# Falling software costs push Monaco toward a broader platform

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/falling-software-costs-push-monaco-toward-a-broader-platform/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Sam Blond](https://realalpha.app/builders/sam-blond/) · Sam Blond is cofounder and CEO of Monaco. · Former Brex and Zenefits CRO who co-founded Monaco, the AI-native revenue engine for startups.
- Host: [Jack Altman](https://realalpha.app/people/jack-altman/) · General partner, Benchmark · Co-founded Lattice and ran it until 2023, then started his fund, Alt Capital.
- Show: Uncapped
- Episode: [Sam Blond on the Future of Sales in an AI-Native World | Ep. 54](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/), Jul 14, 2026
- Moment: 32:03 to 38:11 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/falling-software-costs-push-monaco-toward-a-broader-platform/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=1923

## Quote

> “the cost of **building software is trending to zero**. And so we want to take on as much scope as we possibly can”
> — [Sam Blond](https://realalpha.app/builders/sam-blond/) at [35:36](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2136) · Uncapped

## Takeaways

1. Monaco wants to capture labor as well as software budgets.
2. Lower development costs make a broader product feasible.
3. Shared data lets agents act across sales workflows.

## About this segment

Sam Blond says system-of-record vendors can capture labor budgets, not just software spend. As AI lowers build costs, Monaco aims to fold point solutions into one data-rich platform.

From “Sam Blond on the Future of Sales in an AI-Native World | Ep. 54”, Jul 14, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[32:16](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=1936) Well, several reasons. I think there are two categories of companies that are sales products. There are system of record companies. Today, that is a CRM. We actually believe that forward-looking, this like concept or category of a CRM will evolve into something of the past. we are more orienting around outcomes. And so we think that what today is this like system of record that manifests as a database CRM eventually becomes a revenue automation platform that's actually oriented around outcomes and not things like storing data. So we believe that there is like a new type of company that emerges from this that is a system of record, but doesn't look like the existing systems of record. What does it mean to be the system of record? If not just like a database? What is it? It is, well, look, HubSpot is appropriately named. It is the hub. Everything

[33:14](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=1994) orchestrates from the system of record. Yes, because it's the source of truth of data. That's right. And you asked a question like, why did you make this decision? Well, if we probably, if we bucket these company types or products into two categories, there's system of record and there's point solutions. Point solutions are layers on top of what today is a CRM system of record. If we think about the outcomes of those types of businesses backward looking, we have market leaders like Salesforce that today are 120 plus billion dollar companies just a few months ago are significantly larger than that. And then several others that are actually like quite large businesses. If we think about the category of point solutions that integrate to these systems of record, there are some that experience some early revenue growth and early maybe marks of

[34:02](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2042) low to mid single digit billion dollar valuations. But none of them, historically speaking, have realized generational technology company outcomes. We're not motivated by being a point solution. We're not motivated by an outcome, which again, like a really exciting outcome for those that experience. We want a shot. We want a shot at being a market leader in one of the largest categories of enterprise software that we think will actually evolve from here. If you think about Salesforce and maybe enterprise software companies today broadly, their market caps are predicated on IT budget. We are disrupting labor. Yeah, that's right. And so the future market leader has both that IT budget, but it also has the labor budget. Monaco is way more expensive than that sort of legacy system of record products because we are doing the labor on behalf of our customers.

[34:47](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2087) Which, by the way, is the story of all these AI native companies. It's true. It's both dramatically more expensive in some sense, and it's also dramatically cheaper in another sense than what you would be doing alternatively to get the same outcome. That's exactly right. And people, not only are customers willing to pay, this is what they want. You asked a question that maybe I want to touch on because I think it could be insightful or maybe helpful for other founders that are starting businesses today. There's an application of AI AI in Monaco-like products that is seemingly obvious, which is we are AI native. We just talked about it. It's the labor disruption. We are using agents and compute to replace workflows that founders and salespeople would otherwise be doing themselves. And it is more expensive when

[35:37](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2137) a human does it. And it actually produces worse outcomes when a human does it. The thing that I think is less obvious in terms of an application of AI that we've been very deliberate about, certainly intentional from the very early days, the cost of building software is trending to zero. And so we want to take on as much scope as we possibly can, starting with the system of record, but also displacing all of these.

[36:00](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2160) point solutions that we believe are actually features of a broader platform and not independent product lines or independent businesses in many cases. And by the way, this extreme breadth focus was obviously sort of, you know, like Parker was kind of like one of the like early canonical examples of like the, what a software business really is at the end of the day is like these customer relationships that allow you to extremely efficiently build and sell more products to them.

[36:27](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2187) And, you know, the customer just gets a straight up better experience because the data is tied together. It ends up being cheaper for them in summation. You don't have to have all these different vendors, like all these things. Seems like now with AI, you should actually take that to an extreme degree. The compound startup, maybe phrase or terminology that I think Parker made famous. Yes. And now it's like that should go like exponentially far.

[36:50](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2210) Well, I think Parker, to his credit, was probably ahead of his time on this, right? Because Parker started rippling in something like 2016. Zenefits was maybe less of a compound startup than Rippling was, and Rippling is more of a compound startup. I think that today, and I don't know the exact sort of math equation here, but we can build software. It's something like 10 times faster than we could just a few years ago.

[37:15](https://realalpha.app/v/QnkQhyOGo3k/?t=2235) If that is true today, that is going to be true a few years from now where we can build software 10 times faster than we can today. And so we want to go after as much sort of breadth of what we can do in the platform with the assumption that AI is going to enable us to build a product far faster. And that is what customers want. Customers want to come to one platform. The outcomes are actually better because you don't have data in a bunch of different silos, the system of record, the thing that does your call recording, the thing that does your outbound, the thing that builds your database. It is far more difficult to overlay an agent on top of this arbitrary set of tools with data silos than it is a single platform and source of truth that both has all of your data, but also takes all of your actions inside of the same tool. Totally. So when you think about