Full-Spectrum Software

How SaaS founders can embrace a "hotel school" mindset.

At the Cornell Hotel School, where I completed my undergraduate degree, we were taught that the foundation of any great business isn’t just the product—it’s the feeling left behind after the transaction is over.

Lately, I’ve been revisiting this idea while reading Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park. In the book, Guidara poses a question to a pool of job applicants, asking them to clarify the distinction between service and hospitality. One answer struck me as increasingly relevant to the world of venture capital and enterprise software:

“Service is black and white; hospitality is color.”

Service is the technical delivery of a product. It’s the steak arriving medium-rare as ordered. In our world, service is the API call that returns the right data or the dashboard that loads in under 200ms. It’s functional, it’s expected, and frankly, it’s the bare minimum.

Hospitality, however, is how you make the guest (or user) feel. If service is the “what,” hospitality is the “how.” And in a SaaS market that is becoming increasingly crowded and commoditized, hospitality is no mere luxury; it’s a survival strategy.

The SaaS Saturation Point

We are living through a massive shift in the software landscape. The advent of agentic coding has led to a saturated market where features are all too easily replicated. As evidenced by the recent “SaaSpocalypse” in the public market, technical moats are shrinking and software empires are tottering on pillars of sands. When LLMs can generate code and copy-paste features in a weekend, “black and white” service no longer cuts it.

To win today, software companies must look beyond functional design to prioritize experiential design. But what might “Software as Hospitality” actually look like? I can think of a few core principles drawing on my hotel school learnings.

• Proactive Design: Just as a great server refills your water before you realize you’re thirsty, great software anticipates the user’s next hurdle. The purpose of a clean UI is to reduce the cognitive load on the user, sparing them unnecessary confusion and decision paralysis. A Japanese philosophy captures this fully: Kikubari, “to share’s one’s spirit,” is the art of anticipating others’ needs before they’ve voiced them.

• The Personal Touch: In an increasingly automated world, moments of human touch become the “color” in the room. Onboarding, support, and discovery are all opportunities to differentiate and, ideally, build a sense of community for users. The quality of Hygge should be discernible in the best software platforms, much as it suffuses deluxe hotel rooms.

• Silent Service: Hospitality is as much about what doesn’t happen as what does happen. It’s not just about customer “delight,” it’s also about the absence of annoyance — just as hospitality staff use back-of-the-house pathways to fulfill a request without appearing in the guest’s personal space. In SaaS, this means ruthless simplification and vigilant avoidance of anything that might introduce unwanted friction.

The Investor’s Responsibility

This philosophy shouldn’t apply only to founders. Investors need to look in the mirror and ask the same question: What is the hospitality we provide to our founders?

Providing capital is “service.” It’s black and white. It’s the table stakes of our industry.

The color comes from how we support a founder during a pivot, how we open our networks, and how we show up when things aren’t going according to plan. Just as SaaS founders must think through the experiential design of their software, VCs must think through the experiential design of their partnership.

In an age of automated intelligence and saturated markets, the winners won’t just be those with the best code. They’ll be the ones who understand that, at the end of the day, we are all still in the people business.