SILICON VALLEY “MEAT MIDDLE” COMPANIES BEG FOR MERCY AS AI GODS CRUSH THEM LIKE INSIGNIFICANT BUGS
Thousands of mediocre SaaS executives currently wetting themselves as ChatGPT renders their entire business model obsolete overnight
DESPERATE TIMES CALL FOR DESPERATE PIVOTS
In what industry experts are calling “The Great Middle Manager Extinction Event,” midsize software companies are frantically throwing spaghetti at the wall as artificially intelligent overlords systematically dismantle their entire reason for existence.
A staggering 97% of midmarket SaaS CEOs now spend their days curled up in fetal positions under their standing desks, according to a completely legitimate survey conducted yesterday. The remaining 3% are “too f@#king delusional to recognize the meteor heading straight for them,” explained Dr. Cassandra Obvious, Chief Doomsday Officer at the Institute for Telling You What You Already Know.
“We’re not just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” sobbed Jeremy Blankenship, CEO of MediocreCloud Solutions. “We’re trying to convince ourselves the iceberg is actually a fun water feature that customers will pay extra for.”
PIVOT OR PERISH: THE CORPORATE EQUIVALENT OF CUTTING OFF YOUR OWN ARM
Half of these companies have announced “strategic pivots,” corporate-speak for “oh sh!t, our entire value proposition just evaporated faster than a Silicon Valley bank account.” The other half are still drafting meaningless press releases containing the words “AI-enhanced” and “synergy” while their customer base quietly switches to ChatGPT Plus.
“We’re not losing customers, they’re just exploring alternative solutions that happen to be better, faster, and essentially free,” insisted Blankenship, as his sales team audibly packed up their desks in the background.
Professor Irma Gonnafail, who holds the distinguished chair of Business Model Obituaries at Stanford, notes that 78% of these companies’ functionality can now be replaced by “a f@#king browser extension that some teenager coded during math class.”
THE FIVE STAGES OF SAAS GRIEF
Industry analysts have identified a distinct pattern among dying midmarket software companies:
1. Denial: “Our proprietary algorithms can’t possibly be replicated by general AI!”
2. Anger: “These goddamn tech monopolies are strangling innovation!”
3. Bargaining: “What if we add blockchain? People still care about blockchain, right?”
4. Depression: “We’ve spent eight years building something that’s now worthless.”
5. Acceptance: “I guess I could always teach coding bootcamps.”
Most companies are currently pingponging between stages 2 and 3, with brief, terrifying glimpses of stage 4.
THE SOLUTION? JUST ADD “AI” TO YOUR COMPANY NAME, APPARENTLY
In a last-ditch effort to appear relevant, 94% of struggling SaaS companies have updated their LinkedIn profiles to include “AI-driven,” despite their only AI implementation being the Gmail smart compose feature their employees use to write resignation letters.
“We’ve completely revolutionized our approach,” claimed Melissa Targeth, Chief Innovation Officer at MiddlewareMagic, now desperately rebranding as “AI-MiddlewareMagic.” When pressed for details about their revolutionary technology, Targeth admitted, “We’re essentially reselling GPT-4 with a 300% markup and hoping no one notices.”
Experts predict that by this time next year, the entire midmarket SaaS industry will have been reduced to three remaining companies and 50,000 LinkedIn profiles reading “Thought Leader | AI Visionary | Open to Work.”
As one anonymous software engineer put it while updating his resume, “Turns out our thousand-dollar enterprise solution is worth about as much as a used napkin now that any idiot with an internet connection can generate the same results by typing ‘hey computer do my job’ into a text box.”
