@gradypb's recent Loom to Sequoia’s LPs accidentally made the best case I’ve heard for building AI services businesses over product companies. He details that the best AI application companies have to rebuild their product every 4 months as the underlying models improve. The part he didn’t get into is that the pace of change leaves these AI startups with two pretty crappy options. They can ship the rebuild and re-onboard enterprise customers who just learned the workflow & UI. Anyone who’s sold enterprise software knows how painful (or plain impossible) that is. Or they can hold the rebuild back because customers like the product as is, which is exactly the opening a competitor needs. Cursor probably felt a version of this when Claude Code showed up with a totally different surface (the terminal & agents) aimed at the same developers. So I’d push founders toward the services-native version, when possible. Instead of selling software your customer has to learn, run it yourself with the best practitioners in the space and sell the outcome. Your cracked team can relearn the product every 4 months. And this way your customer never has to. It’s often just a better business too. Pick customers where you’ll clearly drive dollars generated or saved, take a cut, and you can charge way more than a seats or usage-based pricing model would allow. Most people think of outcome-based pricing as a support & sales thing (Sierra getting paid for the upsells it drives), but it’s showing up in healthcare, CPG and a bunch of other places. SmarterDX (a Floodgate company) helped hospitals capture additional revenue they’d overlooked, took a cut, and got acquired for over $1B in under four years. Midstream Health is scaling fast by finding rebates health systems earned but never claimed and taking a cut of the savings. Waystation (another Floodgate company) started as sourcing software for CPG brands, then got pulled into running full-stack sourcing efforts and taking a cut of the found savings. Are there other companies I should be tracking that do the work themselves and take a cut of the results?