Freshworks layoff 660 employees
Read news here: https://yourstory.com/2024/11/freshworks-cuts-13-of-its-workforce-impacting-660-employees
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Aaand they are up 5.2% today Investors reacting favourably
We're all adults here but capitalism is funny
They are also 50% down this year Any small act will lead to jumps in stock price
I don't understand this. Why investors get happy with workforce reduction? Could you explain what's the connection
For some context- AI has emerged to be one of the biggest threat to SaaS.
Excerpts from the death of saas (https://akiranin.substack.com/p/the-death-of-saas)- Now the basic startup operating system is a spiderweb of SaaS. And as any founder will attest, the bills add up really quickly. I guarantee there are SaaS tools used by your business right now your CFO has never even heard of. You do have a CFO, right? Right?!
The worst part is these guys are so fat on their gross margins, they don’t even innovate. I’ve used JIRA for most of my career, and it literally looks exactly the same when I started. All they did was move the same ugly software onto the cloud ten years ago. Possibly made some button edges rounder. Just slightly.
The beating heart of this software will be AI and LLMs. In some cases, these entire workflows might be automated, where no UI is needed, and AI just navigates a series of API calls to do the job independently.
Don’t believe this is possible today? Here’s an example of how an intern at a YC startup built an AI-powered invoice processing pipeline instead of paying $16K for a SaaS tool. It took him, wait for it… two hours.
I personally welcome the reduction in the SaaS services. There is a bloody tool for everything and it adds to the tech bloat in my opinion.
But currently all the ai tools are either free or at low cost. Currently all the ai tools are loss making. Wait until these companies charge you the actual price. Then using AI will be far costlier than using a SaaS company. But until then SaaS companies have to revamp, other wise there will be only 2 or 3 companies that can give competition to ai generated SaaS platforms.
Freshworks is shutting down their CRM too, apparently? Was all fun and games till they went public. Downward spiral since then.
Early signs of AI troubling traditional SaaS companies
Short $crm
Freshworks is known to be the cheaper option in a SaaS category that is well discovered #seats required will no doubt go down as all companies move to AI agents instead of reps
hmm it is what it is!