Mar 2, 2026 · 1h 14m · news
Monday.com CEO on Is SaaS Dead: Will Everything Be Vibe Coded | Eran Zinman · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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In this episode of 20VC, Monday.com co-CEO Eran Zinman sits down with Harry Stebbings to discuss how the company is navigating the "SaaSpocalypse," systematically debunking AI-driven doomsday theories while spearheading an aggressive transition to an agentic software platform.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 22.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.8 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 2.5 Harry pushing back 4.1
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 48:11 Eran rejects public vs private advantage premise
Eran forcefully rejects Harry's framing that private companies hold an inherent advantage in AI, arguing 'the opposite' and dismissing corporate defensive posturing.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 18:24 Harry challenges Monday's hiring plans against AI claimsHarry directly calls out Monday's 20% headcount growth plans as 'completely paradoxical' to Eran's claims about AI efficiency and contrasts it with Klarna's deep headcount cuts.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:05 Eran uses AWS history to contextualize LLM layer threatsEran educates Harry on why LLM model providers will not swallow enterprise applications by drawing a detailed historical parallel to AWS launching cloud infrastructure.
Harry holds his own ▶ 18:24 Harry cites Monday analyst day data and Klarna operational metricsHarry uses specific research metrics from Monday's analyst day and Klarna's public headcount figures to challenge Eran's thesis on AI driving software efficiency.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Hook: Ran Over by a Truck | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Harry opens by asking why Monday.com's public market stock price is beaten down despite solid fundamentals. Eran distinguishes operational business reality from the severe negative market sentiment shift regarding SaaS. | |
| Three Doomsday Scenarios for SaaS | 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 | Harry presses on whether 'vibe coding' and AI agents will extract SaaS value away into simple databases. Eran counters by breaking down doomsday scenarios and noting how hard software maintenance is relative to generating a simple UI. | |
| Debunking Scenario 2: Will LLM Giants Capture the Application Layer? | 5 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Harry asks if model giants like Anthropic or OpenAI will capture application layer software value. Eran uses the historical analogy of AWS to educate Harry on why infrastructure providers do not swallow domain-specific enterprise software. | |
| Debunking Scenario 3: The Threat of an Agentic Future (Database vs Interaction) | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | Harry questions where SaaS value resides if agents turn platforms into passive databases. Eran acknowledges that AI flips the work done inside tools from 20% to 80% and argues the software TAM will grow 100x. | |
| The Exponential Growth of Software TAM vs. Headcount | 7 | 3 | 4 | 8 | Harry cites Monday's analyst day projection of 20% headcount growth, challenging Eran on how that fits with AI efficiency promises. Eran defends the hiring transition period while Harry brings up aggressive headcount cuts by Klarna's CEO. | |
| How Monday.com is Using AI Internally for Efficiency | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Harry asks for internal operational examples of AI efficiency. Eran details replacing 100 SDRs with AI agents and cutting lead contact time from 24 hours to 3 minutes. | |
| Engineering with Cursor/Claude and Headcount Projections for 2030 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Harry asks about R&D tool adoption (Cursor vs Claude Code) and presses Eran for a 2030 headcount forecast. Eran expects headcount to remain around 3,000 rather than expanding significantly. | |
| AI Native vs Bolt-On AI Strategy | 6 | 5 | 3 | 6 | Harry critiques legacy SaaS for using 'bolt-on AI' strategies rather than being AI-native. Eran candidly admits Monday's initial mistake of 'sprinkling AI dust' before committing to full platform transformation. | |
| Monday's Vision: Orchestrating Humans and Agents | 6 | 6 | 4 | 7 | Eran outlines Monday's strategy to orchestrate collaboration between humans and AI agents. Harry challenges whether ChatGPT or OpenAI will win enterprise workflow collaboration first. | |
| The Big Shift in the Monday Product & Adoption Speed | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Harry asks about the real pace of enterprise AI adoption. Eran argues that enterprise adoption takes years because 90% of business context is unwritten and floats in human heads. | |
| AI's Impact on Customer Acquisition Funnels | 5 | 6 | 2 | 4 | Harry asks how AI search (GEO) impacts customer acquisition funnels. Eran discloses that Google AI Overviews directly reduced Monday's new ARR acquisition by roughly 10%. | |
| Share Buybacks and Insider Skin in the Game | 6 | 4 | 3 | 7 | Harry directly asks Eran why he has not personally bought back shares during the stock drop, referencing ServiceNow's CEO. Eran cites 10b5-1 restrictions and highlights that he still holds over 80% of his IPO shares. | |
