Jason M. Lemkin warns startups have until Halloween to upgrade their products with the latest large language models or risk being outcompeted and losing venture capital. He cites Replit's jump to nearly $200 million in annual revenue after integrating Claude 4, arguing that even mediocre software becomes dramatically better with the right AI.
But if you're running a company, if you don't have that answer today, you get an F.
So let's talk— we're here at Dreamforce. Let's talk about 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? How fast do people need to be moving? Halloween. I said till Halloween, which is like—
For a startup, I said Halloween. Halloween's the very latest. Halloween for a startup. Yeah, because you're going to get outcompeted if you're a startup, right? OK, so you're already behind.
Maybe, maybe 2 weeks. 2 weeks. Or you're already behind.
I'll tell you, you know, 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 that now they've lost hope.
Okay, tell me more.
They've all lost hope because it's not— I mean, you could make— when ChatGPT came out, we could all make fun of it, right? I mean, I honestly didn't get it at first. Like, there were so many hallucinations, right? 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. Everything's great now. In fact, even mediocre software just got better when you put the 4s in, right? Claude 4. You could take the same— I don't know how Qualified changed, but I bet you it's a 5 times better product just changing the LLM. I'm sure— like, I tell this, the story about Qualified. I don't know if it's true, but I know it's true. I'm like, the reason they're having to glow up, because they've been doing this for a while. Like, they have a great team, but you stick a better LLM. It was— and it was— I mean, Replit took 10 years to get to a million, right? They add Claude 4. Now they're almost $200 million in one year, but it's the same IDE, right? It's the same software, right?
