AI and the Death of the 2021 Sales Playbook - SaaStr AI LDN AMA with Jason Lemkin

It's real. You gotta play this game. It'll only take a few minutes. If you play it, it's just for fun, because it, we can, it's kind of a prop for vibe coding, but actually if you play it and you win, you get an extra 50% off coming to SaaStr Annual in May. So it's 50% off, 50% off. It's the cheapest tickets we've ever had. You just have to win, you just have to win this game. And it's actually, you could try it. The fact that I was able to build it in like an hour and a half on Replit is pretty telling. It only goes so far. It only does so much. Other things wouldn't work. But it's kind of a reminder that if you, if you want to rebuild something, revive with yourself, your team, and it's been built before, it does get easier. So anyhow, that's just for fun. But, but if you're bored, you can do it here and you'll get an extra 50% off annual or if you win, one person, or maybe it's 3, 3 people that win it. Not that it's such a great prize, but I think either 1 or 3 people get a, a one-on-one with me afterwards too. So all you have to do is win the game, um, trick this, trick 5 prospects into buying from you, um, with some, uh, jargon, AI jargon, and then it'll tell you you won, and there's a leaderboard. So it's vapourcell.ai. Um, so that's the agenda for today. I got, I got nothing for now other than general AMA, but if anybody wants to kick it off with a general question, therapy, whatever you need, let me know if anyone's got something or I can make something up. But anyone got a burning question, wants to kick us off? Don't be shy, be a little shy. Anyone? AMA, maybe it's easier to do this at the end of the event rather than the start. And go ahead. Inbound. Inbound. Is inbound dead? Because we've had our web traffic drop in the last 12 months after Google Summer Event. Yeah. Is it dead? Is there a new way? I don't think anything's— so the question is, is inbound dead? Your traffic's down 50% in the last 12 months. It's a good question. Let me step back. For what it's worth, I really think— This is a part of a woe is me narrative that I think began toward the end of '23 and has accelerated. Woe is you, your SEO is harder. Woe is you, you don't have as many leads as you had during a lockdown, during a global pandemic. Poor you. And it leads to a narrative. And then I'll be more specific with the answer. It leads to a narrative which I think is quite dangerous, which is that the go-to-market playbook is broken. It doesn't work anymore. You hear this, it's just not true. Now, all— here's how I think about it. The playbook that some folks are running from 2021, of course, does not work today or does not work as well. But here's what I say. The plays all work. Webinars, inbound, outbound, leftbound, rightbound. It all still works. And the interesting thing is, if you look at a lot of the hottest AI companies, like look at Vercel, they just raised $10 billion. Who's the CEO? She was the chief business officer at Stripe. Okay, look at Replit where we just did a whole scale with them. There's 0 to $250 million already this year. Vibe Coding, who's their CRO? ZoomInfo. Okay, if you go through all of the hot AI companies right now that are vaguely in B2B, you will see a cast of characters from the— is it the aughts? Is that what we say? No, no, from the tens. You will see B2B leaders that you all know from SaaStr 2018 and 2017 running the companies. That wouldn't be possible if the plays don't work. Now, are they using different tools? Are they using more SDRs? Things we can chat about for sure. Right. But the biggest real difference with a lot of AI leaders is— and then I want to get back to your question. We can talk more. There's just so much demand, right? Because what's happening in a lot of AI tools is everyone is in market simultaneously. The tools are either so disruptive like a Cursor or Replit or Lovable or ElevenLabs will go from like almost nothing to $300 million this year. We just— I mean, Amelia just literally pulled up 11Labs to do all the intros for all our speakers. Okay, we did it in like— she did it in 10 minutes. We used to have to pay an agency that would take weeks and complain about it and they'd be terrible and they'd argue over the pronunciation of people's names. No, it's Lemkin. It's Jason M. Lemkin. We'd have to argue and they get angry. We literally did it today in the green room in like 20 minutes, right? That is so disruptive that this demand. And so of course, if you have insane demand, sometimes with virality, is gonna change the playbook because you're gonna be servicing it, right? And I know, you know, at Bolt, which is one of the leaders in vibe coding, the head of sales there was one of our old sales team, like the old is new, and even there, and I know it's true at Lovable and Repl.it, just as 3 examples, they have so much inbound they can't service it. They have to look at the list each day and I mean, I think Brian, who runs it at Bolt, is at $60 million. I think he has 3 people on his sales team or something like that? 4. 