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Expectations are changing. The numbers are staggering!
Revenue per headcount is the metric I hear often these days for both public companies and private companies. What is possible with AI-native companies is staggering. Historically $200k-$300k per employee was the standard for SaaS, now the times are changing. Tomasz Tunguz put out a great post about this below.
“That productivity gap compounds at the company level. Anthropic generates ~$5 million per employee.3 Cursor, $3.3 million. Midjourney, $2 million.4 Traditional SaaS considers $200-300k strong. A 10-20x difference.”
Many data companies that are being AI-native are seeing the same type of potential and opportunities. Portfolio companies at Social Leverage, like Fiscal.ai are looking at their data api product, the demand, roadmap, and ultimately the revenue they are driving per headcount, and it’s clear that the incumbents have to rethink their business to compete. The $FDS ( ▲ 0.39% ) $LNSTY ( ▲ 0.3% ) & even $SPGI ( ▲ 0.73% ) have to look at some of their products and the people count it takes to build/maintain them and ask themselves what is their edge or moat long term.
Times are changing quickly, not just for SaaS but all industries.
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