charts, and relevant contextual information.

I then inserted each generated image as a slide in Google Slides—and I was finished.

Fifteen minutes from start to finish, after a couple of months of research, I had a complete, professional-looking slide deck that was consistent, visually engaging, and ready to present.

Try it yourself. You’ll be blown away. We’re entering a new era, and this simple workflow is just one example of how dramatically the way we work is changing.

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of entrepreneurs building sports-related technology. They’ve created impressive tools for the high end of the market and have seen strong success over the past few years. Now they’re facing the big question: how do they expand the business? What direction should they pursue, which strategies should they prioritize, and how should they allocate resources?

After hearing their story and seeing the technology firsthand, I immediately thought about lessons we learned at Intown Golf Club. We spent the next 30 minutes discussing what has worked and what hasn’t on the technology side at Intown, especially how to make tech genuinely valuable for serious golfers while also keeping it fun and simple for beginners and kids who just want to enjoy the game.

That conversation was a useful deep dive into an adjacent industry and a reminder of how important it is to evaluate both hardware and software through the lens of the front-end experience. Some products manage to be powerful for advanced users while still feeling intuitive and enjoyable for casual users.

It also reinforced something I’ve come to appreciate: innovation from a different but loosely related market, especially one that’s a few years ahead, can be an excellent source of insight and inspiration. As entrepreneurs, we’re often at our best when we go deep and solve the most valuable customer problems. That usually requires intense focus and a willingness to ignore distractions while you deliver real value.

But if things go well, if the product works, customers are happy, and momentum builds, you eventually come up for air and start asking, “What’s next?” That’s the perfect time to look at nearby markets that may be further along, learn from their best practices, and bring those insights back to your own customers, either to improve what you offer today or to expand the market you can serve tomorrow.

The pattern is simple: go deep, solve the hard problems, and then make time to look around for lessons you can import from markets just ahead of you.

Last week, I was catching up with a group of entrepreneurs when one of them asked, “When was the last time each of us felt uncomfortable in our business?” This made me pause and reflect. “Uncomfortable,” in this context, meant doing something outside of our normal approach or comfort zone. Human nature tends to push us forward for a bit, then settle into a routine or style that works. We often hustle with minor adjustments, but rarely do we push ourselves in ways that truly make us uncomfortable.

As the group went around and shared their recent experiences, most examples fell into two categories.

The first was getting uncomfortable with team members. This included addressing personnel issues and making the hard call. For most entrepreneurs, having to fire someone or tell them they’re no longer the right fit is one of the most difficult and painful things to do. Entrepreneurs are typically optimistic, glass-half-full types who love dreaming and chasing a vision, not telling someone the company has outgrown them.

The second category was about risk-taking. While people often assume entrepreneurs are inherent risk seekers, I find many successful ones to be more risk averse in the sense that they value control and like betting on themselves. They often prefer doing their own thing, even if it has a lower chance of success, rather than choosing a safer, more conventional path. The theme of “uncomfortable risk” emerged repeatedly, referring to the shift from calculated, manageable risks to risks that actually create discomfort. Hiring a new team member may involve some personnel risk but little business risk if the company can afford it. Making a bigger bet that could jeopardize the whole business, yet might be necessary to reach the next level, is the kind of uncomfortable risk that keeps entrepreneurs up at night.

For entrepreneurs, my recommendation is to regularly ask yourself where you are on the comfort scale and when you last got truly uncomfortable in a healthy way. It is easy to coast once things are working and push only a little, but it is worth questioning whether you are pushing hard enough and whether there is an opportunity to get uncomfortable in a smart, productive way.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at the Deloitte 500 event at the Atlanta Tech Village. At the event, the local winners were revealed and recognized. Incredibly, the fastest-growing tech company in the United States based on three-year revenue growth is a local Atlanta company called Impiricus.

Impiricus offers a text-messaging chatbot for healthcare professionals, allowing them to opt in to receive messages from pharmaceutical companies and to text questions directly to get information from pharma companies. After the event, the co-founder of the company, Dr. Hashmi, came up to me, introduced himself, and shared his excitement about the recognition. Naturally, I had to ask him about the company and about the honor of being named the fastest-growing tech company in the country by Deloitte.

I had heard of previous startups in the space focused on connecting pharmaceutical companies and doctors, and while those turned out fine, I was curious about the “aha moment” for Impiricus. How did they make it work so well that the vast majority of doctors in the United States opted into their text-messaging service?

The answer was simple yet profound: Impiricus was the first service to explicitly put the doctor in control and to focus on providing value first, not marketing first. In fact, many doctors receive only one or two marketing text messages per year. Doctors opt into the service through Impiricus, and Impiricus acts as a trusted middle layer that ensures pharmaceutical companies do not overwhelm them with promotions. At the same time, Impiricus ensures doctors can ask questions and get all the information they need related to drugs and treatments without receiving a barrage of marketing messages.

In earlier attempts by others, doctors would quickly become overwhelmed by too many messages and would opt out. By flipping the model and leading with value, simplicity, and respect for physicians’ time, Impiricus created a completely different relationship. Doctors get the ability to text questions into an AI chatbot and receive answers quickly, in exchange for receiving a very limited number of marketing messages. The value to the doctor comes first, and everything else is secondary.

For entrepreneurs, this is a powerful reminder: in industries where relationships or incentives are traditionally one-sided, there is often an opportunity to flip the dynamic by putting the customer first. Lead with value before trying to extract value.

Congratulations to Dr. Hashmi and his Atlanta team on winning this incredible award as the Deloitte 500 fastest-growing company in the United States.

Last week, I was at Atlanta Tech Village delivering short opening remarks for a large AgeTech Connect conference. AgeTech, as the name suggests, is a fast-growing sector focused on aging and the realities of our rapidly aging population.

As both a conference theme and an industry, AgeTech is one of those ideas that feels obvious now but has actually been building quietly for years. It’s a perfect example of what I love most about startup communities: there’s always something new, there’s always a hot trend emerging, and there are always passionate people working to invent the future.

After the conference, I had the chance to sit down with an economic development professional to discuss tech, startups, and startup ecosystems. As we spoke, with the AgeTech conference happening just down the hall, it prompted me to reflect on many other trends and communities we’ve seen come through these walls over the years.

When we first opened Atlanta Tech Village more than a decade ago, Bitcoin was just starting to gain traction among early-adopter tech circles, far from mainstream acceptance. For years afterward, we hosted numerous Bitcoin and blockchain companies, along with their events and conferences. That industry has since matured dramatically, riding multiple boom-and-bust cycles of its own.

The point isn’t to single out one or two trends like AgeTech or blockchain. Rather, it’s that startup communities, by their very nature, sit at the front edge of new technologies and nascent trends.

So if you’re an entrepreneur or aspiring founder looking for ideas, co-founders, or the next big opportunity, my recommendation is simple: spend time at your local startup hubs. Sign up for their events, subscribe to their newsletters, and follow them on social media. You’ll get a constant stream of both emerging and established ideas.

It’s one of the best ways to stay current on new trends and discover the next great market before it becomes obvious to everyone else.