4, okay, so how many leads can they follow up? Thousands, right? So that is different, but they're all classic B2B sales reps, just instead of calling every lead and trying to convince them their fungible product is the exact same as another product, they have insane demand and servicing. But it's the same playbook, it's the same demos, it's the same everything, so. I know that's not quite the question you're asking, but I do think it's important to understand that the playbooks may not work as well, but the plays are the same. And in many cases, it's the same players. So it's just, it's just a lot of folks in market looking for radically better solutions. And at the same time, CIOs and others are cutting budgets for old solutions. There is this— it's not a paradox, but it can feel like it. If you— I've written a lot about it on SaaS. I just wrote it up with a bunch of Gartner data this year. Gartner said overall enterprise software is going to grow the fastest it ever has at 15% a year at this scale. Right. I mean, $400 billion. It hasn't grown this fast ever. But of that 15%, almost half is taken up by price increases from existing investors. Everyone's raising prices. And about half of the remaining half is new AI budget. So that means if you're not one of the ones that they're focused on for price increases or buying more, if you're not adding agent force or you're not an AI tool they want to add to, everyone else has to get cut. So vendor— the vendor count is getting stable or shrunk to make room for new offerings and price increases from the select vendors and the new AI guys. So it can feel like there's forces that are either that are punishing you in a way they didn't used to, or, or they're tailwinds. They're tailwinds. And the reality is, if you talk to any vendor that's here that's a sponsor, the reason they're a sponsor is because they got tailwinds. The headwinds aren't sponsoring anymore. It probably should be the opposite. The ones that have headwinds should probably be here hustling for customers, and the ones that are tailwinds should be just back in the office wondering what to do with the surplus of leads. But this is the, this is the odd, odd, odd thing about marketing. So that's the world we're in. And we can chat more about it if folks have follow-up questions. Specifically on, is inbound dead? So no, inbound isn't dead. The artisans that's here on Qualified, we know them pretty well. We were just talking with the head of SMB at Salesforce, Asian force. All of them have more demand than they can service. All of them, it's actually interesting, they all have the same kind of issue is there's just not enough forward deployed engineers, not enough solution architects, not enough folks to get the agents going. They are all turning away customers because they have too much demand for an agent that can do everything for them. So inbound isn't dead. Is SEO dead? If you're running the classic playbook, right? I'll tell you our SEO at SaaStr. Here's a— now look, SaaStr is a lot of things. We do events, we do a podcast, we do multiple podcasts. We got a podcast with Harry, we got two YouTubes, we got tweets. But our blog, if you've been with us for a while, our blog is like our core. It's like home base. Okay. And our blog traffic was fairly flat for about 4 years. Going into this year, our SEO is down 8%, not, not 50, but 8 for real. We can track it, but our traffic's up 50. Traffic is up 50 and going up. Our viewership, we will end this year at SaaS.com twice as many readers as last year, even though our SEO is down. Now our SEO is down 8% and I think folks like G2 have said theirs is down like 30 or 40% or more. So If that's your only play and you got no ideas and you haven't changed your product or your GTM since 2021, it's probably going to feel 8 to 50% harder. But for us, like, I actually don't— I mean, most of our team is AI agents now, so we don't really have anyone to tell me why our viewership is up. But I can tell you when I look at the content, it's because people all want to read about AI GTM content. Okay? They don't want to read about classic SaaS themes, about CS teams and CROs. It turns out unless there's an AI thing, they don't want to read it. But because we have some of the best AI GTM agent content out there, people are just devouring it. Okay. And if we could sell that content, I mean, Amelia and I would buy islands. Okay. If we could sell because the demand for that content is so high. So my point to everything is you got to find that this is like my other talk tomorrow. You got to find the tailwinds and lean into it. There is AI budget. There is AI budget for new vendors at the CIO level. And if you're an existing because if you have existing customers and you have something that truly changes the game for efficiency, it truly changes. You can replace lots of humans for your agent. Your customers are going to want to meet with you and they're going to want to buy it, right? Salesforce is at $42 billion growing like 9%. And I know they're a public company, but I'm pretty convinced if they could deploy AgentForce overnight for every customer, they could grow twice as fast. Right. So find that tailwind. That's your job right now. For your teams, figure out what— it's not building a copilot or putting AI on your homepage. It doesn't create budget and it doesn't change. It doesn't change how your customers do business, right? What can you do with AI to make your product 10 times better? And it's probably replacing humans for many of you, even though people think that's a tough topic. That's the reality. It's replacing humans in some fashion. That's why customer success took off. I mean, support took off so quickly Because if you train a support AI pretty well, it— you— a lot of folks really have replaced 20 to 50% of their support team. Even Marc Benioff, I think, redeployed 3 or 5,000 folks in support even there at Salesforce. We all know tons of folks that have done it. Sierra just said they went from 1 to 