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Howdy y'all. SXSW will be in full swing here in Austin this week, and it feels like this year's conference is going to take the AI hypetrain to the next level. I created a purpose-built app to help me & my network keep track of what's happening (more on that below).
If you'll be at SXSW, see what's on my Docket for the week & reply to this message to let me know what's on yours!
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đź’ˇ What's On The Docket
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Every year, in preparation for SXSW, I pull together five different spreadsheets just to figure out where I'm going, and the second the conference kicks off, last-minute popups and shifting plans blow it all up.
This year I decided to do something about it. I spent the last week building Docket, my own SXSW itinerary app. It got me thinking about what it means that I could build it at all.
In this week's essay, I wrote about the future of custom software, and why I'm excited about it. Read the full essay on LinkedIn.
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đź«€ The Ecosystem Pulse
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The SaaSpocalypse is ~a month old at this point, and top venture capital firms are putting stakes in the ground to tell the story of what comes next. These three pieces form a coherent (if not always aligned) map of how AI will reshape the software landscape that has been built over the last two decades.
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• What Comes Next Is Bigger Than SaaS Ever Was (NFX): This piece is the most aggressive — NFX seems to be pushing founders the hardest to move on from the old SaaS paradigm. The key stat: the value of the labor market is $50–$60T vs. $1T for software.
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• Good News: AI Will Eat Application Software (a16z): This writeup takes a more defensive angle, breaking down the biggest SaaSpocalypse talking points one-by-one. They believe companies with deep workflow ownership, process knowledge, and network effects will actually get stronger as AI models improve.
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• Jeremy Levine on AI Hype, Market Cycles & Playing the Long Game (Bessemer): Levine argues that network effects are the only moat that matters in an age of AI. He points to Bessemer PortCos either defending their network effects (Shopify) or developing new ones (Relevance, Hockeystack).
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The true value of SaaS businesses was never in the code itself. Generic, thin-wrapper software is dead, but deeply embedded, workflow-native intelligence is just getting started.
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🤝 airCFO Content Connection
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LinkedIn: Startup Tool Evaluation Scorecard
We've been thinking a lot about how to evaluate your tech stack here at airCFO (more on that soon), so we built a Startup Tool Evaluation Scorecard to walk you through it. We've seen firsthand how the wrong choices in your tool stack early on can slow you down later. Here's a good framework to follow.
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LinkedIn: Claude Code Quickstart Guide
In case you missed it, I shared my Claude Code quickstart guide on LinkedIn. In May 2025, I wrote my first line of non-Excel code. Ten months later: 500,000+ lines across 6 codebases, two published web apps, and two tools live internally at airCFO. Take a look if you haven't yet!
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That's all for this edition of The AI CFO — we'll be back in your inbox soon with more musings on the future of AI-powered finance & operations. Please reply to this email directly with any feedback/suggestions/just to say hi!
Cheers,
Alex Wittenberg, CEO @ airCFO
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