Aaron Levie

It's been rumored that Bill Gates is, you know, back doing AI stuff at Microsoft here and there.

So what an incredible moment that founders are coming back to their incumbent companies because of how important this period is.

Yeah, so I think it's probably going to be a hybrid business model ultimately because I don't think AI disrupts still that sort of desk worker dynamic.

So I think we're going to have, it's going to be seats plus.

So basically, you know, think about it as a seat model for the end user that's interacting with the system.

And then you've got this kind of like potentially exponential in some cases, but certainly augmented business model of basically, you know, agents doing additional work.

So now all of a sudden, and this is like why I think it's the most exciting time to be building software.

If you were a startup and you were pitching, I'm just going to make up the example, but you were pitching legal document or contract management software 10 years ago, and you go to a company and they would say, okay, well, I have 15 lawyers, so I'll buy 15 seats of your software.

And that software startup is like, okay, obviously it's not that big of a TAM because it's only the number of lawyers.

So, you know, we'll probably have to price more than like, you know, the office subscription, but like, obviously there's an upper limit of what you can charge for software.

So maybe it's like 200 bucks a seat, you know, something astronomically high relative to productivity software, but like 200 bucks a seat or 300 bucks a seat.

That's your upper limit.

You have 10 seats that you can sell to that company for a couple hundred bucks a seat.

Now you're that exact same company in 2025.

What you're going to do is you're going to go to that company, you're going to say, we have software that not only makes your lawyers more productive, we actually start to automate some of the work that they otherwise do or never got around to or have to kind of outsource.

And, you know, we're going to charge at the rate of $5 a contract or $10 a negotiation or $100 a kind of a legal review, you know, some metric that an agent is going to go off and do.

And that metric has no upper bound for an organization.

It's not capped by any inherent thing other than that company's own volume of customers or sort of business that they want to go through.

So now that same software company, you could underwrite 5 or 10x the amount of revenue that they could generate versus what they could have generated before.

To make this not even a hypothetical, think about Cursor.