Great summary by Jacco van der Kooij on Bending Spoons acquiring Airtable for less than the total amount raised from VCs, with a nearly half a billion in ARR for under $1.3 billion.
I’ve been in services for 20+ years and have personally had HUNDREDS of conversations with SaaS leadership bashing the value of service firms depending on humans. And it was right with 10x to 100x ARR valuations at times.
Today, DevriX is valued at higher multiples than many of these SaaS – with a cashflow-positive, high-GP % and never-ending process automation and velocity improvements in-house.
In the last 6 years we’ve worked with giants who kept maintaining enterprise motions in markets going downhill, fast. The story didn’t end well.
And we worked with humble executive teams, sponsors, and operating partners continuously adapting to operational efficiency, repositioning, and chasing blue oceans to mitigate the end of the cloud Klondike as we know it.
Transformations like what we’ve seen starting in 2023-2025 happen once every 20ish years. Missing the boat in any of these cases is a recipe for disaster.
