Monday.com CEO on Is SaaS Dead: Will Everything Be Vibe Coded

Yeah. So first of all, wanna acknowledge it’s kind of a crazy period, I think, for all of us, especially us founders going through this, you know, massive change in the market. So it’s definitely not easy. It feels like a roller coaster almost every day. You know? Some days are extremely difficult, but it’s definitely quite a journey. I think fundamentally, we need to distinguish between what happens in businesses, which is one thing, and the sentiment change that happened, I would say, in the last year and a half, but more precisely in the last six months, which, from my perspective, it felt, you know, very aggressive, very powerful.

You know, on one hand, like, if you look at the earning calls and how business operate, everything is is kinda normal. Some companies have even exceeded expectations, and businesses are working great. But at the same time, the sentiment has shifted drastically like I’ve never seen before, at least from my perspective. And the negativity that now it’s being attached to software companies, and it seems like every day there’s a new doomsday scenario, a new tweet, so the the sentiment definitely changed. By the way, there’s some a lot a lot of truths to that and and a lot of things I do understand from the investor perspective, so I’m not dismissing it.

But definitely, we need to distinguish between the operation of businesses and the sentiment change that happened in the market.

Yeah. So so first of all, I think there’s like five doom day scenarios I’m I’m familiar with, so that’s one of them. You know, I’ll just take you back a little bit in time, but first of all, it was everything about people will vibe code their own apps. That was one of them. Another option for doom day scenario was that some players like, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI or Gemini will capture all the value from enterprise software. I think that’s another scenario people are talking about.

And the third one is maybe what you refer to as a platform becoming essentially system of records and then other companies capturing the entire value that those companies offer. So I don’t mind going through each one of them if you want. I can address each one of them.

So, first of all, from my personal perspective, I was after a long day of work. I was about to go to sleep. Suddenly, I got a lot of messages on my phone saying that, we were broadcasted live on CNBC, and, you know, from all the software in the world, that journalist picked Monday to show that you can vibe code a software. Obviously, she could pick any software on the planet, but, you know, initially, I said, you know, it’s a compliment. Monday is a beautiful software, so I felt, it was a compliment she she’s done it to Monday.

You know, she could have done it for Salesforce or ServiceNow, or she could even create, like, a search engine or a social network at the same time. So so, again, like, it’s it’s a matter of perspective, I guess. Going back to the vibe coding theory in general, look, first of all, I have to say vibe coding is amazing. I’ve been coding all my life since I was a kid, and seeing this amazing technology become real is unbelievable. But I think there’s a big difference between vibe coding, the user interface, and building an actual software that works across the organization with all the depth and functionality that built into that.

There’s a big difference. I’ve been coding all my life, and I know how, you know, relatively easy it is to create an interface and how hard it is to build a software. I think there’s a big difference, and I think some people might get confused by that.

Yeah. Look, I said each one of those theories, I think it has some truth to that, but I think it’s marginal. I think it’s a very small impact, if any. Going back to the topic itself, think I think people underestimate how hard it is to maintain software over time. I think it’s it’s very easy to create the first increment of a software, but to change it, adopt it over time, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of dedication to do that. And at the end of the day, from my perspective, businesses have a core business operation they need to focus on.

If you think about it, software today is a very small expense for most companies. Having a dedicated person or a team of vibe coding some apps is a huge cost. So I think at the end of the day, vibe coding is amazing technology, but I don’t think it’s going to disrupt software companies. I’ll give you another point of data which I think is relevant. You can see amazing VCs like yourself and other people in the industry and amazing founders building companies. If you could vibe code, you know, any company and any start up, no company will have value, not in history and not today.

And still people invest billions into new companies, new start ups, entrepreneurs build new start ups. You know, I’ve I’ve read amazing news about Ramp raising at 30,000,000,000, Harvey, Ligora, companies you talked about. You know, you can argue you can vibe code them as well, but still the smartest people

Actually, I I don’t think so because at the end of the day, those companies it’s true that over time they accumulate data and information, but I can argue you can probably get the vast majority of the value even without that specific training. So I think at the end of the day, you could argue you can vibe code any company. What I’m trying to say basically is that as much as I think the technology is awesome, we have our own vibe coding capability within the product. From all the theories of how software is gonna be disrupted, this is my least favorite one.

I don’t think it’s gonna happen. And I think, you know, most investors that I speak with and people within the industry don’t think that’s what’s actually behind what’s impacting stocks and software companies today. Again, it can marginally have some impact, but I don’t think that’s the majority of what we’ve seen in the market. I completely agree with you on

Yeah. So so, again, I think there’s, obviously, some truth to that, and they might capture some of the value, but people overestimate how much they’re gonna capture. I I wanna take you back in history. You know, I’m enough to remember when Amazon built AWS. And everybody back then said that Amazon is gonna capture all enterprise software value because before that, the hardest part about building a company was actually getting the servers up and running, the website working, storage, having, like, twenty four seven availability. That was the hard part.

