FastForward #51: And we're back
ForwardThinking 🤔
And we're back
When you saw me out your window
Singing from the garden
Only the beginning
I'm only getting started
I don't mind the digging
Baby, I'll work harder
~Jack Johnson, Washing Dishes
Six weeks ago, I announced I was leaving boldstart and taking this blog independent. True to my word, here I am again, ready to dig in and get back to work.
The idea is to keep building on what I started at boldstart over the first 50 issues of this newsletter. I’ll still be doing weekly commentary, executive profiles and news and analysis, but this time I’m also going to be covering enterprise-focused startups, something I've missed since leaving TechCrunch.
While the content should look familiar to regular readers, there have been some changes behind the scenes. Whereas before I was using WordPress to publish this blog, I've moved it to Ghost, a platform that lets me run the website and newsletter, manage subscribers, view analytics and customize it to my liking.
When I returned from my five-week break, I had a long to-do list to get FastForward set up on a new platform, one I thought would take weeks to work through. While I had some pieces like my content backup and subscriber list, I didn’t know how to get any of it onto the new site, set up tags and navigation, or use the custom URL I’d configured for it (https://www.fastforward.blog).
AI to the rescue
In the days before applications like ChatGPT and Gemini, I would have used the site’s documentation along with a good smattering of Google searches, but I suspect it would have taken much longer to get up and running. Instead of the weeks I expected, I was ready to go in just a few days.
As with everything related to these AI tools, it wasn’t always perfect. I went in circles at times, then figured out how to ask the question differently or try a different model, which often helped me clear the obstacles I ran into. I might have been able to do it on my own, but with AI it was just so much easier.
To be clear, the AI didn’t do the work, it helped me do the work. While today's tools can create content, of course, that's not what I needed. I needed an able assistant to help guide me through the more technical and sometimes convoluted aspects of the Ghost platform, and my AI assistants came through for me.
With the blog up and running again, my broader goal is to try new things, see what works and experiment with different approaches. That includes how to monetize FastForward, which could involve paid sponsors, clearly marked sponsored posts, paid subscribers or some combination of the above. What it won’t include is traditional online ads, which I don't think would fit this publication as I envision it.
Among the ideas I'm considering are collaborations with old friends, premium subscriber-only content and possibly a podcast. If you want to weigh in on monetization and content ideas, please feel free to email me at feedback@fastforward.blog.
I would be remiss if I didn't thank my regular subscribers, the new subscribers I've gained in the last week, and Ed, Eliot and Ellen at boldstart. They encouraged, supported and helped me build this blog, essentially incubating it inside their firm before generously letting me take what I built with me. I am forever grateful.
Until next week…
~Ron
What's new on the blog 📰
How ServiceNow is preparing for an agent-driven enterprise future
I recently interviewed Amit Zavery from ServiceNow, a man who has been at the forefront of enterprise software for decades, about the company's strategy to embrace agentic AI, whether organically or via acquisitions.
Here's what he had to say about the company's flurry of acquisitions last year: "Our 2025 acquisitions don't represent a pivot away from organic growth and building, they represent an acceleration," Zavery said. "We're focused on acquiring strategic capabilities."
Chasing agentic AI success at scale in 2026
Remember how 2025 was going to be the year agents really took off in the enterprise. Well, that didn't happen for a lot of reasons, mostly related to the inherent complexity of operating inside large organizations. That hasn't stopped people from predicting that once again, 2026 is going to be the year of the agent. If you keep on saying it, sooner or later, you could be right.
News of the Week 📣
SaaS stocks take a beating
Two major tech companies reported earnings this week, ServiceNow and Microsoft, and for any sane person looking at the numbers, it was a pretty darn good report for both companies. But apparently not for Wall Street.
You may wonder if revenue was up. It was. You may be wondering if it beat analysts' predictions. It did (or at least came very close). You may ask if the future outlook looked good – and it was.
