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“Seat”-pocalypse not SaaSpocalypse - Garrick van Buren

2026-04-04T01:11:28.000Z

The SaaSpocalypse wasn’t caused by AI, but will be perpetuated by it.

AI (OpenAI, Anthrophic, Gemini, etc) evaporating $300B in market value is vivid, compelling, serves everyone involved, and like so much hype – mostly completely wrong.

The narrative is: AI arrived. Revenue stalled. Therefore customers are buying fewer seats because they’re implementing AI.

Businesses across industries stopped growing headcount three years ago. Here’s the seasonally adjusted, non-farm job openings & hires against interest rates since 2000.

Data compiled from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/

Narrative fallacy (Taleb): the mind’s compulsion to construct causal stories from loosely related events. Strongest under uncertainty, when a vivid explanation is available and the actual cause is diffuse and banal.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc: e.g. “after this, therefore because of this.” It is the fallacy underlying most financial news narratives (“stocks rose on news that…”), most earnings call explanations, and apparently most SaaSpocalypse postmortems.

The non-farm hire rate peaked in early 2022 at the top of the post-COVID snap-back. Then fell steadily, continuously, for three years. In February 2026 it sat at 3.1, nearing the lows of the 2008 financial crisis. This decline was well underway before Claude Code existed (Feb 2025) and before Klarna made headlines ditching Salesforce (Sep 2024).

A recent Fast Company posited SaaSpocalypse a myth, arguing enterprise software encodes institutional architecture too deeply to be replaced by general-purpose agents.

Maybe. The question is not whether AI can replace Salesforce with a homegrown solution because it’s too operationally ensconced. The question is whether the companies running Salesforce are growing their human sales force and purchasing more seat licenses. The JOLTS data suggests they’re not – and haven’t since 2022.

Seat-based SaaS revenue is a function of customer headcount. When your customers stop hiring, they also stop buying the follow-on tools and amenities supporting the new employees.

Unfortunately, seats are in the revenue forecast, in the sales quotas, in the board expectations, in the investor guidance. The entire operating system of a enterprise SaaS business is calibrated to a number the company does not control and never did: its customers’ hiring plans.

When hiring grew reliably through the 2010s, this was invisible. Seat expansion looked like product success. NRR above 120% felt like a moat. It was, in part, just a rising labor market expressing itself through software licenses.

Headcount go up?

Many SaaS compaanies are now pivoting to outcome-based or consumption-based pricing (this was all my 2025 client work). Both realign pricing with customer’s economics rather than their headcount. ARR still matters. A dollar of ARR anchored to customer economics is more durable than a dollar of ARR anchored to a seat count in a contracting labor market.

This is not a new.

Probably have been this way all along.

The signal is now visible in the capital markets too. Last quarter, Blue Owl investors requested return of $5.4 billion across two private credit funds, redemption rates of 40.7% and 21.9% respectively. KKR, Apollo, BlackRock followed by invoking their 5%/quarter withdrawal gates. Blue Owl attributed the pressure to “heightened market concerns around AI-related disruption to software companies.”

The headcount shrinkage has already happened.

Tech layoffs tracked by layoffs.fyi peaked at 264,000 in 2023, then decelerated: 153,000 in 2024, 124,000 in 2025, 41,000 so far in 2026. The acute phase is largely over. As you can see from the graph above, hiring has not rebounded across sectors. What remains is structurally lower hiring floor, because the companies doing the laying off stopped backfilling. Low-fire, low-hire, and no new seat licenses..

My bet is not that “AI will disrupt SaaS”. My bet, is “companies will get smaller”.

Fewer employees than yesterday.

Quarter after quarter.

Suggesting the Saaspocalypse isn’t today, or in 2026, it’s forward-looking. Not because the SaaS companies have poor fundamentals or shrinking margins, but because their customers, and the US economy overall, stopped growing jobs.

Yes, some part we can blame on the productivity enhancements of AI. Hell, I’m planning to leverage AI in my business as much as I can ahead of hiring a person. But, $300B in market value? No. AI is not that good yet.

The post “Seat”-pocalypse not SaaSpocalypse appeared first on Garrick van Buren.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-03T20:33:45.000Z

I’ve tried to get used to “Click wallpaper to show desktop” for long enough now and I still despise it. Also “Show menu bar background” is a must. Annoys me that I now have to go set esoteric settings to make macOS work the way I want it to.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-03T11:53:28.000Z

I too am proud to be called “Old School“.

Bruce Springsteen — Live From Minneapolis (3/31/2026) - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-01T03:15:31.000Z

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band perform the first two songs from their set for the opening night of the Springsteen & E Street Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour live in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 31, 2026.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-01T00:23:52.000Z

April 1st: Digital Sabbatical Day – Rhoneisms

It’s almost that time again…

Instructions Second - Garrick van Buren

2026-03-31T14:21:41.000Z

Try
Instructions
Safety

The post Instructions Second appeared first on Garrick van Buren.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-31T00:40:15.000Z

Rough Magic by Bandits on the Run

I need to introduce you to this band. I feel like they’re a secret I’ve been needlessly keeping for far too long. Incredible harmonies, beautiful song structure, inventive instrumentation, but/and I know them and they’re also lovely humans. New album soon. Buy it.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-30T11:56:16.000Z

There is engagement to be harvested at the extremes of everything.