That was the heavy lifting. I remember how people got excited when you got a website online. And when AWS came out and was so easy now to build a website, everybody said Amazon is gonna capture all the enterprise value because it’s just so close to the value they offer. What really happened is the exact opposite. We saw a boom of companies building on top of Amazon, and software was growing exponentially. Because at the end of the day, I’m not saying Anthropic or OpenAI are not capable of building enterprise software.

I’m saying the opportunity they have as being the infrastructure of, you know, the LLMs of the future is so massive. And going after enterprise offering is a whole different business to build. Because at the end of the day, when you sell to companies, it’s a different sales process. It’s a different mechanism. Nobody’s gonna buy software for the entire organization based on purely PLG play. The way they’re gonna adopt, they wanna be handheld, especially if you wanna use a software across the organization. I’m not saying people will not use Anthropic and OpenAI.

For sure, they will. But I don’t think they’re gonna capture all the enterprise value because they have a much bigger opportunity ahead of them, and it’s not their focus. And no company on Earth, with AI or without, can do everything. I don’t believe in one player being the one software to run everything in the organization or at all. So I don’t see this, plays out.

So it’s a tough one because it’s true. That’s why it’s tough. I believe with that with all my heart. Basically, the way I look at it is that if you think about it very broadly, software, as we know it, haven’t changed for twenty five years, even before the web. I was building software for DOS, you know, without interface. Same thing. You would build a database. You will create dashboards and analytics on top of it. You might have some automations and workflows, but essentially the value, same from day one.

And it’s true that interfaces changed. People initially built for desktop application on Windows, It moved to the cloud, so that was a major benefit because it became real time. Everybody was seeing the same thing at the same time. Mobile came into our life, but if you judge by value, basically the same for twenty five years. And if you think about it, it doesn’t matter if you built a CRM software, IT software, work management software. 90% of the work was done outside of the tool. So, you know, if you’re a salesperson, you would make the call outside of the CRM.

You build the deck outside the CRM. You will prepare for the call outside the CRM. Eventually, yes, you will track the data into a CRM, and your VP of sales will be able to see what’s going on. Same goes for IT. Same goes for Monday. You would track your workflows and projects, and you will do everything within Monday, but the work itself was done outside of the tool. So if you think about it, software was extremely beneficial. I I I can cannot imagine the world before software because we take so many things for granted, like everything is centralized, real time, one place, everything is tracked.

So we might take it for granted, but it was a major step. Going back to your question, AI changed everything because now with AI, I I think we flipped the equation. I think AI can potentially do 80% of the work and not 20% like it used to be before AI was brought into our lives. And I think that changes everything in what companies need to do for their customers, what customers expect from software. It will only grow over time. Nobody will wanna buy software than not doing the majority of the work for them, because otherwise, you’re just buying legacy software.

Well, I think I think this is, in my opinion, where investors in the public market get it wrong. You know, if you judge but by what software is is doing today, you’re right. You know, if we don’t change, eventually, we’ll become a database, and nobody will buy Monday to track their work because you will buy software from other vendors that fulfill that promise. But that’s not the way it’s gonna play played out. We’re changing everything, basically.

You know, going back to what I’ve said that I think some of the investors or the public market, you know, I totally understand the way it reacted because I I think what the public market is saying essentially, we understand that the value is changing and software will be different going forward, but we don’t know who will be able to change. And I get it because it’s hard. Change is extremely hard, especially for an existing company. The public market is saying we don’t know which company we’ll be able to change.

There’s so many parameters to that, and we’re out until we get that confidence. But if I take a step back, I think that, you know, software going forward, the TAM of software, how much companies are gonna spend on software, is gonna be a 100 x for what it is today. Software going forward will be much more valuable going forward. Software TAM is gonna grow exponentially. And if you combine this with the fact that companies are going to change and gonna capture this value, I think this the opportunity in the software market today is like we’ve never seen before in our lives.

Look, I could give you an example from from Monday. You know, I’ve I’ve checked it myself. So I think a company like Monday, let’s say we have like 1,000,000,000 in expenses. A company like Monday will probably spend 70% of the budget on headcount and then 8% on software. But if we can flip the equation and scale businesses not on headcount going forward, you know, every CEO will be gladly increasing the expense on software because it is gonna be marginal compared to the headcount growth that you plan for your business going forward.

And I think this will play out more and more into the future as AI become more dominant. Companies will spend much more in software and much less on headcount going forward because they’ll just become more efficient. And they’ll gladly spend that.

Yeah. No. I agree. And I think we need to differentiate between the transition and where we’re going. So for us, actually, we we brought it down a little bit. In the last earnings call, we said it’s gonna be mid teens. And I think there’s also potential, you know, we might even take it lower. I don’t know. We’ll see. But I I don’t wanna, you know, press the brakes violently. I think we need to do this responsibly because there’s a transition period. But if you look at the horizon, you know

Look. First of all, you know, it’s discussions we have in the leadership team, and maybe we’ll make other decisions, but I don’t think that’s the point. I don’t think that, you know, if if we reduce ad count dramatically, it will change, you know, investor perception about Monday. I just don’t think that’s the essence of what we’ve seen in the market. Going back to what I’ve said, I think investors don’t know which company is going to change. And, you know, we just had the earning call two weeks ago.

