A scary SaaS selloff changes the calculus for startups and private markets: “code alone was never a real moat”

On this Friday the 13th, I didn’t have to try hard to come up with a scary story for you.It all started a little over a week ago. Everything in the public and private markets for 2026 seemed as normal as can be. We were all talking about the bizarre, AI-old social network that is Moltbook. And then, advancements in enterprise AI agents like Claude dropped and it all still seems pretty normal (after all, the models get updated and improved all the time). But public market investors started to take this in, q ...