| The Psychological Toll of a Pummeled Stock Price | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Harry probes the psychological toll of leading through a stock market crash. Eran shares his experience waking up at 3 AM and feeling a sense of relief when the stock hit bottom, allowing him to focus on building. | |
| Public vs Private Company Advantages in the AI Era | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Harry asks if private competitors hold an advantage over public companies in the AI era. Eran rejects the premise, asserting that public market scrutiny forces necessary transformation. | |
| Playing Offense and Why Monday Will Remain Public | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | Harry asks why Eran does not take the company private or make major M&A acquisitions with its $1.5B cash balance. Eran notes that Monday generates 27% free cash flow and explains the valuation disconnect in private M&A. | |
| Personal Resilience and Family Support | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | A personal exchange on resilience where Eran praises his family's support and Harry shares a personal story about crying in Leicester Square during a tough fundraising period. | |
| Filtering Out the Noise & Going All In | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Harry asks about offensive moves against incumbents like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and HubSpot. Eran emphasizes going all-in on CRM and Service products. | |
| Incumbents' Ability to Change vs Market Mispricing | 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Eran discusses how market sentiment underestimates incumbents' ability to change. He declines to pick between competitors, focusing on execution speed. | |
| Quick-Fire: The Humility of the AI Race & Berkshire's Cash | 6 | 5 | 3 | 3 | In a quick-fire round, Harry asks Eran to choose between investing in OpenAI or Anthropic. Eran calls for humility, pointing out how rapidly market narratives flip every three months. | |
| Final Thoughts on Cycles, Wix Partnership, and the Future of Quality of Life | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Eran reflects on stock market cycles and quotes Stripe investor Ken Fox on decoupling stock price from business performance. The conversation concludes on family life and AI's impact on quality of life. |
Statements from this episode (55)
Zinman: Public markets are pricing Monday.com as worth zero
“What the market is saying to me is, the company is worth zero.”
Stebbings: Monday.com is valued at $3.9B despite $1.3B in revenue
“With close to 1.3 billion in revenue, they're valued today at just 3.9 billion dollars in the public markets.”
Zinman: Buyers will reject software that doesn't do most work
“Nobody will want to buy The software, they're not doing the majority of the work for them.”
Zinman: Monday.com is undergoing the largest pivot in its history
“It's the biggest pivot moment for us in the history of the company.”
Zinman: Enterprise spending on software will grow 100x
“The time of software, how much companies are going to spend on software is going to be a hundred X for what it is today.”
Zinman: Software fundamentals remain strong despite negative market sentiment
“If you look at the earning calls and how business operate, everything is, is kind of normal. Some companies are even exceeded expectations and businesses are working great, but at the same time, The sentiment has shifted drastically, like I've never seen befor…”
Zinman: Enterprise SaaS faces five distinct AI doomsday scenarios
“Yeah, so first of all, I think there's like five Doomeday scenarios I'm familiar with, so that's one of them. But, you know, I'll just take you back a little bit in time, but first of all, it was everything about people will Vibe code their own apps. That was …”
Zinman: Vibe coding will not disrupt software companies
“So I think at the end of the day, vibe coding is amazing technology, but I don't think it's going to disrupt software companies.”
Zinman: Enterprise-wide software sales cannot rely purely on PLG
“Nobody's gonna buy software for the entire organization based on purely PLG play, and the way they're gonna adopt, they wanna be handheld especially if you wanna use the software across the organization.”
Zinman: OpenAI and Anthropic won't capture all enterprise software value
“So I'm not saying people will not use Entropic and OpenAI, for sure they will, but I don't think they're gonna capture all the enterprise value. Because they have a much bigger opportunity ahead of them, and it's not their focus.”
Zinman: Historically 90% of enterprise work occurred outside software tools
“90% of the work was done outside of the tool.”
Zinman: AI will handle 70% to 80% of enterprise work
“I think AI can potentially do 70, 80% of the work, and not 10, 20%, like it used to be before AI was brought into our lives.”
Zinman: Monday.com spends 60-70% on headcount versus 7-8% on software
“A company like Monday, let's say we have like one billion in expenses, a company like Monday will probably spend, you know, 60, 70% of the budget on headcount and then seven, eight percent on software.”
Zinman: Companies will shift spending from headcount to software as AI scales
“As AI become more dominant, companies will spend much more on software and much less on headcount going forward because they'll just become more efficient, and they'll gladly spend that.”
Monday.com lowered headcount growth guidance to mid-teens, may cut further
“In the last earning call, we said it's going to be mid teens. And I think there's also potential, you know, we might even take it lower.”