You know, a lot of fun, you know, obviously, I’m being sarcastic. You know, going back to investors, and I’ve talked with, you know, all of our major investors, everybody’s saying the same thing. Eventually, what they wanna see is businesses revenue accelerate. And I totally get it because I think what people are saying is this. There’s huge demand for AI products, and people wanna buy AI. And we’re gonna have a few years now that companies are look gonna look for AI solutions. Given that we’re going to see infinite demand for AI products, there shouldn’t be a demand problem.

So you need to show us or prove to us that you can supply that demand to your customers and new customers. And because of that, we wanna see acceleration revenue going forward. And they’re right. I think that’s the best way to prove it because if there’s infinite demand and you’re able to capture that, no reason for your business not to accelerate. And I think that’s our role. This is exactly what we need to do and prove to ourselves and to our investors going forward that we are able to accelerate the business, and we are able to capture that AI demand that exists now in the market.

And this is, you know, Roy and I’s responsibility going forward.

Yeah. So the way I look at this is this. I’m not I’m not arguing that companies need to become more efficient, so I’m not dismissing it. And we will become more efficient. I’ll I’ll give you some example of things we’re already doing. First of all, we had a team of about a 100 SDRs, and we’re now doing doing it with agents. A 100% is being done with agents. We moved those SDRs to do outbound. All of our support is being done with AI. All of our developers is using Claude Code and Cursor.

I don’t think there’s any company that’s pushing AI efficiency more than we do. We wanna be at the forefront of that, and we’re pushing that with all cylinders, and we are becoming more efficient.

So basically, a customer today that goes into Monday when they leave their details on the website, let’s say they leave a contact sales form. The way we used to do it before AI was that we had a a team that will call back those customers to qualify them to check the opportunity and basically qualify them and help them schedule a meeting with the account executive on our team. So this is all down done by AI today. So I’ll give you some stats. It used to take, on average, twenty four hours to get back to a customer.

Now it takes three minutes. We used to miss a lot of the calls. People would not answer the calls. Now everything went up. Conversion rate went up. People answering the call went up. Opportunity to book went up. So all parameters went up. AI speaks all languages, available twenty four seven. So quite an amazing transition.

So when it comes to the SDR part, we’ve done it our own. We built our own solution. And support, we use some third party, but a lot we do our own as well. I think you still need to highly customize tools today in order to properly enjoy them. Things are moving so fast that we just felt building our own is probably the right path to take at this point.

I’ve seen some of it. I I think right now it’s a sense of flavor. But essentially, we’re in transition period, and definitely we see increasing output for engineers. I think part of it is that you find new bottlenecks that are not attached to writing code. I think there’s a on one hand, we see increase in personal productivity. But again, there’s new bottlenecks you find each time you increase one of those productivities, and we’re on a journey to increase more and more the output of

3,000 people. And and gonna be when? 2030. Go for it. 30. Wow. My gut feeling is is probably we’re not gonna grow substantially. But, look, I think efficiency is important, but I think what’s even more important is the opportunity that we have. I think this is where people are missing the point from my perspective, because it’s true that we can focus a 100% on efficiency, reduce headcount, reduce expenses. But going back to my point, this is the biggest opportunity in software ever in our lifetime. The biggest opportunity that we ever had as a company and as a industry.

Okay? This is it’s like the beginning of the most amazing journey for all of us. So what I wanna do is to capture as much as I can out of this opportunity because it’s out there, and we can do it. And I think this is where people are getting it wrong. Like, you know, on one hand, I see people excited about private companies because they build tools in the AI era that kinda capture the what I’ve referred to as doing the work. But I’ll tell you a secret.

Public companies will do it as well. We’re gonna do it. We are already doing that.

A 100%. And we were the victims of this as well. I’ll share a little bit of our journey. So going back a year and a half ago or even two years, you know, when some Sam Altman wrote that famous tweet, this is ChatGPT. You can play with it. I remember that tweet. You know, I’ll give you the kind of the relationship that we had with AI. So initially, you know, I was excited. I’m I’m excited about every new technology. I’m I’m also a person who like to try things in my own hands, and we played with it, and it was amazing.

But we didn’t get it, to be honest. Like, I think most of us didn’t get it. Maybe some of us got it. And, you know, initially, also the investors, they didn’t know what it means, and we heard from investors, you know, it’s cool. There’s hype around it, but we don’t know. But something changed about, I would say, a year ago. I don’t know what it was, to be honest. Like, it’s not like one tweet that I’ve seen or one product. I feel it was, you know, combining many many data points, but I think it was a a collective understanding that things are changing, and things are changing forever.

And this is where you started to see the change in the market sentiment, and, like, I felt like a light bulb moment at that point. And before that, we’ve done a lot of things. Like, it’s not that we didn’t do things, but we built some AI features. But like you said, I call it sprinkle some AI dust on top of our product. So, essentially, we didn’t know what to build. So we built a way for people to build formulas using AI. We built AI blocks, AI columns, but essentially, it it was sugarcoating our product because the value haven’t changed.

