Miro acquisition, WordPress drama, SuperReturn PE event on Monday: my inbox today in hindsight.
Triangulating VC, PE, open source, the future of work, and generations in 10 quick memos:
1. Miro was overvalued (as most of the 2021-2022 market was). The private SaaS market was as hyped as the AI one is today.
2. I’ve bought Zoom, Asana, Semrush and running at loss. Public markets of the 2010s were used to generating losses and growing freemium user base. This isn’t translating to upsells too often.
3. WordPress is in its own bubble. Still one of the most resilient platforms for large orgs in edu, government, publishing, lead generation websites at scale, content delivery systems, and some ecommerce. But lagging behind for years doesn’t justfy public drama.
4. The CMS market took a massive hit with the AI baloon. On top of all the foss CMS, then the Wix/Webflow/Squarespace, then FB pages and IG profiles, now not just Lovable or Replit, but virtually any vibed 1-shot Claude code build.
5. This is why the CMS market went through multiple waves of layoffs even among the top hosted giants (some sponsoring the Super Bowl more than once before).
6. Private equity isn’t good or bad. Just like entrepreneurship isn’t good or bad, managers aren’t, or CEOs aren’t, or waiters and cashiers aren’t. Some people are intrinsically good people and some aren’t, and the same goes for well-ran and poorly managed companies. Legal business models can be on all ends of the spectrum.
7. I love operating in/with PE companies because of data-driven economics that make rational sense more often than not. An initiative has GP goals, a synergy aims to 1+1=3. Far less gamble than VC with what we see out there.
8. Miro again, similarly to Airtable, sold for nearly 90% less than their last valuation. It’s only getting worse when LLMs change the rules, just like BPOs and offshore label did with IT jobs, and cloud did with on-premise, and SaaS did to fixed projects. Not the first time and won’t be the last – but the SaaSpocalypse is having a hard time if runway tightens up.
9. Open source is now repurposed and reused a lot more in vibe coded projects, but just as LLMs steal content without paying for that, the same happens with FOSS. The unequal unit economics of free content and code making it to 10x-100x more projects/sites/decks with the same if not lower return of capital will break the model, 100%.
10. Gen Zs walk on very thin ice. Abundance over the past decades didn’t incentivize hard work, and the global realities over the past 5-6 years (between pandemics/wars/recessions/AI) leads to a hectic job market. It’s appalling what Facebook groups or subreddits do to bash layoffs or companies withdrawing remote, while swimming in hundreds of thousands of photos from WFH in the sea/skiing resorts or record low productivity for far too many companies that aren’t allowed to publicly talk about that as stocks will evaporate.
What will Q4 look like this year?
