Post by Krish Subramanian

12 days into this new year, it’s officially RKO season in SaaS. Ours takes place this week across multiple cities around the world. While we lay out 2026 targets, introduce systems for better alignment, and rally around a unified aim building on an excellent 2025, there’s something crucial we ought to be thinking about. Tailwinds. And the behaviours they beget. This is unarguably the best time to be building in many categories including ours. In some sense, much of our foundational work at Chargebee over the past decade has culminated towards serving the AI-driven, relentlessly expanding centrality of billing workflows. Not a day passes, when the importance of figuring monetization isn’t brought up by people from different functions, teams of different sizes, and companies representing different verticals. As a founder/CEO, the potential ahead of us enthrals me. As a builder, I’ve rarely felt the same sense of wonder around the everywhereness of the problem statement and what we can solve for our amazing customers. But as I’d written a few months ago, “growth, as is its blinding nature, papers over everything. It doesn’t just blanket the smaller, troubling symptoms. Even structural, org-wide issues can go unaddressed (or rather, completely ignored).” I want this time of great possibility to also be one of great clarity. We need to think harder about the up-levelled operating defaults our work requires today instead of just adapting past templates. We need to ship nimbly, continuously, and audaciously to learn from customer teams building at the frontier. I’ll wrap up with another long-standing RKO feature: invoking a sports analogy. Not drawn from cricket (a favourite of mine), nor basketball/baseball (sorry, Brian and Guy), but the most distilled of disciplines: running. Nicholas Thompson, The Atlantic’s CEO — and, as I recently learned, a lifelong runner — wrote about a beautiful lesson he learned from his father: “There’s wind at your back that’s hard to feel. Don’t let yourself get soft. Because then you won’t be ready when the wind is in your face - - - as it almost certainly will be soon.”