So look, going back to the transition, like I said, initially, it was the AI dust that we sprinkle on the product, but then we realized, you know, what I’ve said is that the value we need to give to our customers, not just us, every software is completely different. So what we’ve done internally is to rethink what we are doing as a company, what’s the value we try to provide to our customers with monday work management platform and also with CRM and service, and rethink our whole product.

Part of it is pricing, like you said. That’s gonna change dramatically. Our go to market is gonna change. Our homepage is gonna change. The ads are gonna change. The most important part, what our product is given to the value it gives to our customers is now going through the biggest transformation since we launched the company back in 2013. It’s the biggest vivid moment for us in the history of the company.

It’s gonna change. What does it change to? Well, eventually, I think it’s gonna be more consumption and then entirely consumption going forward. So I think this also be a transition, but now it’s gonna be hybrid, and eventually, it’s gonna be a 100% consumption.

First of all, maybe I’ll just explain the transition that we’re doing just to make it more concrete. So basically, companies wanna adopt AI. And they’re gonna adopt vertical tools to do that, like the, you know, the SDR example I gave you, maybe another example for support, for legal. There’s a lot of vertical solutions people are gonna adopt. But I think there’s a big room for horizontal plays, and this is exactly what we’re gonna do with monday. So, basically, we wanna be a place that orchestrate between agents and humans because at the end of the day, you know, maybe in the far future, agents will do a 100% of the work.

I don’t think it’s gonna happen, but maybe it will happen to some extent. But we’re gonna have a a huge transition period where humans and agents need to work together. And we wanna make Monday the default place for people to build agents and to collaborate between agents and people. So, essentially, you build agent on the top of Monday. Those agents will output tables, docs, files. People will go over it to build their own agents. And, we wanna become the default place to do horizontal agents across the company.

So first of all, I don’t think that ChatGPT or Gemini or Entropic are gonna do it because going back to my the second theory that we discussed, Of course, people are buying a Tropic, Claude, they’re buying ChatGPT, but it’s not a tool where you work with another thousand people and share information. It’s a personal tool that people use. There’s a big difference between selling a tool that be can be used personally and building a tool for people to collaborate with agents. It’s a very different product.

It’s a different size product.

Yeah. I’ll I’ll explain it again. I think, you know, a company today that wanna adopt AI, they have no idea what they need to do. No idea. It’s a new technology. You know, I I think we live in a echo chamber of tech, but the world out there is very different. And I think, essentially, companies will wanna buy AI. They will do whatever they need in order to buy AI capability because it’s gonna be a competitive market. And if they won’t do it, they won’t survive.

So so I think we need to differentiate what enterprise contract means. Okay? So the fact that ChatGPT or Gemini or Anthropic are selling a contract that a thousand people, let’s say, within Monday can use Anthropic, it’s it’s great, but that’s not the product I’m talking about. It’s like comparing Microsoft Office with Monday. It’s not the same thing. There’s tools that people use individually, which is great. Personal productivity tools, building agents, but then there’s there’s the actual work. It’s like claiming that there’s no need for SDR software because you you bought Anthropic.

It’s a different problem to solve. So I think the problem solving how people and agents are working to the together in one workspace is a very different product. It’s a very different problem. I think companies will want guidance on how to do that. They’re gonna need help setting up agents, figuring out what they can automate with agents, and what they can replace in terms of headcount. And this is not by buying off the shelf product that is a generic product. You will need a product that can help you collaborate between humans and agents if it’s a very different product compared to just buying a license to LLM.

And I think eventually, if you look at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini, they have a much bigger opportunity they wanna chase. They wanna be the backbone of the LLM industry. They wanna capture as much as they can in terms of that market share, and I get it. It’s a huge opportunity. Again, going back to my AWS comparison, they are the infrastructure, but there’s gonna be a lot of products built on top of that. I think if anything, we’re gonna see an excess of software being built on top of the LLMs, not less, exponentially more, because the opportunity is so massive and the TAM is so huge.

And going back to Monday, we’re going all in for that. We’re changing the product, the value proposition, how people use the product, how people onboard, and what people should expect from the product. If you haven’t built an agent on Monday, you’re not using the product properly, and that’s a major shift. The boards, the dashboards are gonna be more in the background, and the agent’s more in the forefront. And it’s a it’s a huge change. It’s a scary change, but I believe in that with all my heart because I think the opportunity is massive.

We’re at 0.001% done of where the world is going.

I think technology is moving fast. I think organization is gonna take more time. You know, what is AI adoption? There’s so much nuance to that. There’s so many look. At the end of the day, I think what people are confusing is, you know, AI can get super smart, and we’ve seen it grown exponentially. But no matter how smart you are, if you don’t have context, you cannot perform your job. You know, even the most intelligent person on earth cannot do their job if they don’t are not aware of the context.

And if you think about any company, even Monday itself, 90% of the context is not documented anywhere. Nobody knows it. You know? It’s something that kinda floats in the air. You know? What’s the idea? What’s the strategy? Who’s doing what? What’s next month? What’s next year? How we’re gonna do it, why are we doing what we’re doing, what’s the thought process behind it. So I think we’re gonna see a transition period before all that information and knowledge and intelligence is gonna be documented, which might happen in the future.

