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EV Einar Vollset On Startups For the Rest of Us

“It's the first time in at least 10 or 15 years that leadership really matters in companies large and small. For the longest time, once you got to a certain size and you had a SaaS and you had this retention, you couldn't really screw it up all that badly… You really can. And people will for sure.”

Startups For the Rest of Us · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026

“It's the first time in at least 10 or 15 years that leadership really matters in companies large and small. For the longest time, once you got to a certain size and you had a SaaS and you had this retention, you couldn't really screw it up all that badly… You really can. And people will for sure.” — Einar Vollset, Startups For the Rest of Us

Responding to Rob Walling's prediction that 10 to 20% of SaaS companies will go to zero or plateau because of AI, with Squarespace as his example of a big one at risk.

Transcript

Startups For the Rest of Us Around 12:24 into the episode
Einar Vollset

…that that's really one of the big unknowns. Is like, I think it's undoubtedly true that a lot of these things is coming. The question is like, how quickly does it spread through the economy and into your niche? Like that, I think, will depend on like what your customers are like and all that stuff.

Rob Walling

…going to go to zero tomorrow, but they're going to plateau. Like I, I'm moving all my sites off there onto static sites. And I think a lot of other people are. There are now services. I mean, I interviewed Nathan from Blink Pages, a Tiny Sea company, and he's starting up a whole service to do that.

Einar Vollset

Yeah, there's no doubt about that. I think fundamentally, a lot of these things are changing. And I think like how these companies react is going to have a huge impact. And it's almost like it's the first time in like at least 10 or 15 years that leadership really matters, you know, in companies large and small. Because like for the longest kind of time, like once you get to a certain size and you had a SaaS and you had this retention and you had this, you couldn't really screw it up all that badly. Now you can't. Like, you know, like you really can. And people will for sure.

Rob Walling

And unless a company like Squarespace comes up with a whole new kind of AI first approach with static sites that it supports, if it does that, they'll survive. But if it doesn't, I just don't, I don't see how they do it long term. So let's dive into this. There's a lot of, we see it in Tiny Sea…

Einar Vollset

Fathom.

Rob Walling

Fathom, yep. They're all kind of the same now because you just get to feature parity real quick. And so Otter, I believe, launched in 2016 and Granola launched in 2024, eight years apart. And they're kind of the same product because AI just gets you there. So this is something that even if you have…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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