Jason M. Lemkin warns startup founders they have until Halloween 2025 to deploy a disruptive AI agent or risk being outcompeted. He says companies may need to cut up to 80% of staff and rebuild with AI talent to survive in an agentic enterprise world.
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There's no excuse in 2025. The agentic enterprise, which is kind of the vision that Salesforce is talking about at this conference, how long does a company have, do you think, to get on board the train before they just miss the train? You need to be moving now.
I've got until Halloween, which is like— Yeah, because you're going to get outcompeted if you're a startup, right? You're already behind. You have like 2 weeks. I'll tell you, maybe it's mean, every VC I know, every investor I know, where the startup hasn't made the jump yet, they've given up. Now they've lost hope. But if you didn't pay attention to how everything changed, at least at the start of 2025 and didn't have a plan, there's no excuse. But my point is everyone that sees other companies know, okay, we'll give you 2023. If you didn't figure it out, totally cool. There's no excuse in 2025. So Halloween, you've had 10 months. You don't have anything in production that is disruptive. You, you, you're not working at an acceptable speed in the age of AI. You have already lost. You may, it may not be over. but you gotta get rid of most of your team at a minimum and start over. You have to reboot your entire— if you're not in market with a disruptive AI agent as a startup on Halloween, you need a brand new team, a brand new team. Maybe even 80% of them gotta go. And, and you give them a nice Thanksgiving bonus and a turkey and tell them they gotta go because you've had, you've had 10 months.