I think we have a huge transition period of people working with agents. I think you can see some small companies and, you know, I’ll be following Jason Lemkin and what he’s doing on your own his own team. You know I’m a big fan of Jason. Dude, you

I I I always joke with Jason that we have like a one-sided relationship where I listen to every word he says and he’s an he’s my mentor, but he’s not aware of it. So it’s I like do a show with

do a show with

I know. But look. At the end of the day, you know, a small team like Jason’s team, and Jason is very forward leaning, can replace everything they do with AI. But for an existing company and business, it’s gonna be more of a transition over many years. And we need to remember that most economy, you know, 95% of economy is not software companies. It’s actual businesses. So going back to my point, we’re gonna see a transition period of companies adopting AI, AI working with humans, humans collaborate with agents.

It’s a massive opportunity. And I don’t think OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini are gonna go for that because it’s such a different sales process, enterprise sales, top down, different tool use. And we’re gonna go all in for that opportunity because our advantage is that we are the best platform for people to work in together across the organization. So we’re gonna take that part of business and add the agents on top of it and change the value in what people do with the product, and I believe it’s gonna be massive going forward.

I think going back to my, original opening where I said that there’s the sentiment change, but businesses are unaffected. So we were affected by one thing, which is, Google introducing AI mode in the search results. So Google used to be a significant acquisition channel for us, and definitely, it took a hit in terms of people clicking on sponsored links because people see the AI answers. So definitely said

It was about 10% of our acquisition in terms of new ARR. But, again, Google is very transactional. So people usually, when they’re searching for something, they’re willing to buy at this point because the intent is very high. So we lost some of the more transactional deals, more SMB oriented, and we shifted that budget to other channels, but there are kinda longer sales cycles. So we definitely took a hit because of that. But apart from that, we have 70 other channels that we acquire customers from, and we didn’t see any impact on other channels.

So it was a significant impact, but from my perspective, it’s isolated to that.

Well, we are. We announced a buyback program of 870,000,000, and we said we’re gonna spend it over the next two, three years. We already done some buyback in q four. If we’re gonna see opportunities, we’re gonna buy back our shares. And definitely, there’s opportunities right now. So we are looking into that, and we do have a buyback program.

Yeah. So first of all, I’m on a 10 b five program. So, basically, I have to, six months in advance, make a six months plan ahead. So I’m not saying I won’t. When the plans open up, I might buy more shares personally. Again, it’s something I need to decide with my wife. You know, it’s not a personal decision for me, but definitely it’s opportunity. But I can share another thing is that not myself or my partner Roy or the rest of the leadership team is selling shares.

I in my 10 b five, I have, you know, a number I’m not willing to go below in terms of sell selling shares, and I can say the price now is much, much lower than that number. So I’m not selling any shares personally. You know, since the IPO, I still hold probably 80 something percent of my shares, so I sold less than 20%. 14 in this journey. So I don’t think I need to prove more that I have like, all my skin is in the game.

You know? I’m I’m a 100% in. I believe in the future of the company. As I said, it’s one of the biggest opportunity that we ever had as a company.

Look, it’s it’s been a roller coaster. It’s been hard, you know, emotionally, everything in the last few months. I can share that, you know, it’s still fresh, but, you know, the last earnings call, the stock went down to $70. You know, obviously, when the stock is going down and and I’ve seen all the earnings calls before Monday and after Monday. I I felt like no matter what companies are gonna announce, the stock is gonna go down 20%. So I was not optimistic. I was not sure what’s pricing and what’s not, but it is what it is.

I get it. The sentiment is so negative.

do you feel

Look. I didn’t know what to expect, and and overall, I’m trying not to make the stock price to manage, you know, my decision making process, but I look at it. It’s it’s you cannot ignore it. Like, it has a psychological impact for sure. And, definitely, it’s not easy or fun when you go up and talk with analysts and investors and, you know, nobody’s happy. Again, I don’t think we’re because, you know, ServiceNow is down 50%. Salesforce is down 60%. It’s not helpful. You know? So I understand, you know, there’s things I can control.

There’s things I cannot control. I cannot control the negative sentiment in the market. What I can control is what can we do about it. So I’m trying to focus on the things I can control. Going back to the earning call on Monday, the stock went down. Obviously, you know, lost some sleep over it. I woke up 3AM thinking about it. Tuesday, woke up 2AM, didn’t fall back asleep. But, you know, when I woke up Wednesday and the stock was 70, and I had left a feeling of relief, you know, to be honest, because I said, okay. 70 represent, let’s say, 3.7 market cap.

We had, like I don’t remember the exact number, but roughly, let’s say, 1,500,000,000 in the bank cash. No debt. So the enterprise value is 2,000,000,000. We have, like again, I don’t wanna disclose specific number. Let’s say, over 1,300,000,000 of ARR. So it’s like 1.5 multiple. So I felt like, okay. Like, what the market is saying to me is like, air quotes, like, the company is worth zero. Okay. Fine. Now I need to build. I need to prove. And suddenly, felt, you know, relieved because I’ll do everything needed in order to do to make the company successful.