Yet both stocks took a kick in the head the day after earnings reports this week, and they took down other SaaS stocks with them on Thursday:
- Microsoft (MSFT): -10.23%
- ServiceNow (NOW): -9.94%
- Salesforce (CRM): -6.09%
- HubSpot (HUBS): -11.22%
- Snowflake (SNOW): -7.70%
Perhaps Wall Street is spooked by lack of a clear software AI monetization plan. Perhaps it's the high cost of building and running data centers, but whatever the reason, investors ran from SaaS stocks this week, and it wasn't pretty.
MCP Apps move model chat beyond Q&A and into real work
The Anthropic-led MCP communications protocol took a big step forward this week when it released MCP Apps, a way to embed application workflows directly into the chat interface. Of course, it works with Claude, Anthropic's AI chat tool, but because it's an open standard and part of the Linux Foundation, it will work with other models, as well.
While models like Anthropic's can be tremendously helpful in reducing the amount of friction involved in getting work done, it still requires asking the question and then switching to the application to do the job. This new functionality lets you get work done in one place without switching context constantly.
It's not unlike the Slack value proposition a decade ago. While chat programs existed prior to Slack, it differentiated itself from the pack by using plug-ins to get work done without leaving Slack. This offers the same potential, but with greater intelligence.
Box CEO Aaron Levie, whose company is included in the initial group of supported apps, sees this as a natural progression for the protocol, one that helps extend the capabilities in a meaningful way beyond simple text. "Sometimes you want to be able to render an object or be able to create a custom interface or have something that somebody clicks on to kick off something, and it doesn't really just work as a text prompt. So I think MCP Apps is a necessary part of the evolution of MCP," Levie told FastForward.
For now, out of the box, it also includes integrations with Figma, Amplitude, Asana, Canva, Clay, Hex, monday.com and Slack. This ability to build workflows inside a model that includes many of the productivity programs people are using already is a big leap.
I'll be exploring this more in-depth in a longer piece next week. Watch for it.
Amazon could be the next big company investing in OpenAI
OpenAI always seems to find a way to worm its way into the tech news cycle, and this week wasn't any different. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon could be joining rival Microsoft in investing in the company.
Reports peg the investment at up to $50 billion in what would be a huge financial commitment, if true. Consider that Microsoft, which is being slammed by Wall Street this week for having too much exposure to OpenAI, has reportedly only invested around $14 billion (only).
It would presumably come with a similar deal to Microsoft to use some of that money to buy AWS infrastructure services in what is know as a circular deal, something we wrote about earlier this year in a similar arrangement between OpenAI and Nvidia.
It's worth noting that this news comes the same week that Amazon announced it was laying off 16,000 employees, and comes on the heels of laying off another 14,000 people last fall. The timing is at best unfortunate and at worst completely tone deaf.
My adventures in AI 🤖
I built my first app prototype in Claude this week and it was surprisingly easy.
I was talking to someone the other day about issues and frustrations related to the job application/interview process, and they suggested it would be nice to have something like Glassdoor, except instead of rating the company on what it's like to work there, it would be rating a company's interview process.
That stuck in my craw, and this week I opened Claude, described what I wanted from the app, and it built me an iPhone app prototype in Rust in a few minutes --and it's not bad.
I'm not a programmer (and I don't pretend to be), so I have no idea if this is sound under the hood, but from a pure app design perspective, it created what I asked and frankly I'm a little amazed.
This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn.
What I'm reading 📚
If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this
~Matt Rosoff, The Register
My Claude Code Psychosis
~Jasmine Sun, @Jasmine's Substack
AI slop is overwhelming open source
~Tom Krazit, Runtime
Guys, I don’t think Tim Cook knows how to monetize AI
~Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch
Look who's talking 👄
“We don’t live in the SaaS neighborhood."
~ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott telling Fortune he doesn't think his company is actually a SaaS company.
