Scott Galloway Says the ‘SaaSpocalypse’ Is a Farce: ‘I’m Buying SaaS Stocks’

The NYU professor tells Inc. why the SaaS selloff is overblown—and why investors are falling in line anyway.

BY BRIAN CONTRERAS, STAFF WRITER @_B_CONTRERAS_

Scott Galloway. Illustration: Inc.; Photo: Getty Images

Take a look at the stock market over the past month and you might be inclined to think that the AI inflection point is finally here. In apparent anticipation of general-use chatbots replacing more narrowly tailored software-as-a-service platforms, investors are selling off SaaS mainstays en masse.

The result? Plummeting share prices for Salesforce (down 14 percent), Intuit (31 percent), Oracle (19 percent), Shopify (9 percent), HubSpot (20 percent), Atlassian (44 percent), Docusign (22 percent), ServiceNow (21 percent), Snowflake (20 percent), Asana (38 percent), Workday (28 percent), SAP (15 percent), and Adobe (16 percent).

One shareholder who’s not concerned? NYU Stern School of Business marketing professor—and tech-savvy media personality—Scott Galloway.

“I’ll just say what I’m doing: I’m buying SaaS stocks,” Galloway quips when asked by Inc. about what some on Wall Street have dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.” “I think it’s a huge opportunity. … These companies, as a multiple of free cash flow, are the cheapest they’ve been in a decade, if ever.”

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He adds: “I think they’ve been overpunished” by investors.

Indeed, others in tech and finance have already argued that the selloff is overblown, even as a recent market analysis memo had Wall Street mulling a near-future catastrophe of mass automation and economic decline. Morgan Stanley’s head of global technology M&A recently suggested that the SaaSpocalypse could be making it harder for founders to secure exits.

It is “farcical,” Galloway explains, to think that people are all of a sudden going to be able to cancel their Adobe and Salesforce subscriptions in favor of writing ChatGPT or Claude prompts. 

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