Tweet by JaredSleeper

February 2, 2026

One thing that is abundantly clear is that traditional software growth investing (whether private or public) is dead. Metrics have perhaps never mattered less in software investing than they do today. The assumption used to be that the world moved fairly slowly/predictably, and so you could extrapolate trends in one place and assume they more or less continued. All of the old techniques (LTV:CAC math, unit economics, etc.) assumed this stability. That stability is a bad assumption today and it is not how assets are priced- the market is scrambling to sort out the new technical equilibrium and which companies have a place in it/are beneficiaries. I still think many incumbents are well-positioned, but importantly, their near-term metrics don't tell you anything about that at all. More than ever, there is just no substitute for truly, deeply understanding the world and how products fit in/are built/etc. and staying at the cutting edge of understanding AI adoption. You need to be more technical, deeper in the product, understand narratives better, understand teams and execution etc. One could argue even investing in public SaaS today is more analytically akin to venture investing than traditional public markets investing.

Author
JaredSleeper
Date
February 2, 2026
Open on X