There was a time when the distinction between software and services was clean-cut. A software company built tools and a service company delivered outcomes. The former lived on gross margins and the latter scaled with headcount. And venture capital, predictably, sided with software in its search of power law driven outcomes.

For decades, serving SMBs has been a graveyard for startups - too expensive to acquire, too costly to serve, too prone to churn. Despite the sheer number of small and medium-sized businesses (over 23 million in Europe alone), SaaS companies have historically struggled to make the economics work.

Pricing as a moat is quite the oxymoron since pricing structures are anything but proprietary. However, we argue that pricing is a wedge that AI-native challengers might collectively use to gain a headstart vs. incumbents in the B2B software landscape.

2024 was a year of growth and resilience. Despite a challenging environment for venture-backed startups, we witnessed resilience, innovation, and incredible achievements from our founders, team, and community. From major funding rounds to new investments, team promotions, and the launch of our new substack publication, Samaipata continued to build momentum across all fronts. 

Ecosystem is quite a buzzword in the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. While I find it cringey, it does capture the reality of functional entrepreneurial hubs. These are definitely systems, where interconnectivity between different nodes is critical for individual and collective success. In this article we touch upon closely related drivers of interconnectivity - founder mafias, exits and stock options - in the context of the Spanish entrepreneurial system.

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