Like, it can’t get any worse. Yeah. The stock can go down, but I feel this is, the lowest sentiment that software companies ever had. So, yeah, it can get lower, but, you know, to be honest, like, it’s it’s pretty low right now.

Yeah. I’m not saying it cannot go down. Obviously, everybody after every day, there’s a new tweet, and all the stock is going down seven percent. I cannot control it. But what I feel now, you know, screw it. I’m go gonna go all in. I’m gonna go all in, both Roy, myself, and the management team. This is the biggest opportunity. There’s only upside to where we’re at. We’re gonna take the risks. We’re gonna go all in and do whatever is necessary to win. I’m extremely motivated for that.

I think the opposite. The opposite. If you kinda relate to what I’ve said, I feel like I was kicked in the head so many times by now that, okay. I get it. And I feel when when you’re private, you know, you you can try and and ignore what’s going on and even say, you know, everything is okay. But for me, I get it. And and I don’t blame the investors. I think investors are super sophisticated. It’s an amazing market. What the investors are saying, I got the message.

I got the message, and they’re right. They don’t know who’s gonna be successful. But I think this is where they get it wrong because, basically, I think what I’m trying to say, Harry, throughout our conversation is, are you playing defense or are you playing offense? And I think every every day I go on Twitter and I read what people are saying, and everybody is publishing an article. You know, this company has more robust system of records. This company has a moat. This company is enterprise. Who cares?

Who cares? What are you arguing? Who’s gonna change last? Who have more time? I’m saying the opposite. This is the biggest opportunity. Everybody have to change. Everybody have to change. The faster you change, the better. And I think some some kind of companies will not be able to change because, I don’t know, the founders are not there because it’s hard, because the DNA is not there, because it’s a 100,000 people company, because they’re not sure where they’re going, because they don’t have a culture of execution.

My confidence come from the culture we built, the fact we always were great execution, the fact that once we make a decision, we’re gonna go all in. We have everything needed. We have the cash. We have the talent. We have the execution. We know what we need to build. That gives you a lot of confidence, the people in the company and our mission. So, you know, if you if you’re playing defense, good for you. I feel for us, it’s an opportunity to play offense and do whatever we need in in order to win, and this gives me a lot of confidence because I’m building the future.

No. I don’t see a reason. No. We look. I I think at the end of the day, you can be private. You can be public. The question is, do you need to raise more money? And we don’t. We generate 27% of free cash flow. We don’t need to raise more money. We have everything we need going forward. If anything, we’ll become more efficient. I see the retention rate highest ever, gross retention highest ever, and we’re still acquiring a lot of customers. So I’m very confident about the business, and I think this is where people don’t understand that the businesses are working good.

And things might change, but, you know, nothing is more sticky than a SaaS product. So definitely, I’m not worried about, you know, operationally. And we are changing, you know, as we speak. So we don’t need to raise more money. I don’t need reason to go private, and we can stay public.

Yeah. So look, we we are looking into companies, and we also met a few that we were close to acquiring. But look, at the end of the day, this is this is not how we’re gonna win. If I need to bet the whole company future on an acquisition of a start up, I’m not doing my job as a CEO. The problem now with private companies is that we have the opposite valuation between private and public. If Monday’s valued at 3.7, every startup in the private market with 5,000,000 of ARR is now being valued at 2,000,000,000.

So, yeah, I can buy it with partially cash, but I’ll need to use my stock as well. So I don’t have a lot of opportunity buying, you know, a few billions worth of of a private company. It’s not gonna play out. And, again, like, I feel we have everything we need in order to execute. So I think, you know, it’s a cycle. It’s a cycle for public companies. It’s also gonna be a cycle for private companies. Now there’s a lot of money in the private companies, in private investors, but it you know it’s a cycle.

At some point, the investor’s gonna see the same company 20 times a month, and LPL is is is not gonna pour a lot of money. And I get it. I’ve I’ve been in cycles before. Are you in CEO groups, WhatsApp groups? Not WhatsApp group, but I have a few CEOs I consult with. Yeah.

Not really. You know, the the problem problem with with other other CEOs CEOs is people don’t expose their emotions too much. I’ll say that. But I think people feel resilient. I think we give each other confidence. I think some CEOs are I wouldn’t say ignoring the problem, but don’t understand the magnitude of what needs to change. And I think some are more are more kinda advanced in how they think about it and understand the magnitude of what needs to be changed. Again, my confidence is is coming from doing and changing.

So that gives me a lot of confidence going forward. So I don’t need anybody to kinda pat my back, and I got Roy, my partner, and the rest of the leadership team. And we feel very confident on where we’re going.

So first of all, I wanna acknowledge it’s it’s hard. It’s hard. And, you know, I told somebody someone the other day that some days I feel like I was ran over by a truck, hit by a plane, and barbecued, and it’s it’s just 11AM. You know? So so definitely there’s there’s days like that. But but I I I must say that I feel very good now, and I feel we’re doing the right things. I’ll tell you I’ll give you I’ll say two things that really helped me.

