Ashwin Sreenivas, co-founder of Decagon, rejects the argument that foundation models and AGI will make SaaS and software obsolete.
Opinion
Sreenivas: AI startups relying permanently on FDEs become glorified consultancies
“Once you know what the workflow is, you should not be relying on forward deployed engineers anymore, because once you know what the workflow is, If you can productize it, you should productize it and then become, you know, typical company with these scaling pr…”
Insight
Sreenivas: Deploying custom open-source models eliminates major AI cost pressures
“If we ran our entire business exclusively on frontier models, I would care a lot about costs, and I would think a lot about that, but once you're already, once you've already made the jump to saying, okay, now, now we know how to think about open source models…”
Insight
Sreenivas: Early-stage AI startups need forward-deployed engineers for unproven workflows
“Forward deployed engineers are necessary or newly necessary for early stage AI companies because the workflows are new. Right? If you're building a SaaS company five years ago, most SaaS products are pretty well explored, right? Like you roughly know what the …”
Insight
Sreenivas: AI productivity gains will drive companies to build more, not fire
“Everybody has access to these tools, and so if our competitors are going to use them and build more things, we need to build more things, right? If somebody else said, oh, here's our roadmap, and now we can get through it in, you know, a third of the time, and…”
Insight
Sreenivas: Optimizing AI agents breaks the cost, latency, and performance tradeoff
“Performance latency and accuracy is definitely the driving factor for most of this, right? Cost is a nice benefit in that, you know surprisingly, this is one of the few like tasks where you kind of get all the things for free, right? Like we don't actually hav…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sreenivas: AI application companies may eventually evolve into vertical model labs
“I think there will always be a space for application layer companies. Maybe in the longterm application layer companies just become labs for specific verticals, you know, because your primary product ends up being The models that are just really good at doing …”