The whole buy-versus-build debate just collapsed into a build-then-buy-someone-else's-build loop.

One company is snapping up legacy tools at pace and rebuilding them with shared infrastructure. Another is letting a million projects spin up each week, most from people who've never touched a compiler.

The connective tissue is cost: code got cheaper, so holding it, modernizing it, or generating it from scratch all became newly viable strategies. What stays unproven is whether any of this sticks once the maintenance bill comes due.

2026 will redefine IT as a strategic driver of global growth. Automation, AI-driven support, unified platforms, and zero-trust security are becoming standard, especially for distributed teams. This toolkit helps IT and HR leaders assess readiness, define goals, and build a scalable, audit-ready IT strategy for the year ahead. Learn what’s changing and how to prepare.

Download the Toolkit

Private equity’s favorite pastime is financial liposuction; Beacon’s selling a gym membership instead.

The AI-native holdco just raised $225M to roll up small, profitable, founder-led vertical SaaS; youth sports, campgrounds, unions, industrial niches, and rebuild them on a shared AI platform. Instead of cutting costs and flipping in 5–7 years, Beacon wants to hold indefinitely, automate back offices, rewrite products, and keep founders in via earn-outs.

The bet is simple: if the cost of high-quality code collapses, the “boring” software layer of the everyday economy is mispriced. Beacon claims >50% EBITDA growth across a portfolio now adding roughly one company a week.

But this AI roll-up experiment is unproven at scale. Integration debt, culture clashes, and opaque valuations could turn “anti-private equity” into standard PE with better tooling. For now, Beacon’s war chest is a live test of AI-modernized legacy software as an asset class.

🚨 Soccer spent decades fighting technology.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars, World Cup spots, league titles, and entire careers have been decided by referees making split-second calls from impossible angles.
So why do so many fans hate VAR?
In this episode, Caya dives into the strange relationship between soccer and technology — from ghost goals and controversial World Cup moments to the sophisticated systems that now track balls to the millimeter.

Lovable just turned “vibe coding” from meme to line item: it’s now claiming $500M ARR and 1M new projects a week, according to TechCrunch’s reports explosive run-rate. Most of those projects are built by non-engineers aiming to monetize or replace internal tools.

This isn’t side-project energy. If even a small slice of those 50M+ builds stick, that’s a parallel universe of CRMs, inventory systems, HR tools and storefronts that never pass through traditional SaaS funnels, as TNW’s piece on chasing build‑economy thesis hints.

The open variable is maintenance. Vibe-coded apps haven’t lived through enough dependency churn to expose their carrying cost, and TechCrunch’s earlier debates looming SaaSpocalypse quietly rests on abandonment rates.

If Lovable can show those stay low, the “buy vs. build” equation in B2B software will get rewritten from the bottom up.

Scale your growth: Join names like HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Deel. Put your product in front of 90,000+ startup founders. Let's talk.