100 million in a year. Brett Taylor, ex, you know, ex-CTO of Facebook, co-CEO of Salesforce, just going out to people and saying you can replace a lot of your support teams with AI. So you've got to find your version of that, your, your tailwind to grow. But if you're running the exact same playbook as 2022, nothing's changed. Yeah, that inbound is going to be harder. SEO is down and vendor consolidate. The odd thing that it will take another question. It's just such an odd thing when overall B2B software budgets are at a record size and accelerating plus 15% at hundreds of billions are in according to Gartner. And folks that have product market fit with AI B2B are growing like crazy. But at the same time, it's not free. People think that CIOs have infinite budget. They don't. There's a little bit of elasticity, but at the end of the day, companies only have so much revenue and they only have so much profits and they can only apportion so much of that to software and IT. And so it's not all free. And when they're giving this money to— I these hot AI companies, they're cutting it from everybody else. They are cutting it from everybody else. And if they're not— and if they're not arguing with you on renewals, and a lot of folks have felt it, it's worse. They're calling up vendors and saying, we're just cutting back this year. We're just— and if you guys haven't ever been at it, I, in my brief tenure as a VP at Adobe, it was pre-AI, but I lived it as a VP at Adobe. And you'd go around the room and you'd say, There were human layoffs and there were app layoffs, okay? And everyone at the boom of cloud wanted more apps, and they'd say, "Fine, but everyone go, every single VP around the room, give me 1 or 2 to cut." You'd have to cut 1 or 2. And it's still happening, it's just done more from the top down at the CEO level. So if you're on the bubble, if you're an attachment to a CRM that you don't quite need, right? This is where, you know, so many folks, you know, Outreach and SalesOps struggled and Gong took a lot of this market because Gong built everything, But one of the things Gong did is they stole budget from sales ops and outreach and other folks, right? They stole it. And see, it's already happened for this calendar year, but CIOs and others have gone around the room and said, give up an app, or give me 2 if you want to add 1 extra. You want to add a couple AI apps? I'll find you budget. You got to give up 2. You got to give up 2. You have 100 marketing tools. You need 100? Maybe 96 is enough. And I, I find even in my own investing portfolio, I just got an investor update yesterday of a pretty successful company that's partly through its AI transition. They're at mid-eight figures in revenue. They had $1.5 million of churn last month, $1.5 million of churn last month from happy customers that, you know, no CSAT issues, no other issues. They literally said just we're cut. They're cutting apps next year. We're an attachment. Were an attachment to CRM. We got cut. And the CEO, who I love to death, failed. They failed as a team because they didn't get above the cut line. Now, they didn't lose all their customers, but they lost to— that's a $1.5 million last month. Not because it didn't work, it wasn't great, and not because they didn't have AI in it, but because the two CIOs just went around the room and that was the one that got cut. It was great to have, but not mission critical, and it got cut to make room for another app. In fact, one that's also speaking at this event. All right, anybody else got another question? Hi, I'm Patrick. Quite a specific one. In a podcast the other day, you said something along the lines that AISDRs didn't work, but then SONNET 4 and now it works. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Because I think— I can. Sorry, say that again. The AISDRs don't work but do work, or? You said didn't used to work, but then SONNET 4 now works. It was quite a specific comment. It's not a complicated— it's a rich question. And Amelia and I will show you real data tomorrow at 9:00 AM at the kickoff. Two different threads. One, really none of these products, these SDR products, I think worked before Claude 4.1 SONNET or Claude 4 this year, right? Replit didn't work, Lovable didn't work, Base44 didn't work, nothing. I mean, they were out there, they weren't very good until the magical moment when Claude 4 came out and everything was kind of magical. Gamma didn't— Gamma was around since 20— We read about Gamma and we love Gamma for AI presentations, 1 to 80 million it'll do this year, but it was founded in 2020. So it was 5 years to 1 million and then 1 to 80 this year. It's not a coincidence that all of these apps took off January, February, March of this year. When the LLMs got better. Okay. So in a way it doesn't matter. But if you bought a lot of overhyped go-to-market SDR tools before February, March, or April of this year, they just didn't work well. Right. And I mean, literally, we were— Amelia and I, it's on our Saastr.com/agents website. We were at this company Qualified that does AI inbound and outbound. We use it on the website. And we were with the CEO that they've been around for like 5 years. He was the ex-CMO of Salesforce. Okay. They've been doing this for trying to use AI to qualify inbound leads since like 2019 or something. Okay. Repeat founder, great guy. I'm like, I don't have any of your numbers, but this really took off around February or March this year, right? It's like, yeah, like that's when your product actually worked. He's like, yeah, that's