Eventbrite Sold for $500M, Databricks $5B Raise at $134B Valuation & Why SaaS is Like Japan

Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll argue most public SaaS companies are caught in a TAM trap, while Databricks at $134B may be reasonably priced given its reaccelerating growth.

• Databricks raising $5B at $134B valuation (32x 2025 revenue, 55% YoY growth) compared to Snowflake at 20x revenue with 28% growth — the premium is justified only if reacceleration persists.
• Lemkin: the majority of public SaaS companies are in a TAM trap — average public SaaS growth is now ~16%, the slowest ever recorded.
• SaaS seat-based pricing called existentially threatened: HubSpot is 2.8x more ARR-per-employee than 2021; Microsoft says it is permanently past peak headcount.
• Eventbrite acquired by Bending Spoons for ~$500M (1.5x revenue, 50% premium); Salesforce-owned Drift is dead after security breach exposed data from ~700 orgs including Cloudflare.
• Gainsight locked out of Salesforce for two weeks with no resolution — Lemkin warns enterprises will consolidate agent access to incumbents like Salesforce and Snowflake on security grounds.
• Google launched a Lovable/Replit clone within 10 months of those products blowing up; founders no longer get years before incumbents clone their product.
• Supabase ($5B) vs. Lovable ($6B): O’Driscoll picks Lovable (captures front-end value if vibe coding wins); Lemkin picks Supabase (harder problem, stickier, less clonable).

2025-12-04 · Watch on YouTube