Escape in Europe — Day 15 - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-29T22:00:00.000Z

2:00a Daylight Savings in Spain. Clocks forward an hour.
3:20a Alarm for Tammy and Mazie to get their Vueling VY2478 to Split Croatia
3:40a Tammy and Mazie get taxi to Barcelona Airport. See their websites for potential updates on their week in Croatia! 🇭🇷
Jamie doesn’t really try that hard to get back to sleep.
6:00a Alarm for Jamie and Tyler to get to their DL9440 flight to Amsterdam.
6:50a Taxi to Barcelona Airport.
8:30a Final taste of Barcelona with Boldu donut in terminal B.
Seated in row 26 of 26.
9:20a Departure to Amsterdam
Landed and deplaned 11:55p with extremely short connection – 12:40p departure
Bus transit from landing
Ran to passport control, short connection bypass
Ran to E7 amongst the last to board the flight
After running to flight the departure was delayed 40 mins to allow a passenger to deplane due to a medical issue which also then required pulling that individuals baggage.
3:25p Landed in MSP
3:40p Lyft ride home.
3:50p Arrive home to furniture everywhere since we had hardwood floors refinished while we were gone.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-29T20:49:50.000Z

Small Project Sunday: Successfully troubleshot and repaired the non-functioning wipers on my 1993 Chevy Pickup. A time when cars were built in a way that one could do such things on their own.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-29T13:15:11.000Z

Stella Foster – Connect to What Matters

Access iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram. On any phone. Stella connects to your messaging apps and lets you access them from a second device — flip phone, feature phone, any phone.

An interesting idea for folks that make the switch to a not-so-smart phone.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-29T05:43:00.000Z

POAP 7578037 at I passed through Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN) in 2026.

Colorado trail run - Jim Bernard

2026-03-29T02:51:47.000Z

Got some time on trail when visiting EM and Pam!

Office Dog Best Dog - Jim Bernard

2026-03-29T02:50:21.000Z

I’m working at MinnPost right now and they are amazing, but importantly there is an office dog named Jake.

Escape in Europe — Day 14 - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-28T21:00:00.000Z

Mazie’s Barcelona Finale

9:00 AM: Informational session and Barcelona Finale Kickoff (BFK)
STOP 1: AirBNB
STOP 2: School (COACB Building)
STOP 3: Boldú
- Menu: Bolduman Praliné donut (Nutella for Tyler) or sandwich if you feel like it
STOP 4: Arc de Triomf
STOP 5: Parc de la Ciutadella
- This is the largest centrally located park and used to be part of the old city as well.
- Botanical gardens
- Fountain -Optional stop 5.5: Quick visit to the beach (short walk from Ciutadella)
STOP 6: EL Born Centre de Cultura
- View the Roman ruins -STOP 7: El Born: Explore
- Melocotón store
- Mostaza store
- Dr. Bloom store
STOP 8: Barrio Gótico: Explore
- Until the mid-1900s the entire city of Barcelona was crammed within these walls! Living conditions were horrific, life expectancy was low, hygiene was nonexistent; there was physically not enough room for the growing population to live and exist. Nowadays this is tourism centre.
STOP 9: La Basílica
- We can go in and take a look around, or not!
- Optional stop 9.5: Spend a little time at Placa Catalunya
STOP 10: University Botanical Gardens
STOP 11: Learnlife
- Maybe it looks different in the daylight…
- Optional stop 11.25: If anybody wants a real lunch, you can try an Empanada Pollastre from Forn de l’Eixample.
STOP 11.5: Casa Batlló
- This is one of Gaudí’s most iconic houses, located on the iconic La Rambla (also right off the pedestrian street) in the center of the city! It boasts an incredible street-facing facade but is supposedly unique and captivating from the inside as well. Assuming everyone would like to, we will be getting tickets to go inside and see it all.
STOP 12: 99 Cheesecake
- Menu: Base flavor= el clásico. Toppings= Kinder Bueno, Lotus, or Ferrero Rocher sauce. Optional toppings= Lacasitos (m&ms) or Katifi (Dubai chocolate)
STOP 13: Pedestrian street
- This is my favorite street to stroll down. It is so quiet and peaceful, and I may be partly making this up but it seems like many locals flock here for their commute. We will get to soak the street in on the walk to our next stop!
STOP 14: El Desván Bakery
- Menu: Recommended: Lemon Pie cookie. But honestly choose whichever flavor looks best!
- Recommendation: These cookies are large and you have just enjoyed cheesecake. We are probably best off sharing or saving for later.
- Optional Stop 14.5: Parc Joan Miró
- Gigantic, pretty park complete with lots of palm trees and a biblioteca!

Detour (45 minute walk, or 25 minute metro)

STOP 15: Grácia: Explore
- This is another one of my favorite areas of the city. Although gentrification is creeping in, locals still say it retains an incredibly distinct feel from the rest of the city. People from Grácia are proud to say there are from here. It is very obvious when you enter and leave the area, and I think it is one of the most charming and interesting areas of the whole city!
STOP 16: Padam
- My favorite store I have discovered here.

Return from Detour (45 minute walk, 15 minute metro)

STOP 17: La Alcobita (Dinner)
- Menu: Tapas. Patatas Bravas, avocado salad, pan con tomate, jamón Iberico

(45 minute walk, 25 minute metro)

9:00 PM: STOP 18: Air BNB
- Congrats! You made it and have now experienced Barcelona through Mazie’s eyes :) Certificate of completion to come. Satisfaction of the day already arrived.
- There’s always the Kinder Bueno churro

(Pack and get to bed)

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-28T16:26:17.000Z

99 Cheesecake is one of Mazie’s absolutely favorite spots in Barcelona. We have to agree! Her favorite is Lotus Crème, Kinder Bueno Blanc Crème, Kataifi.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-28T16:09:53.000Z

Fun stop exploring Gaudi House.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-28T14:26:36.000Z

Gelato break.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-28T13:16:30.000Z

Cathedral of Barcelona.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-28T13:05:37.000Z

Barcelona street scene.