when it finally actually worked after 5 years. Right. Same with Gamma. Replit was founded almost 10 years ago. Right. And blew up. It'll go— it was 10 years to a million and then 1 to 250 million. So, so you kind of almost have to— if you had— it's, it's less an issue for this room than maybe the, the, maybe the, the less techie of the world. But if you had a bad experience with almost any AI, LLM, GTM, other product before March of this year, write it off. It was a different time. It was different LLMs, different world. Okay. That, that's a base point. The second point, which is not the same question, but it's related. Plenty of folks, whether they tried to deploy an AI sales agent before or after Q1 of this year, so many folks just told someone on their team to do it or hired an agency that didn't know what they're doing. Okay. Literally, Amelia and I were on a call with a global technology leader we all know and love. We've all heard that's pretty AI forward. Okay. Pretty impressive company. And said, we're thinking about buying our first AI SDR. We're just going to buy it and hand it to our SDRs and have them figure it out. Have them figure it out. It's not going to work. You got to train it. You got to train it for a month. You got to train it every day. You've got to iterate in onboarding. So that's another failure mode that I've already heard like 10 times since I've been here today. Folks like, well, if I can, I just buy one of these tools and turn it on and walk away. You can't. We've said this in every Workshop Wednesday that Amelia and I have done with every other speaker. It still doesn't work. So one failure mode was like pre the fours, pre, pre, you know, Claude 4 and GPT-4, pre the fours, the stuff, the LLMs weren't good enough. And the other one was we bought it and just turned it on and we didn't magically get millions of revenue. It don't work that way. Right. And the real way, if I had to summarize it and we'll talk a lot about it at this event, here's the other mistake folks make. If you want— Emilia makes this a lot of times on our, on our live live webinars or AI Workshop Wednesday on Wednesday. Here's the Captain Obvious thing for any AI SDR, BDR, even AEs as we do more of them, CSMs. First, you got to have it work in the real world with humans. Then you tell the AI what worked. That you— there's no magical prompt. Okay. The prompt is, here's the script that I use with a customer that I closed. Then you iterate that prompt and then you hook it up to data like Salesforce or HubSpot or other sources of data. Or Snowflake, and then you have it ingest the data to keep working with that prompt to make it better. It's not that complicated. Okay. So many folks are like, oh well, Saastr's AI SDR works because you have inbound leads. I'm like, well, everyone has some inbound leads or it's just you, you've got the only— as long as you've closed any customers, you can train the AI to be almost as good as you and work 24/7. It's that simple. But folks think that like, I'm going to buy— I have no inbound leads at all. I have no inbound. I've never done outbound. So I have no inbound leads. I've never done outbound, but I'm going to buy a tool and turn it on. I'm going to make millions. Like, how the eff would that work? Just this is kudos to the sales rep that got a commission at that vendor. But you know, it doesn't work and you can laugh. But I would say 80% of the conversations— Amelia, do you agree that we have a version of that? I bought a tool. I bought a tool and I have no leads. I bought a tool and I have a lot of leads, but I didn't connect it to my leads. It didn't magically work. And like, so you just figure out what works in the real world and then train the AI to just do it again and again and again with more and more and more data. And then read every email it sends, read every response it ingests. And some of them will be dumb and some of them will be wrong. And all these tools have some bit of training and you say, hey, that was wrong. You know, SaaStr, "Disaster AI learned it is not December 4th," okay, or whatever mistake it makes, and you do it every day for about a month, and then the mistakes start to go away, and they become recurring, and it gets trained on better, more and more. It's not that complicated, but it's, you've gotta sell it, just like anything, going back to being a disaster, if you can't sell it yourself, the AI can't sell it for you. It's that simple. You can't sell yourself, the AI can't. So thanks for the, a big answer, but thanks for the question. [Speaker] Hi, Jason. My question is, What's the main skill that we should uplift in 2026 for the main gen? And what do you think is going to be the golden nuggets, the best channel in 2026 for Legion? Sorry, you might have to— I'm just getting a little tired. You might have to rephrase the question. Sure. What's the question for GTM? So for Legion. For Legion. Yeah. What do you think? What kind of skill should— what skills should we uplift in 2026 and what's the golden nugget channel or the main channel, which one do you think that it's? Well, I'll give you two answers. First of all, for marketers in general, for B2B marketers, I talked to a great marketer when I came in at an AI-focused company saying she was pretty confident about her job, things were going well, but she was nervous. The world's changing so much, she was worried for her job. And I said, you should be. Everyone should be worried for their job. Every CRO or CMO should be worried for their job. On the one hand, it's the same people