What I learned from Ben Horowitz and Service now? May 2026
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Written by Swagat Irsale, Growth Advocate.
I write about what I learned mostly every month. This usually includes 2 or 3 videos, blog posts or similar from AI, tech and Saas. Here is it for the last month -
What I learned from Ben Horowitz and Service now? May 2026
There is a saying that “Culture eats Strategy for breakfast”. Not sure who coined this, but it is very important and I have seen and lived through parts of it in my corporate career. However, this does not mean that strategy is not important and only culture is … 👏
Strategy is equally important and should be coupled with a vibrant culture. There is an additional perspective here, which is the stage of the company. Stages of a company can be the initial stage, growth stage, maturity stage and so on. Importance and criticality of strategy, culture, product, customer centricity, and more such variables makes sense at specific stages of the company.
I recently heard Ben Horowitz talk about many insights regarding products and companies at the growth stage. Here are my key learnings from his insightful talk -
If you are at the growth stage; the only job is to scale. During scale what you are selling is a story. Your brand is also a story which helps you acquire customers as well as employees … 🏆
Story is your only strategy. I believe what he meant is that the story should include how you sold a product to a customer, how successfully they used the product, customers continue to pay and buy more product and this creates a very good flywheel/ self - growing feedback loop effect.
This story acts as a lubricant for you in each and every prospect interactions and propels you further in your growth and scale journey.
Additionally, he gives tips for product managers. We all understand that the role and job of a product manager continues to evolve. Here are the pointers which I like -
He sums it up well. The job of a PM is to read the market, build relevant things, speak with customers/ prospects, iterate, build what will be sold and lead the market again and again. Well said Ben … 👏
One of the additional insights from his talk is that he stresses on the right product at the right time. Example - right now maybe is the right time to build and sell an AI product.
Is 2026 the right time? Or is it too late to build and sell an AI product?
What do you say? LMK.
Here is the video -
Service Now is another flagship technology company which serves most of the Fortune 500 enterprises. Here are my notes from Service Now’s Amit Zavery’s talk.
AI is a tailwind for enterprises. It is helping enterprises build and ship software faster, self-serve customers faster and much more. AI efficiency is visible in many enterprises and the efficiency will continue to improve in the coming years … 💡
AI slop is real. Please understand this; there are pockets of operations where AI may be used and those applications being not so mature; will create AI slops. We need to understand these risks before adopting any.
AI will eat saas is a noise … 😡
The Agentic revolution is very promising. We need to make sure that AI agents have appropriate permissions, compliance, security, and more. If all these guard rails are put, AI agents can be a game changer. However, we need to make sure that AI agents have appropriate context to make the action if they are making any.
Here is the original video -
There you go.
This is what I learned from Ben Horowitz and Service now in May 2026. Hope you like it.
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