And what if that person making the offer was Peter Thiel?
That’s what happened to Luke Sophinos.
Luke dropped out of college to join the Thiel Fellowship where he met incredible founders and gained a Silicon Valley network overnight. He niched down his startup and created a vertical SaaS business for trade schools.
He rarely does interviews despite being the most knowledgeable person out there on vertical SaaS.
Thankfully he’s a friend, so we sat down to go deep on why the highest-upside SaaS opportunities have shifted from horizontal to vertical, why owning the transaction layer is key to building a venture-scale vertical SaaS business, and tactical frameworks to grow a vertical SaaS product (many of which he goes into detail about in his Vertical SaaS Bible).
In our chat we discuss:
Founder Mode
(00:00), Intro
(01:18), Luke's first business
(03:32), Joining a VC firm in college
(06:33), Becoming a Thiel Fellow
(11:26), Dropping out of college & going all in
(15:33), Why traditional education is broken
(18:04), Why founders should target boring industries
(19:53), Building trust
(21:04), When to pivot
Vertical SaaS
(22:46), Differences between vertical & horizontal SaaS
(23:53), Why vertical SaaS has better opportunities going forward
(26:53), What makes for a venture-scale vertical SaaS product
(32:38), Why vertical SaaS is criticized for not being venture scale
(34:30), AI's impact on vertical software
(37:37), Why Luke is sharing the vertical SaaS playbook
(39:00), The vertical SaaS bible
(39:53), Where to start building vertical SaaS businesses
(41:53), Raising venture funding & debt financing
Rapid Fire
(44:50), Who is one investor you’d recommend?
(45:08), One thing you'd change about startups?
(45:38), Advice for first-time founders?
(46:00), Something you believe that most disagree with?