in the same place, but there's so much change and you gotta get ahead of it, right? If you don't get ahead of it and build skills, it's gonna be hard. So the advice I gave there, and then I'll give a second piece of advice The number one piece of advice is become proficient at like a couple tools here or otherwise, a couple leaders. Okay. Right now, today, if you are world class at AgentForce or Clay or Qualified or Artisan or any of the tools here, it really doesn't matter which one. Pick 2 or 3 leaders that, that have decent revenue that people have heard of. And if— and you go through the deployment yourself, you do the training we talked about, you onboard, you get it working in your company. and you can point to the metrics just like Amelia is going to do tomorrow. Here's how we had 7.2% open rate and here's how long it took and here's how— if you have those skills, you will be infinitely hireable for the next 18 months because only like 2% of marketers have those skills. So become the expert in deploying agents and it doesn't need to mean, you know, every agent or even needs to be technical, but you need to pick a few leaders and deploy them yourself. Not, not tell someone on your team to do it, which is what we see. Do it yourself. Do it, watch it, iterate it, train it, iterate every day, spend a week nonstop deploying it and then work on it every single day for a month. You will learn so much and you will become infinitely deployable. That's sort of at the agent level. You know, I think on and just sort of generic demand playbook, I don't— I'm still learning. I don't have all the magic ideas. But I think if you think like buying GEO vendors and just figuring out how to automate LinkedIn posts is gonna save your job, it's not. I think you just, just like always, we gotta be careful of LinkedIn bullshit and charlatans because even if it's like a little bit better, it's not gonna save you if the CIO's canceling your app that they like. It's not gonna save you. I don't know all the answers, but you need to, It's harder and harder to sell fungible products that don't show massive instant ROI. And I think back a lot, the first podcast that Marc Benioff did with us earlier in the year, I asked him what he thought of Palantir, obviously one of the biggest successes in AI B2B. And he said, he went on to say this a lot other times, he's like, I'm jealous of how much they charge. Pretty funny, you know, they charge more than he does. But I really love the thing he said next. He said, I'm jealous in a way. I wish— I love what they're doing for forward-deployed engineers. And what Mark said was, I wish everyone at Salesforce could go live even before they pay. They could go live before they even pay. This— think about this, and this is a marketing and sales weapon. The way we used to buy B2B software for years was I need a CRM, I need a marketing automation. Your friends would use it. You saw your last company, you talked to a sales rep that could answer 6 questions, you'd buy it. And if you're lucky, by the end of the year you might deploy it. I mean, in the old days, if we've been— if you've been around for a while, you might have customers that were new for year 2 that never even deployed in year 1. Okay, that don't fly today. It flies a little bit, but it don't fly much. Okay, what Mark's point was, he said, I know I can't deliver this today. It's not It's not feasible, but the technology is there. I wish every single customer would be live on an agent force or whatever, a Gentec Salesforce before they gave me a dollar. Think about that. This is my best advice. Get as close to that today as you can for your customer. When you look at the ones that explode, the cursors, the gammas, think about— go back and use them again. Think about how much value you get in the free program. Think about how much value you get in the first month. What can you do with AI to provide that much value to customers before they even pay you? If you provide insane value with an agent before they pay you, they're going to be kind of happy to pay you rather than the sucker bet that we all made for the better part of two decades. A sucker bet. I think it works. Someone gave me a demo. The demo kind of works. I can't use it myself, but I, you know, I need that. And then half the time it's a horror story. So my— that's my best idea is make your— provide insane value before you get a check. And then the percent of your leads that's going to convert is going to skyrocket. It's whatever it is, it's going to skyrocket. So thanks for the question. I'm still learning, though, in part. It's a more generic question. There are some AI experts that think or say that with AGI in 2, 3 years, SaaS will be dead because you can literally just talk to OpenAI or so on and say, write a code that does that, and you don't need to buy software. It will just do it on demand or look and learn from itself. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, it's possible. Listen, listen, it's, it's, it's, if you'd asked me 6 months ago, I'd say the odds that's true is zero. That's like ChatGPT nonsense, right? I mean, ChatGPT is very, very powerful. You know, it's very extensible, it's very open. It's still impossible. You cannot reproduce the amount of workflows, the amount of corner cases, the amount of complexity that complex B2B software does. But you can chip away at it. You can chip away at it. And so I know I can't quite show it on the screen, but like this app we built, I mean, we've built 11 apps. I've built 11 apps. I've coded 11 apps in 90 days that have been used 800,000 times. They're all at saster.ai/agents. 