Good morning. Andrew here. It has become clear to me over the last two weeks that the power of artificial intelligence has shifted and accelerated in ways that are not fully appreciated yet. Something called OpenClaw is a new agent of the future — and it’s already here. Sarah Kessler goes deep on one of the biggest questions at the moment: What happens to traditional software companies if anyone can now code an app? She also has an interview with the founder of a buzzworthy new matchmaking company. And please make sure to take our quiz on the K-shaped economy. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Software’s A.I. identity crisisWhen ChatGPT came out in November 2022, Eoghan McCabe was about a month into his second stint as C.E.O. of Intercom, the customer service software company he had co-founded a decade earlier. Growth had ground to a near halt, and now he had another problem. McCabe foresaw an existential crisis: If chatbots could answer customer queries, and if they replaced customer service agents, companies “wouldn’t need help desks — they wouldn’t need the software anymore.” He decided that Intercom needed to become an artificial intelligence company, or risk becoming obsolete. More than three years later, similar realizations about the potential for A.I. to disrupt software are suddenly rippling through public markets and wreaking havoc on the industry. And that existential crisis has spawned an identity crisis: Software companies at every stage — from start-ups to publicly traded corporations — have been working hard to be seen as A.I. companies. Sparkles emojis and magic wand icons are everywhere, “.ai” has become a popular website domain, and venture capital investors say almost all of the pitches they’re fielding from software start-ups have some kind of A.I. angle. The reason for the panic is clear: Over the past 12 months, software stocks have seen their biggest plunge in more than 30 years, wiping out $2 trillion of market capitalization from the peak, according to J.P. Morgan. The S&P North American Expanded Technology Software Index has dropped about 20 percent in just the past month. And shares of the software giants Salesforce and ServiceNow are down more than 40 percent over the past year. A lot of that damage has come just in the past several weeks, as the release of powerful new A.I. tools, like Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, have put into sharp relief how quickly the technology is advancing. Much the way that software has long disrupted whole industries, A.I.’s arrival is redefining what it means to be an innovative tech company. Pressure building in the start-up worldAs recently as 2024, PitchBook called the business model known as “software as a service,” or “SaaS” — charging subscription fees for cloud software use — “the bread and butter of venture.” Now, what energy was left in the fading category has been sucked up by A.I., a technology that could change both how software is built and how companies pay for it. Although a slice of start-ups were pitching themselves as A.I. companies a few years ago, today “it’s like almost all of them are,” said Tony Wang, the managing partner of 500 Global, which runs start-up accelerators and venture funds. Almost half of venture capital last year went to A.I. start-ups, according to CB Insights. And at least 135 of the 151 companies in the latest cohort of start-ups in the tech accelerator Y Combinator identify as A.I. companies, according to its directory, including 14 with names that end in “A.I.” McCabe successfully made the pivot: Within three months after the release of ChatGPT, Intercom, which remains privately held, released an A.I. customer service agent. The company’s growth rate soared, and annual recurring revenue ratcheted up to nearly $100 million, McCabe said. But many companies are still scrambling to make the transition. ‘Trying to catch up’For almost a decade, Amelia Lerutte has worked on marketing for SaaStr, a company that hosts events for enterprise software founders. She said the tone among software founders working to build A.I. into their products had changed from just a year ago. “I think now there’s definitely a bit of panic around it — I don’t want to say panic in a bad way, but just like they’re trying to catch up,” she said. To reflect the focus of the founders in its community, SaaStr has changed its name to SaaStr AI. And Lerutte’s job title changed to chief A.I. officer. She now spends much of her time deploying A.I. agents, some of which are open for SaaStr’s community of founders to use. Last weekend, she used A.I. coding tools to create a product management system. “It’s pretty crazy that I could do that,” she said. “This is literally a software tool we were paying for last year.” Omari Rigg, an entrepreneur who mentors start-ups through the tech accelerator Techstars, said he often saw shallow attempts at A.I. transformation. “They’ll change their domain name, for example, from word.com to word.ai, and they will change their entire messaging on their landing page and their LinkedIn to, like, ‘We are an A.I.-enabled tool now,’ right?” Rigg said. “But other than that, nothing they’re really doing is actually leveraging a ton of actual A.I.” Does that strategy work? Largely no, venture capital investors say. “It’s very quick to see,” said Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners who has focused on cloud software companies. A.I. is disrupting A.I.So-called A.I. wrappers — companies that build an interface that gives users access to the capabilities of another company’s L.L.M. — have already been disrupted. For example, Jasper, a writing tool for marketers powered by OpenAI, raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in 2022. But it started to cut the internal value of its shares after OpenAI released ChatGPT and users began going straight to the source for help with their writing, according to The Intercept. (Loreal Lynch, the company’s C.M.O., said in a statement to DealBook that it had since expanded its product to run entire marketing programs and had seen “2X year-over-year revenue growth.”) Other categories of A.I. companies have gone through an entire start-up life cycle so quickly that they’re no longer appealing to early-stage investors. “There are even A.I. companies that we were interested in maybe a year and a half ago that we’re no longer interested in,” Wang of 500 Global said. “And that is a fast-moving cycle.” Many analysts and investors believe that public market investors have jumped the gun on writing the obituary for software companies. “The market is pricing in worst-case A.I. disruption scenarios that are unlikely to materialize over the next three to six months,” J.P. Morgan strategists wrote in a note this month. Bessemer’s Deeter said that public market investors hadn’t necessarily done the work to separate the software that was meaningfully leveraging A.I. from what was not actually adding value, and that software would be necessary to monetize A.I. models. “Remember, the foundation models only get paid if there are consumers or apps pulling in payment,” he said. “They’re not a business in and of themselves.” Even with generative coding, said Wang, “it’s building the U.I., it’s building the back end, it’s deploying in the cloud, all that I consider software.” But what makes a software company is in flux. Code production is becoming more accessible, and what differentiates teams is how they use artificial intelligence. When companies are thinking about how to stand out, Wang added, “I would say just throw out the software and just deal with the A.I.”
