Cole: B2B software serving AI-displaced workers faces high risk of non-renewal
Michelle Cole · 24 - Inside a Hands-On Venture Studio with Paragraph Partner Michelle Cole · Feb 13, 2025 · at 10:55
Michelle Cole, partner at Paragraph, discusses how macroeconomic shifts and AI workforce displacement impact software renewal rates.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Basically, right now, you can look at where AI is going and see that lots of jobs are being displaced. If you have software that is serving the people that are being displaced, you're likely to not be renewed.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Michelle Cole
Cole: Relying on customer success to sell software signals weak product-market fit
“If you need customer success for your product to be Appealing, then you need to get back to that product market fit. Then you probably don't have good product market fit and you need to enhance that as opposed to supplementing it with people.”
Cole: Founders who love the $0-20M stage should sell, not scale further
“I think it's really important that if you really love doing zero to 20, That you just do zero to 20, and when it gets to 20, you sell, and you give it to somebody else who really loves 20 to 50, and you go back to do zero to 20 again.”
Cole: Internal champions prevent B2B SaaS churn more than industry vertical
“Also, when you have a champion who cares about your product and helps it be implemented, that is Is critical when you go to do renewals. If that champion is not there any longer, then you're likely to have churn. So that I think is more important, at least in …”
Paragraph launches $10M fund aiming to build 15 workspace SaaS startups
“Basically, we are a ten million dollar fund that is investing in B to B SaaS products that are in the future of workspace, and we are excited to build about 15 companies in the next five years, and so just lots of different things going on.”
Cole says Envisage Technologies exited for hundreds of millions of dollars
“It was in the multiple hundred million.”
Cole: NPS correlated with renewals remains the gold standard SaaS metric
“I think that the sort of gold standard at this point is your net promoter score and looking at how you're doing in that and then correlating that to renewals. And if you have a nine, then you're this likely to renew. And if you have an eight, you're like this …”