This is my second time at the startup rodeo. So as we were starting up my thoughts were on minimum viable product and go-to-market strategy. But we were throwing AI into the mix and an AI startup is a whole different ball game, as I came to realize pretty soon. AI needs a specific mindset, it demands that you think about scale really early, and it requires a high level of commitment and capability in engineering teams that can build for and handle this scale. Now, AI is almost an essential weapon in a SaaS startup's arsenal.

Pekka Koskinen is the CEO & Founder of Leadfeeder, a lead generation software. Starting in 2002, I've founded five software companies and made three exits to date. Along the way, I've witnessed tectonic levels of change since launching my first company. In the fast-paced world of software as a service (SaaS), the pool of competition has continued to evolve, and alongside it, so have buyer expectations. As pointed out by a SaaS economics study from Price Intelligently, SaaS companies "that started five years ago faced an average of 2.6 competitors in their first year of business. Those founded a year ago were up against 9.7."

Let's rewind the clock a bit. Back in the day, software vendors would write code, package it, and often distribute physically (through those nifty things called CDs). In this old world, buyers were shouldering most of the operational costs, such as running the applications that they bought on their own local data and compute centers (or laptops and desktops). Then came the advent of faster Internet speeds and cloud computing, which really opened up software development and deployment to a whole new world. With that, we started to see a dramatic shift of infrastructure costs back to the software vendor. That is, under the SaaS world, vendors host and manage web apps in their own data centers or cloud environments, allowing buyers to gradually decrease their investment and expenses associated with managing infrastructure.

From the millions of Amazon Alexas to the self-driving car, new products are coming to market infused with machine learning. The innovation offered by machine learning techniques are real, and they will changed the SaaS world. How can startups use machine learning to their advantage? These applications alone make for tremendous advances. But, combinations of these applications lead to incredible things.

From the millions of Amazon Alexas to the self-driving car, new products are coming to market infused with machine learning. The innovation offered by machine learning techniques are real, and they will changed the SaaS world. How can startups use machine learning to their advantage? These applications alone make for tremendous advances. But, combinations of these applications lead to incredible things.