What you’re saying: ServiceTitan’s Pantheon 

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend ServiceTitan’s annual ‘Pantheon’ event in Southern California. I spent nearly all of my time chatting with folks about the state of the industry, including many of you, which was nice — and I may or may not have had a couple cheat meals. 

Regardless, below are some snippets that stood out from several of those conversations, anonymized and condensed for clarity, in no particular order:

“I can’t get a read on the market. Some contractors I speak with are doing great, and others aren’t. It’s a mixed bag of performance. It’s a weird year, and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.”

“Home sales really do impact demand, and their being down doesn’t help the market. Plus, the weather has sucked.”

“I expected there to be more private equity-backed platform deals this year, but several of them have pushed their timelines to come to market (like into next year), and I think uncertainty has played a big role in that.”

“In the near to medium-term, I’d bet that smaller PE platforms either start consolidating or go belly up.”

“So ServiceTitan got Poison to perform last year, and now they’ve got… Little Big Town?”

“All the AI talk and announcements are great, but we still prefer to be fast followers rather than first movers. And even then, we’ll keep things as simple as we can.”

“It’s more real than last year, but AI is still buzzword-y. It’s here for sure, but the business is a people and execution game.”

“I think we’re in somewhat of an AI bubble, and a good chunk of all these vendors exhibiting will either be merged, acquired, or out of business at some point in the near future.”

“The idea that Google is dead is obviously bullshit. It may be a constantly-changing black box, but we still need them.”

“Consolidation will continue happening at all levels — from smaller contractors getting acquired to eventually large-scale platforms merging or buying each other — no matter what, just like it has in every other industry.”

“We’ll see what happens with rates. The Fed said they’ll cut them more by the end of this year, but it’s too soon to say how that’ll actually impact consumers.” 

“For the most part, the Trump administration has been okay for the industry, in my opinion. Consumer uncertainty isn’t good, but the Mexico tariff exemption is.”

“Software company events are a great business model. You get thousands of people to pay thousands to fly in, and then get to pitch them face-to-face on why they should spend thousands more on new products.”

“This sounds obvious, but I really do believe that the contractors with strong plumbing businesses are set up well right now.”

“Wait, what do you do again?”