So so one is the people in the company. That’s something that’s very significant to me because, you know, once we tell them what we’re doing and and focus on doing an execution, I could see in their eyes, like, although it’s scary and we’re changing a lot of things and we’re taking big bets, I can tell in their eyes that they’re excited. They appreciate we don’t ignore the problems, that we don’t say everything is okay. We are changing. We are adapting for the future. And people are working incredibly hard.

They’re dedicated from the bottom of their hearts, and that gives me a lot of confidence. And the second thing, and I don’t wanna get too emotional, is is my family. My wife and my kids, super significant. I feel I have, like, a network or support. At the end of the day, what I really care about, you ask me about my personal wealth, I don’t care. I just want the company to be successful. I feel immense sense of responsibility for the future of the company, for the employees, for the investors, for everybody that’s part of that ride.

And I wanna do whatever it takes to capture this opportunity. And I wanna play offense. I think that’s the point. At the end of the day, I think there’s so much noise. Just listening to the noise is the wrong thing to do as a leader and as a CEO. Noise is Twitter and other article, even public market. I wanna focus on the essence. For me, the essence is very simple. It’s the biggest opportunity of our lifetime in terms of software. We need to change, and we are changing.

And because of that, I’m confident we’re doing the right things. This is what in my control. I will do whatever is necessary. So this is the essence, and this is what we’re doing. And that gives me a lot of confidence going forward.

Yeah. I’ll I’ll tell you how I look at it. I got the front seat in probably the one of the most exciting period in human history, the birth of intelligence. And I can navigate this ship, and it’s amazing. It’s such a great opportunity. I think everything is life. Is it a glass half full or half empty? I can look at it and say, oh, you know, like, was on a path, and everything was great, and we built this great company and so on. But the way I look at this today is maybe this is our big biggest opportunity as a company.

Maybe we waited for that moment, and if we did the right things, we can reaccelerate the company and even grow much larger than what we could have become as a company. So I hold into that, and that gives me a lot of confidence. And if you ask me today how I feel, I feel great because, as I told you, we hit the bottom or maybe close to the bottom. And from here, we can only grow and focus on execution. And this is exactly what we do.

So basically, our strategy is twofold. One, in terms of our horizontal platform, we’re going all in agents and humans working together. We’re shifting the product a 100%, the pricing, the go to market, the product. We have two vertical offerings, the CRM and service. For that, we’re building those products from scratch, being a 100% agentic. So basically going full in on that opportunity. The way I look at this today, service dominated by ServiceNow, CRM dominated by Salesforce, is open market today. I believe in their ability to change, but they need to prove it.

I wanna go all in. I think we made this choice to go for CRM and service back in the days where we have crazy competition. Now I feel the the play field is leveled and there’s opportunity. We have one big horizontal bet, two vertical bets with service and CRM, and we’re going all in on all three. I’m very confident about that. So I think it’s a big bet, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to capture that opportunity. Who’s a harder competitor, HubSpot or Salesforce? Again, the question is who’s who’s gonna be able to change?

That’s the most important factor for me because at the end of the day, it’s not what they built, but how can they change? Going back to my point about public market, I think this is where companies are mispriced. Everybody’s priced now on the downside. Again, it’s because of lack of of information, not because not because the market is not sophisticated enough. Because you don’t know. You know, you don’t know who’s gonna be able to change. But I’m confident we will change. There’s a lot of questions, how, and there’s a lot of risks to it, but we’re gonna change.

And the question is who else is gonna change? And who else is gonna change successfully and responsibly? Who do you think will change more

Being in a bigger company is harder because it’s hard to move humans. That’s the hardest part. I think people think enterprise is a benefit is a benefit. Maybe SMBs is better because SMBs are more open to adopting new technologies. When you play defense, some of those things might look as disadvantages, selling to SMBs or being a small companies. If you play offense, those disadvantage might become advantage because those customers might be sooner to adopt technology and will buy those products before enterprise will buy. So I don’t know, to be honest, and it’s it’s for them to prove.

You know, I I now I will never underestimate each one of those companies because they’ve built incredible things. I think in general, I think investors underestimate incumbents’ ability to change, their willingness to change, their motivation to change. You know, private companies are great, but, you know, those companies reach where they’re reached because of multiple things, and they’re very successful companies. And I think the cycle is gonna shift once, you know, like, fungus after the rain, you’re gonna see another public company change and accelerate, another one accelerate, and investors are gonna say, it happens.

So let’s rethink whose else is gonna change over time, and valuations will go up.

I don’t know. I think I think most of them it’s not like again, I’m not an investor, so I don’t have my own list. I think it’s been a bloodbath, so it’s

Well, obviously, AI. Like, you know, a year ago, I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand. I don’t think I was the only one, but didn’t understand the magnitude of the change. But today, I understand that software is fundamentally changed forever. So that’s something I didn’t understand, but now I totally get it. It’s obvious to me that the future is gonna be very different for software. What criticism about you stings because it’s partly true? About myself? Yeah. I think one thing that I think we can do better is to tell a story in a better way.

