Equity

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace noticed last week that we had a bevy of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stories that we wanted to chat about. So we decided to break them out into their own episode. What came out of the conversation is a mix of optimism, sarcasm, and healthy doubt regarding what's next for SaaS. SaaS matters as it is an incredibly popular business model for startups, a way to generate high-margin recurring incomes. Indeed, it's almost the default method for revenue generation amongst startups today. But precisely what SaaS is, and how it works, appear to be moving targets. This piece by our own Danny Crichton, for example, digs into a trend that he has noticed in the broader software space, namely startups taking a single task, or feature, and providing it in a manner that ascribes to best practices. For example, online checkout tech has been around since the dawn