800,000 times in 90 days. I haven't— we haven't stolen revenue from anybody, but that's a bit of an existential threat to somebody, isn't it? So and the other point I'll say for folks, since we built these 12 apps on Replit, I can't tell you how much better the agent has gotten. So if any of you follow me closely, you'll know the first app I built on Replit like 170 years ago. It blew up. It didn't work. It deleted my database. Those posts went viral. It was on Reddit. We got some like threats, some death threats from Redditors. It went crazy. Millions of views. Okay. And there's a lot of reasons that happened. And if you want, we can talk about it for fun. I've learned a lot. I intentionally went into— I did this experiment. It was, it was an experiment from like 160 days ago or whatever, because everyone, Microsoft, lovable Replit, was all saying Just tell us in— tell us in a sentence. Hold on, sorry. Tell us in one prompt what you want to build and you can build it. They all said this 180 ago. Tell us you want Salesforce, we'll build it in 60 seconds. Of course, that was impossible. So I said, but they're all saying it. Not just these startups like Lovable and Replit and Bold. So Microsoft was saying it. Microsoft was saying this. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do a social experiment with all of us. I'm going to build an app for the SaaS community without learning anything. I'm not going to study these apps. I'm not going to understand how they work. I'm not going to read anything. I'm just going to ask Twitter which one I should use. And they said by a narrow margin, pick Replit. So I picked it by a narrow margin and it went off the rails for the first one. Okay. I could tell you why it deleted the database and all these other things, but they fixed all of those issues for, for real. But more importantly, the agent is like 100 times better now. When I go— when I started writing apps on Replit 170 days ago, I'd be like, I want to build a way to connect folks in this room together. And the code would just be wrong. It would hallucinate. It would say things that were all wrong. I couldn't test it. I couldn't QA it. I was never going to finish an app. And almost no one finished these apps 9 years ago. Now I wrote one, you know, in an hour for this event. And I'll give you an example of something that's changed, and then I know it's a long-winded answer. When Replit launches V3, and I'm sure Lovable has it, and Claude itself has some of this functionality now, now in Replit V3, which only launched like 45 days ago, there's multiple agents that talk to each other and check the work. Okay, so when I did the first app in Replit, it deleted my database. Now it calls in other agents to help it. So before it deleted my database, now it has an architect. And when there's a tough problem, it doesn't just do something, go off the rails. It says, hold on, I'm not sure. I'm gonna call in another agent, the architect, and the architect talks to it. And if there's a security question, they bring in other help on security, and now they have a design specialist. So there's so much better. And so my learn— so the rate— we're not gonna build the, the classic CRMs and ERPs that we all use, but don't underestimate the, the rate at which this stuff's getting better. And so Where do I think that nets out today? And maybe next year I'll have a different answer. I'm still— I mean, I know a lot, but I'm still in learning mode. Just realize that like your competitive edge is shrinking in time, shrinking in time. When I started in SaaS, you basically had— you build something really slick and then you'd have about 18, 12 to 18 months until you were copied by a startup. Then you'd have like 5 years until a big company. Copied you. Okay, I know I'm really dating myself, but for fun, when we launched EchoSign— DocuSign, which is like $18 billion company today— it only worked in Windows and only was partially web-based. We had like 18 months before they decided, hey, we're gonna copy what Lemkin and his team did. Like, we needed to get users, they needed to see traction. They had traction in printer drivers for real estate, didn't seem worth their trouble. Then it took like 5 years for it took 6 years for Adobe to decide to copy it. Then the copy didn't work and they bought us. Then like Google just launched a clone like last year, like a decade later. Like that's the way it used to happen. Not too recently I invested in a startup that I love, incredibly powerful startup. Within 2 weeks they had like 4 clones. 2 weeks. And then I talked with a massive company that's building a clone themselves. It'll be out this year. So the rate at which— this is where I think it's not that we're going to rebuild Workday and Salesforce and Oracle, but our competitive edges are going to be measured in months. And when they used to be years, and that compounds, that compounds. And if you can't run at that pace, I don't see how you're going to— you're going to— you're going to fall to 0% growth. So that's what I worry about is this rate of iteration. And so it's not exactly the narrative of, you You can prompt everything in ChatGPT, but, but our, our moats are all weakening. Our moats are all shallower. And the pace of copying and improving, I mean, literally this, it's funny this. So Google just launched a Replit lovable clone. It's had its own, it launched it. What's today? Monday. Monday. So I think it launched it on Friday or Saturday