Kerry Anne Hoffman

Anthropic is shipping lightening speed. They’re shipping faster than a 20 person startup. The product marketing function must be drowning.

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Just read this Crunchbase piece about the "second wave of layoffs" and... wow. Job searches are now averaging 6-7 months. Over a third of Americans have side gigs. Here's what gets me: We're watching the entire concept of "having a job" get turned inside out, yet we still expect people to figure out health insurance like it's 1995. Picture this: You get laid off. Your job search drags on for half a year. You pick up some contract work to pay bills. Cool, you're adapting, you're hustling... but wait, how do you keep your kid's asthma medication covered? The article talks about how "workers are blending traditional jobs with side gigs." Sure. But our benefits system? Still assumes you work somewhere for 30 years and retire with a gold watch. I keep thinking about all the talented people I know who are stuck in this impossible position - turn down contract work and keep searching for "real" jobs with benefits, or take the work and pray nobody gets sick. That's insane. That's not a choice anyone should face in 2025. The good news? This chaos is forcing innovation. Companies are learning to build lean, mean machines. Maybe it's time we build support systems that actually match how people work today. #ReadyForWhen #Layoffs #Benefits #HealthInsurance #Crunchbase Read more: https://hubs.ly/Q03PHbcW0

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The SaaS model is about to get disrupted. It won't look like what you expect. Renting software is no longer the only game in town. For years, companies paid monthly fees for tools they never truly owned. It was easy. It was fast. It was the only way. But the ground is shifting. Building your own SaaS used to be a fantasy. Too expensive. Too complex. Too risky. Now, the cost of development is dropping. AI is making custom tools possible for everyone. But there’s a catch. Owning your own SaaS means owning the headaches. Infrastructure. Security. Maintenance. Downtime. Most companies don’t want that pain. The real breakthrough is managed infrastructure with custom code on top. Plug in. Connect your data. Build what you need. Skip the server drama. This is the new sweet spot. Not pure SaaS. Not pure DIY. It’s “vibe coding” for the enterprise. You get the freedom to build. You get the safety net of managed infrastructure. This is what the next wave of enterprise software looks like. The market is massive. The demand is real. The future is custom, but not chaotic. Companies will own their workflows. Vendors will own the plumbing. That’s the only way this works at scale. The SaaS world is changing. The winners will be the ones who help you build, not just rent.

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📣 Female Tech Founders in NYC — New Accelerator Alert! Scale Ready Studio is a new 12-week, revenue-focused growth program for women building tech startups in NYC, created by Women.NYC in partnership with Get Sh!t Done. This program is designed to help founders scale sustainably through: - Revenue and profit growth - Strong systems and operations - Weekly strategy labs - Hybrid coaching (1:1 + group) - Technical assistance - In-person Founder Days The program culminates in a Deal Day, where participants pitch to a curated group of investors. 🗓 Applications close January 12

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The big layoff at Block / Square is tough to hear. Hoping those folks land on their feet as I’m sure there is a lot of talent amongst them. The move does start to prompt some big questions that I hope will become clearer in the next few weeks: - what does this imply for other big payment / pos companies? Is this a layoff that lagged or a sign of the impact of AI? - how does this change the Square GTM for mid-market restaurant chains and independents, who they’ve been making some ground with. - what is the eng to non-eng split with this layoff? - is there a reaction from Toast or SpotOn ? I’ll be keeping a close eye on this… #leadership #ai #foodtech #hospitality

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Had a blast and learned a ton this week in Miami this week for MaestroQA's company offsite and Art of the Conversation Event! First and foremost, it was great to see and spend time with coworkers and customers. Zoom is great, but there's nothing better than actually getting together in person and seeing folks to face to face to learn and hang out. 🛥️ I have too many takeaways to share them all in one post, but figured I'd start with a couple: #1 - Our CEO, Vasu Prathipati set the tone of the event by stating that we're a company with a clear set of values & that we're not the right tool for everyone. A lot of QA (& other tools) help you calculate the ROI of their tool by pitching headcount reductions and efficiency gains in the QA process. We're here to provide you with different tools (or different knives as Harrison Hunter would put it) so you can drive change and positive business outcomes & that matters to us. Over the week, I heard many people speak to how they are using conversational data to gather insights to improve how the business operates from individual performance to insights on churn, sales opportunities, competitive intel, product and policy feedback, & more. In life and when developing technology, how you want people to use it matters & we want companies and people to use ours to help drive change and positive outcomes in the world. #2 - Checkr & Brex both discussed the 'death of the QA score' and how they both stopped using QA as a metric & the benefits it's had on their quality & CX programs based on recommendations from us at MQA. While moving away from QA scores wasn't easy from a change management perspective, it made sense as it had little to no impact on actually improving performance over time. People would be focused on the score itself, instead of focused on the coaching, feedback, and insights coming from the reviews themselves. They flipped the script on QA as its always been seen as the bad guy to something that motivates people to get better and develop themselves. This is just one story of many I heard this week on how they are leveraging conversational data to drive business outcomes and change throughout their business. It was a great week and an amazing event & more to come from the event!!! AI Writing Detector: 0%

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