Zinman: Massively cutting headcount won't fix investor perception of Monday.com
“I don't think that you know, if we reduce ad count dramatically, it will change you know, investor perception about Monday. I don't, I just don't think that's the essence of what we're seeing in the market.”
Zinman: All major Monday.com investors prioritize revenue acceleration above all else
“I've talked with, you know, all of our major investors and everybody's saying the same thing. Eventually what they want to see is businesses revenue accelerate.”
Monday.com replaced 100-person inbound SDR team with AI agents
“We had a team of about a hundred SDRs and we now doing, doing it with agents. A hundred percent is being done with agents. We move those SDRs to do outbound.”
Monday.com cut customer response time from 24 hours to 3 minutes using AI
“It used to take, on average, 24 hours to get back to a customer. Now it takes three minutes.”
Zinman: AI developer productivity gains create new non-coding engineering bottlenecks
“On one hand, we see increase in personal productivity, but again, there's new bottlenecks you find each time you increase one of those productivities, and basically we're on a journey to increase more and more the output of our R&D team.”
Zinman: Monday.com headcount will not grow substantially by 2030
“So today we have about 3000 people and gonna be when? ... My gut feeling is, is probably we're not gonna grow substantially.”
Zinman: Public SaaS companies will match AI startups in agentic work
“On one hand, I see people excited about private companies because they build tools in the AI era that kind of captured the, what I've referred to as doing the work, but I'll tell you a secret. You know, public companies will do it as well. We're going to do it…”
Zinman: Monday.com's early AI features were superficial sugarcoating
“We built some AI features, but like you said, I call it we sprinkled some AI dust on top of our product. So essentially we didn't know what to build. So we built a way for people to be, build formulas using AI. We built AI blocks, AI columns, but essentially i…”
Zinman: Monday.com will transition entirely to consumption-based pricing
“Well, eventually I think it's gonna be more consumption and then entirely consumption going forward. So I think there's also be a transition, but now it's gonna be hybrid, and eventually it's gonna be a hundred percent consumption.”
Zinman: Companies will adopt specialized vertical AI tools across key departments
“So basically companies want to adopt AI and they're gonna adopt vertical tools to do that. Like the you know, the SDR example I gave you, maybe another example for support for legal, there's a lot of vertical solutions people are gonna adopt.”
Zinman: Monday.com plans to be the default platform for enterprise AI orchestration
“And we want to make Monday the default place for people to build agents and to collaborate between agents and people. So essentially you'll build Monday, you build agents on the top of Monday. Those agents will output tables, docs, files. People will go over i…”
Zinman: ChatGPT and Claude won't win enterprise AI orchestration
“I don't think that ChatGPT or Gemini on Tropic are going to do it, because going back to my the second theory that we discussed, you know, of course, you know, people are buying a Tropic Claude, they're buying ChatGPT, but it's not a tool where you work with a…”
Zinman: Software built on LLMs will grow exponentially, not shrink
“I think if anything, we're going to see an excess of software being built on top of the LLMs, not less, exponentially more because the opportunity is so massive and the time is so huge.”
Zinman: Users not building AI agents are using Monday.com improperly
“If you haven't built an agent on Monday, you're not using the product properly. And that's a major shift. The boards, the dashboards are going to be more in the background and the agents more in the forefront.”
Zinman: 90% of company context remains undocumented
“And if you think about any company, even Monday itself, 90% of the context is not documented anywhere. Nobody knows it.”
Zinman: Google AI search hit 10% of Monday.com's new ARR acquisition
“It was about 10% of our acquisition in terms of new ARR but again, Google is very transactional, so people usually, when they're searching for something, they're willing to buy at this point because the intent is very high, so we lost some of the more transact…”
Monday.com announced an $870M stock buyback over 2-3 years
“Well, we are we announced a buyback program of eight hundred and seventy million. And we said we're gonna spend it over the last, next two, three years. We already done some buyback in Q four.”
Monday.com leadership team is not selling any company shares
“Not myself or my partner Roy, Or the rest of the leadership team is selling shares. I, in my 10 B five, I have you know, a number I'm not willing to go below in terms of selling shares. And I can say the price now is much, much lower than that number. So I'm n…”
Zinman has retained over 80% of his Monday.com equity since IPO
“Since the IPO, I still hold again, I don't know the exact number, but probably 80 something percent of my share. So I sold less than 20%. 14 years in this journey.”