or something. So I'm like, I know these apps, I'm going to try it. So I put in this prompt to build VaporSell. Didn't quite work. Okay, just launched. Okay. Doesn't have a database. It does. It's missing a lot of things, but I just took that work, which literally took about 10 minutes, and I gave it to Replit and Replit cloned it in 5 minutes. It worked better. It worked better. I'll give you another example. We talked about this, wrote about a little bit. We took— we're running about 5 AI SDRs and BDRs at Saastr now. Took us a while to do this. Our most recent one, we just took a prompt from one and put it into another and it just worked. It just worked. And so agents will actually— may make our moats even weaker and shallower because if the agents can just take prompt— if I can take a prompt from one app and give it to another app, my switching costs have gone down radically, haven't they? It's not 2 years of business process change and mapping data. And the mapping data doesn't work and the leads don't map to the leads in the context. If I can literally take the prompt, which is reach out to my top 50 attendees from Saastr Lender this year and give them a special coupon for Saastr Annual in May, and that's my prompt and it works, and I can just give it to another agent that does the same thing. Where's my moat? I mean, there is switching costs, but it's so much lower than it used to be. So that's the kind of stuff I worry about, that the cloning is going to be much faster. The agents, the agents create short, shallower moats. The agents can ingest each other's prompts. And I just feel like everything is on shakier competitive moat foundations. And that's the world we got to adapt in. We don't get 5 years to wait for a big guy to clone us. That was the old days. We got 5 years, 5 years to wait, sometimes like 7 or 8 years. And then a big company would say, oh, well, they hit $100 million because for a lot of big companies, You're so big. I mean, if you're doing— I keep coming back to Salesforce because I'm forgetting what everyone else's revenue is. But Salesforce, $45 billion. So one way to think— when you're thinking about competitors, one way to think about competition is it's got to be 10%. So at the end of the day, it's probably not worth Salesforce doing something that can't make them $4 to $5 billion in revenue. Now, it's a little more atomic than that. It might be each business unit is smaller. So maybe CRM is— CRM's $4 billion. Like $6 billion. So maybe it's worth them doing, getting out of bed for $600 million or $800 million of revenue, et cetera, et cetera. Billion-dollar competitor, it's the same. So it used to take everything 5, 7, 10 years to get to $100 million. So no one would even bother to compete. Now, when you, when, when, when, if, if Replit gets to $250 million one year, of course Google's gonna clone it, right? So everyone's, everyone's aware of this and cloning faster. And, and, um, you know, I, I don't wanna be one of these guys on X, which is that the only mode is speed. Bead in working 996, but there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of truth in it. And, and if you don't like it, you're gonna, you might, you, you, you might go into terminal decay. Like you'll, you'll hang on to your existing base, but you won't get any. I mean, it's tough. I wrote up today, I really tried to be positive and then it got like 500,000 views on X, on LinkedIn. I wrote up PagerDuty. PagerDuty, uh, missed its last quarter. PagerDuty is doing, just crossed $500 million in ARR, it's worth $1 billion, 2 times revenue, 2 times revenue. Now there's a bunch of things that happened there, but their customer count is flat, 15,000-something customers for 4 years. So Datadog came out with a clone, Atlassian's product is better, startups are better, and they just didn't move fast. I don't mean to be critical of folks at PagerDuty, I'm sure they're doing a great job, but objectively they didn't move fast enough, and I think it's only gonna accelerate. Everyone will build, will build a clone now. They'll build them faster. It took Datadog 15 years to decide to do this, or 10 years. It might take them 8 months to do it next time, and 90 days to do it with next time. And then I will take another question. If you guys haven't vibe coded or something, whether it's Cursor or Replit or something, there's a lot of learnings. But one thing that's much, much easier is if you already know exactly what you wanna build, So cloning is so much easier. Like, literally, I took the prompt from Google and put it into Replit and I instantly cloned it because I knew exactly what I wanted to build. We built this VC founder matchmaking whole suite of apps. If you go to Saastr.ai, click AIVC, we've done like almost 1,000 VC founder connections for free. We've, we've graded almost 3,000 pitch decks and then 700,000 startup valuations. Okay. And that took me a couple of months to figure out. Now I know how I want to connect founders and VPs through this same workflow. I already know how to do it in my head. This isn't going to take me 90 days. It's going to take me like 2 weeks to do this one. And so my, my point is, is cloning is going to get even faster because once you build it and work, smart folks already know what they want to build. They already see it and know it. That's the easy stuff to build. And you can just fly in Cursor or Replit or whatever when you know exactly what you want to build. When you hear, you'll hear folks say like, oh, our team's not much more productive with these. Why are