Fallout from the latest trove of Epstein files continued. Kathryn Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs’s general counsel, will step down in June after emails showed she had a friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that spanned many years. The Wasserman Agency lost prominent clients, including the musician Chappell Roan, over flirtatious emails that its founder, Casey Wasserman, exchanged with Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, in the early 2000s. And Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a notable business figure in the Middle East, resigned as the head of the Dubai-based ports giant DP World on Friday after he was named in the files. The Trump administration erased a key climate change finding. The Environmental Protection Agency repealed the 2009 scientific determination that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare, which underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change. The change eliminates limits on greenhouse gasses produced by motor vehicles and clears the way to repeal limits on emissions from power plants and oil and gas wells. Economic data looked positive. Employment growth in January was surprisingly strong, according to data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday. And the Consumer Price Index, released Friday, showed that inflation eased at the beginning of the year. But some economists see risks ahead: About two-thirds of new jobs came from just one sector, health care, and spending on A.I. data centers accounted for almost 40 percent of economic growth last year. More big deals: Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation. Gail Slater left the top antitrust post at the Justice Department. And Kraft Heinz put its breakup on hold just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Crowdsourced loveBlaine Anderson has been building dating businesses since 2020, when she started selling an online dating course for men. She pitched that business on “Shark Tank,” and eventually pivoted to working primarily as a matchmaker, charging between $25,000 and $150,000 per match. Now she has added a new financial twist to the old problem of finding a date: asking singles to post at least a $10,000 reward for anyone who helps them find a partner. It’s crowdsourcing for matchmaking. DealBook’s Sarah Kessler talked with her about the new business, Bring Me Bae, which started promoting its first profiles of love seekers today. The interview has been edited and condensed. Tell me about how you came to this idea. Matchmaking is very, very labor intensive and operationally heavy. The first match is actually usually pretty easy. It’s probably somebody you know or in your network. But by the 10th match, it’s like you’ve scraped everyone you possibly know and you have to source people that are total strangers by hand. Sometimes myself or a matchmaker on my team will actually go hang out at the types of places where we believe a woman who would be a good fit for that client hangs out and meet women in person. So the concept of Bring Me Bae really was born from, what if you could make everybody your matchmaker? How does it work? You have to pay at least $10,000, but that is only paid to the matchmaker if you end up dating someone you were introduced to for at least a year. So that money would go into escrow. And then once the year mark happens, it would be released to the matchmaker, and the platform, Bring Me Bae, takes a 30 percent cut. How do you confirm that I’m dating or not dating this person? There is an honesty component, but it’s likely going to be somebody who one person in that party knows, like the matchmaker is very likely going to be a friend of either one of the people. Ideally people understand the value and are like, “Oh, I’m excited to pay this should this relationship work out.” Will you invest the money while you hold it? Yes, I intend to place members’ reward payments in interest-bearing accounts as one way of earning revenue. Do you think it’s less romantic to meet someone if you’ve put up a bounty? No less romantic than meeting somebody on a dating app and swiping purely based on their looks. I think being willing to post a bounty is showing that you are intentional and serious about finding somebody. Quiz: K-shapedThis question comes from a recent New York Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.) The buzz phrase “K-shaped economy” was heard on quite a few earnings calls this quarter as executives increasingly acknowledge that income inequality is shaping their businesses. In the third quarter of 2025, the net worth of the top 1 percent of households climbed to a record share of the national total. What percentage of wealth did the top 1 percent hold? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday. We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
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