I think Roy and myself were not even though we do great marketing for our product, I don’t think we tell the story good enough for the company. And and definitely that’s something that I feel we can improve because I often feel like, you know, if people knew what I knew, they will be much more confident in Monday and where we’re going, and I feel it’s it’s my responsibility to do a better job telling our story and our strategy.

First of all, I think we all need a little bit of humility. What I’ve heard in the last year is is is this. Microsoft is the most amazing companies. Microsoft is is finished. Google is finished. Google is the best company on Earth. OpenAI is the most amazing company. OpenAI is finished by Anthropic. And this is like three months cycles. So I feel it’s like 9098, and we say, you know, Yahoo and Netscape gonna suck all the value from the Internet revolution, and we know nothing. So I feel we’re in the beginning of an exponent.

It’s really hard to say who’s gonna win, who’s gonna lose. It’s a horse race. I think we’re probably missing 90% of the picture of us how it’s gonna play out. So I’m not an investor. I’m not I’m I’m making bets on Monday, not on other companies. Definitely, I feel Anthropic have a little bit more momentum right now. They can change, and it will change. I’m sure. The

Yeah. But but look, it’s a cycle. What happens in the cycle is that over time, you see consistency and you gain confidence. And then you see companies accelerate, you gain confidence. Nothing I will say will change perception. Time and execution will change perception, and this is our responsibility as CEOs, and this is what I’m planning to do. Over time, it will change. It’s a cycle. I I’ve been through so many cycles so far. Like Is this the hardest one, or is this like every other one?

Look. Everybody enjoyed the twenty twenty one cycle with COVID. Right? But it it was also also a cycle. I remember when our stock went went up to 400 after we IPO’d. One of our investors told me something, Ken Fox from from Stripe. He told me something which was brilliant. He told me, isn’t it great that the stock is going up without the revenue going up? And I said, what? What are you talking about? And he said, yeah. Everything you gained is through sentiment change. Nothing you’ve done.

And it really resonated with me. I said, okay. I need to distinguish between what we do as a company and our growth and the market sentiment. And if you don’t praise yourself when the stock is high, you won’t be impacted because the stock when the stock is down. If you don’t attach your personal success and personal ability to lead the company with the sentiment, and you need to focus on the business performance. That that that was his point, and it really resonated. And I didn’t celebrate when it went up to 400 because I knew it was temporary at the end of the day.

It’s a cycle. So everybody enjoys when the cycle is up, but also now when the cycle is down, I need to focus on the business metrics, the revenue, the retention, the things we are doing. That’s the important part. Not be carried away by the cycle itself.

Yeah. So so, of course and and, again, it’s a personal friendship, but I really love Adi Sharif from Wix and Near. You know, we’re we’re close friends, so, obviously, I ask them a lot of questions. But we also have other CEOs that I talk with. And, it’s hard for me to pick, like, a name because I don’t know them personally. So, you know, when you pick somebody, you take their entire personality with it, so it’s really hard for me to pick. But, look, the amount of information that I acquire through podcast, blog posts, videos, I probably acquire, like, five, six hour content a day.

You know, I walk to work. I walk back. I do the dishes. I have you know, my kids are saying, why do you have the AirPods in your ear all the time? Because I just feel we need to learn like crazy. I I try to gather as much information as I can, and I think I’m I’m learning a lot from different people perspective. Also, I love the show you guys are doing, the four of you the three of you. Sorry. So I listened to that. You know, I think now you need to be learning as much as you can.

So that’s the mode I operate in. I’m adding in a

Well, first of all, I’ve been with my wife for twenty three years now. So we basically grew up together. But I’ll tell you one thing. So my wife has been nothing but amazing throughout this journey, and specifically, I would say the last six, eight months. It’s not like she doesn’t care. She knows what I’m going through, but the amount of support I get is unbelievable. So one advice I would say, and this is actually from my therapist. So she she gave it to me because I told her what I told you now about my wife.

So she told me, say it to her. When you meet her this evening, say to her what you said to me. I said, right. I mean, I have to because I feel it, but I haven’t said it to her. So, you know, communication, sharing how you feel, the good, the bad, talking about it, it’s the best advice I can give with my wife and also with partners at work. So I feel the more you open, the more vulnerable you are, the more you share, the more intimacy you create, and the better relationship you create with other people.

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This is probably the biggest change since the invention of computers. I’m lucky to be part of that, and I’m excited to see how this plays out. You know? It’s I think if you ignore the the negativity that attached to that, it’s pretty exciting. I mean, it’s it’s it’s quite a period to be alive. It’s pretty amazing.

Humans didn’t shower in hot water, like, eighty years ago. And now if if you don’t have hot water and your bath when before you go to sleep, it’s like it ruins your day. So it’s like, we get used to good things so so easily. I think, you know, specifically with AI, we’re gonna get used to getting the bet best treatment, best doctors. Everything’s gonna be instant. We got each one of us gonna have the most amazing personal assistant. Our life is gonna be amazing. And, of course, we’re gonna complain.

Of course, we’re gonna look at the the things that don’t work. But I think going forward, probably the the the value and the the quality of life is significantly gonna go up going forward.