I was probably early on the SaaSpocalypse train.
David Friedberg, CEO of Ohalo Genetics, with an admission that might mirror a lot of start-up and SMB orgnaizations, namely that the theoretical allure of using AI frontier models to replace enterprise systems of records looked appealing, at first sight at least. He recalls:
I always said like I think SaaS was this temporary phenomenon between the founding of the Internet and the start of AI. But I think that it’s a little more nuanced than that.
Ohalo Genetics is a firm that focuses on radically accelerating crop improvement using proprietary proteins and gene‑editing techniques that alter plant reproductive biology. What marks them out from others in their field is that Ohalo does not introduce foreign DNA into the process, but rather it restructures how existing genomes are inherited.
Its proprietary hybrid breeding system eliminates the need for vegetative propagation by producing uniform seed that in turn reduces time, cost, and pesticide use. As per the corporate blah blah:
Ohalo’s technology aims to deliver millennia of genetic progress in a single breeding cycle, potentially transforming global agriculture by increasing yields, reducing input costs, and improving climate resilience.
The firm is named after an agricultural find in the Sea of Galilee, Friedberg explains:
They found this old pot of seeds, 20,000 years. It kind of re-wrote what we thought about the history of agriculture and plant breeding. So we named it after that little village.
Ohana, meet Ohala
Nowadays, as well as all the impressive genetic achievements it can boast, Ohala is part of the Salesforce ‘Ohana’. So did flirting with the SaaSpocalypse thesis not work out? Friedberg explains:
We did a little vibe coding. I did a vibe code to make a CRM product over the weekend. And you quickly realize just how much it takes to do maintenance, to do accounts, to do security. There’s just much more to it.
We realized pretty quickly there are certain, I would say, software applications that are maybe verticalized where you have to build custom workflows that make sense for your particular business.
But then there’s platform software. And platform software, we realized pretty quickly is really what we need to build our entire company around. And Salesforce is what we kind of decided to go with on CRM.
He points to Salesforce’s Slack collaboration platform as a case in point:
We’re not going to go vibe code Slack. We’re not going to vibe code CRM. But we build custom workflows, custom interfaces, custom prospecting tools [for] my Sales teams. I’ve got agents that are out scanning public county databases, trying to find where farmers are planting what crops, what their names are, what their contact info is. I’ve got agents doing all sorts of prospecting.
That interface gives my Sales team leads that integrates with Salesforce. They can then go run the standard workflows that are a little bit more standardized across verticals. And we can build all of our custom workflows in parallel and in concert with the Salesforce tool.
Platforms though are bought in, he says:
I think it goes back to this point about where do we create value. I’m not going to create value as a business by doing something that everyone else does. If everyone else is using Microsoft Excel, I’m not going to go build Microsoft Excel. If everyone else is using an ERP tool, well, we integrate with NetSuite, and [Salesforce has] an integration with NetSuite. We’re not going to go build an ERP tool, and we’re not going to go build Slack. We’re not going to build communications and messaging. We’re not going to build CRM.
Vertical exceptions
That’s not to say that Ohana only buys rather than builds, he adds:
Verticalized SaaS, where you try and standardize a vertical on a bunch of workflows…[platforms] actually destroy value in that vertical because everyone is now doing the same thing in the same way, so no-one can differentiate in that vertical. We’ve actually dumped all our vertical software. We make all of our verticalized SaaS in-house.
But the horizontal, the platform…this is really where I think we’ve realized that’s actually going to get bolstered and it’s more valuable with all the other capabilities we can now build around it. So I’m definitely sold in that sense… We’re going to build custom interfaces for doing plant breeding.
He adds:
We’re going to build custom interfaces for doing plant breeding. We’re going to build custom interfaces for prospecting customers. We’re going to build custom interfaces for selecting the right product for a farmer based on my satellite and radar imagery that shows me what that farmer’s field is going to look like next season, making an estimation and then making the right product selections for him.
So the interface to do that for my Sales team, for my customers, that’s where we add value. And then the actual following up with the customer, connecting with the customer record, making that transaction record, storing it, that needs to be done safely, securely. It needs to be done with the right account settings, the right access. That’s what we’re not going to go build.
This bi-partisan build-and-buy approach has procurement implications, he notes:
Now when we make a selection, it has to be a selection with standard platforms that we can work with that integrate, that have the integration capabilities that have the ability to service and support.
Again he points to Slack as an examplar:
Internally, we use Slack. That’s our primary communication messaging tool. And in Slack, we’ve got an Ask HR channel now. And so we basically use Claude to set up an Ask HR channel that anyone in my company can ask the HR questions that they would normally spend time calling up the HR people saying, ‘Hey, I got this question, I got this question’.
Ask HR has access to all of our internal HR documents. It knows who you are, whether or not it can access your personal information, it knows standard benefits policies, and it could just answer all your questions for you through Ask HR. I don’t need to go build a communications tool to do that. I can leverage Slack and I can leverage Claude to deliver that internally.
It’s another good example of kind of the sort of thing where we can build something custom using our internal benefits, our internal HR policies, but then we can leverage the platforms and Claude to deliver that.
So, no more talk of the SaaSpocalypse? Well, no, up to a point, it seems, as Friedberg admits:
I think there’s still a SaaSpocalypse but with a lower case ’s’ rather than the upper case ’S’, for verticalized tools where I think AI really allows you to re-build something that’s unique, which creates value for your business in a vertical.