They tend to be old. Their technologies and approaches, at least.
The good thing in SaaS about getting to $100m ARR is you basically become unstoppable for another decade, at least. Look at Oracle, SAP, and the oldies of enterprise software. They are still around and doing very, very well.
Look at the old guard of SaaS — even the ones acquired like Successfactors, Taleo, Eloqua, Concur, Marketo, ExactTarget, etc. — are all doing just fine. Maybe they’ve grown more slowly after being acquired, but they are all still growing . Box, Salesforce, etc. are all still growing at a very rapid rapid.
But … platforms do matter in SaaS.
After $100m, you are old. Even Slack is old. Salesforce is way old.
Things change. AI, ML, mobile, Big Data, whatever. All of the current SaaS companies at $100m+ ARR were built 1–3 paradigms ago in SaaS.
And unlike B2C — it’s often almost impossible to rebuild your technology stack in SaaS. There are too many workflows, too many features, too many dependencies, too many integrations. If your product is configured 1,000 unique ways for 10,000 customers … good luck refactoring that. Ain’t gonna happen, 95 times out of 100.
So after $100m ARR, no matter how innovating you are and were — you can be disrupted.
Even if you can’t see it in the numbers.