Zinman: Monday.com has $1.5B cash, no debt, and $1.3B ARR
“Roughly, let's say, 1.5 billion in the bank cash. No debt. So the enterprise value is two billion. We have like, Again, I don't want to disclose specific numbers. Let's say over a 1.3 billion of ARR. So it's like 1.5 multiple.”
Zinman: Software industry sentiment is at an all-time low
“I feel this is like the lowest sentiment that software companies ever had.”
Stebbings: Stripe's private status gives it an advantage over public rival Adyen
“If you look at Stripe and Adyen, I think Stripe have an inherent advantage in being private that Adyen don't have because they're public in what they can do, how aggressive they can be, how they approach product, you name it.”
Zinman: Public companies hold an advantage over private rivals in market shifts
“I think the opposite. The opposite. Because if you kind of relate to what I've said, you know, I feel like I was kicked in the head so many times by now that, okay, I get it. And I feel when you're private, you know, you can try and ignore what's going on and …”
Zinman: Monday.com will remain public with no reason to go private
“No. I don't see a reason. No. Look, I think at the end of the day, you know, you can be private, you can be public. The question is, do you need to raise more money? And we don't. We generate 27% of free cash flow. We don't need to raise more money. We have ev…”
Zinman: Monday.com gross retention rate is at an all-time high
“I see the retention rate highest ever, gross retention highest ever.”
Zinman: Relying on startup acquisitions is a failure of CEO leadership
“If I need to bet the whole company future on an acquisition of a startup, I'm not doing my job as a CEO.”
Zinman: LPs will eventually stop pouring money into private tech startups
“At some point, investors are going to see the same company 20 times a month, and LPs is, is, is not going to pour a lot of money, and I get it.”
Zinman: Many tech CEOs fail to grasp magnitude of required changes
“Some CEOs are... I wouldn't say ignoring the problem, but don't understand the magnitude of what needs to change. And I think some are more kind of advanced in how they think about it and understand the magnitude of what needs to be changed.”
Zinman: Monday.com can reaccelerate growth and exceed past potential via AI
“But the way I look at this today is maybe this is our biggest opportunity as a company. Maybe we waited for that moment. And if we did the right things, we can reaccelerate the company and even grow much larger than what we could have become as a company.”
Zinman: Monday.com has hit bottom and will grow from here
“And if you ask me today how I feel great because as I told you, we hit the bottom or maybe close to the bottom. And from here we can only grow and focus on execution.”
Zinman: Monday.com is pivoting entirely to AI agents
“One, in terms of our horizontal platform, we're going all in agents and humans working together. We're shifting the product a hundred percent, the pricing, the go-to-market, the product. We have two vertical offerings, the CRM and service. For that, we're buil…”
Zinman: Salesforce and ServiceNow markets are open to AI competitors
“The way I look at this today, service dominated by ServiceNow, CRM dominated by Salesforce is open market today.”
Zinman: Investors underestimate software incumbents' ability and willingness to adapt
“I think in general, I think investors underestimate incumbents ability to change their willingness to change the motivation to change.”
Zinman: Public software valuations will rise as incumbents demonstrate AI acceleration
“I think the cycle is going to shift once you know, like fungus after the rain, you're going to see another public company change and accelerate, another one accelerate, and then investors are going to say you know, it happens, so let's rethink who else is goin…”
Zinman: Monday.com leadership fails to adequately tell company strategy
“I think one thing that I think we can do better is to tell a story in a better way. I think Roy, myself, we're not even though we do great marketing for our product, I don't think we tell the story good enough for the company, and definitely that's something t…”
Zinman: Tech industry is missing 90% of how AI will play out
“It's a horse race, and I think we're probably missing 90% of the picture of how it's gonna play out.”
Zinman: Anthropic currently holds more momentum than OpenAI
“Definitely, I feel And Tropic have a little bit more momentum right now. They can change. And it will change, I'm sure.”
Zinman: Monday.com stock peak to $400 was driven entirely by sentiment
“I remember when our stock went, went up to 400. After we IPO'd and one of our investors told me something, Ken Fox from Stripes. He told me something which was brilliant. He told me, isn't it great that the stock is going up without the revenue going up? And I…”
Shorts cut from this episode
▶ How AI is Making monday.com More Efficient · 20VC with Harry (@22:10)
▶ The biggest opportunity (in our lifetime) in software · 20VC (@0:35)
▶ Monday.com CEO: Some days I feel like I was ran over by a tr (@0:00)
▶ Vibe Coding ≠ Building Software · 20VC with Harry Stebbings (@5:58)
▶ People underestimate how hard software is to maintain · 20VC (@7:02)