Can an AI Startup Beat ServiceNow?

Jake Stauch says a startup can take on ServiceNow if it aims at the large enterprise from the first day, and if AI lets people build automations in code. Two and a half years in, he calls the original plan delusional and says it has gone the way they drew it. Serval set out to become the largest enterprise software company. They made a list of companies, circled ServiceNow, and said they would beat it and build something bigger. That was two people in his co-founder Alex's living room. The ambition was there on day one.

The usual path is a thin layer on the incumbent, or a down-market product for smaller customers. A layer caps the company. Serving a smaller market first changes the product, the team, and the growth plan. They asked why not go after the big company. It is harder, and the prize is larger if you win, so they built for large enterprises from the start.

They did not see the same opening against the other giants. ServiceNow is a workflow platform, and code is a better way to express an automation than a drag-and-drop builder. Few people could write that code fast enough. AI is what made the idea possible. The bet was that coding agents would get good at defined work such as a password reset or an approval, because that work is verifiable. Early demos seeded the model with examples until a workflow was hard to break when the APIs existed.