The worldwide SaaS market is about $300 billion per year.

The labor market in the U.S. alone is $13 trillion.

What software is now going after, the prize that it's going after, is the labor market.

Almost every software company has basically taken a filing cabinet and turned it into a database.

But what's happening now is the whole thing is effectively done end-to-end.

Software ate the world.

Now it's coming for labor.

At A16Z's LP Summit, general partner Alex Rampel, who leads the apps fund,

took to the stage to discuss why the real market opportunity isn't the $300 billion

SaaS industry.

It's a $13 trillion U.S. labor spend.

From filing cabinets turned databases to AI that actually does the job,

Alex breaks down outcome-based software, new pricing models,

and what happens when agents sell, support, and collect on their own.

Let's get into it.

I'm going to talk about how software eats labor. First, Mark wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal a long time ago, about 10 years ago. How about how software eats the world?

I guess the labor force falls within the world, so this is a natural follow-up. But if there's only one takeaway that I can leave with you today, is that the labor market,

this is almost obvious, is so much bigger than the software market.

So the worldwide SaaS market is about $300 billion per year.

Worldwide market cap is about $2.2 trillion.

The labor market in the U.S. alone is 13 trillion, so much,

much bigger. And it doesn't mean that the software market will suddenly be worth $13 trillion a year,

...