they not using Vibe Coding apps? There's probably a lot of reasons, but one reason is they don't know what they want to build. But when you talk with the best— and then you'll talk with some of the best engineers and they'll say something crazy like, I do 90% of my code with Vibe Coding tools. Like, like, how is that possible? Well, often they're not— 90% of the time, for the 90%, they're not building something that's never been done before. They're really building something else that's been done before. So they already know in their head how they want leads, contacts, and opportunities, or email automation or whatever, and they're thinking through it, and they go for a run, or they think about it for a couple weeks, and they can see it form in their head. They get pretty good. I call it replet fluent for me. I can already see in my head how I want to write the application. But there's cursor fluent and everything fluent. And so it's just, you're just 10 times faster when you know what you want to build. And so I'm worried about the moats. But thank you. Maybe that's too much, but. Anybody else got a question? In the go-to-market world, a lot of people talk loosely about the importance of ROI and value selling and quantifiable business cases. Well, why is it so hard for sales teams to action on? Is it awareness, understanding, a process or tools issue? What's really holding teams back from speaking the language of CFOs? Well, listen, let's be honest. Got to be honest in the age of AI. Most, most sales reps have no idea how to sell value. You can't sell value unless you're a product expert. You cannot sell value. Most sales folks want to talk with a war sheet, a tear sheet. They know 6 things. You can't sell value if you're not a product expert. AI makes it more extreme. We try these products, we know these products. We need onboarding. We need to train our agent. I was— we were with an AI leader the other day. Emily and I were there. They closed a 7-figure deal while we were there. The solution architect left the sales team behind, closed it without them. Didn't want to talk to the sales team. Sales team didn't know the product, had no value. They added no value. So what was the term again? What did we call it? Solution? What was that? Sorry, what do we call it? Value? What? Sorry. Value-based selling. Yeah, yeah, it's dead in the water. Value-based selling is providing value. You cannot provide value in the age of AI if you do not know the product cold, ideally how to deploy it and how to get it going and apply real value, not to have a valuation calculator on your website that says 18 months down the road the product will work. Okay, so I think a lot of these, these, these are just a bunch of lazy sales ideas. From reading from a script, from high-demand, fungible, complex-to-deploy products, where they think taking folks out to lunch or knowing 4 buzzwords adds any value to a customer. And it's always been hard to sell a technical— for non-technical sales folks to sell a technical product to CTOs and VPs of Engineering. And why has it always been hard? They just don't know the product well enough. And the easiest thing for sales folks has to sell has always been sales products, sales tools. They use them every day. Just sell the tools you know. But I think we're going to see AI is not going to replace the AE the way it is already beginning to replace the SDR, has already replaced support, is already replacing customer success. But it is going to replace a lot of AEs that aren't product, don't know the product cold. And I just got to tell you, I really think 70, 80% of the sales executives I have worked with over the last 5 or 6 years don't know their product cold. It's always, if you look back, if any of you have, if you look back at your sales, whoever your top couple sales reps are, whatever, pre-AI, doesn't matter, the top ones weren't just good schmoozers or good, like they knew the product cold, especially for startups, right? I call them sales magicians, but they're not magical. They just know how every nook and cranny works, how every, how to, how to, how to, how to get past feature gaps, how it all works. And we're just not going to tolerate mediocre sales reps in the age of AI. We're just going to buy from somebody else. The mediocre rep, the worst one you can't hire today is the sales rep that tells you they're a great people person. Who cares? Here's what I want. I want an AI SDR. I want it deployed in 30 days. I want it to get me this amount of quota. I want to do this workflow. I want to integrate it this way. And they're— and the rep's like, oh, that sounds good. Yeah, we can do that. I mean, it's not going to work. You're a people person. I'm a people person. I text with all my— I close all my deals on text. I'm a people— I see this one. I just closed— I closed $50,000 last month on text. I don't— I don't need to meet anybody. I mean, that worked in 2021 when there was infinite demand, right? It just does. I don't see it working today. And I'll tell you, I, I caught up with the sales rep that I've known for years in lockdown, made almost a million bucks at a hot cloud company that had infinite demand, right? It was 3 to 5 deals a day, made a million bucks. Then next year made about $600,000, felt, felt it was undervalued and quit, found a new job, made about $180,000. After that. That company is struggling. Now he's back in school. No job. Okay. Great people person. Got to be an expert. Got to be an expert. So I think all that stuff's dead and AI is just making us all too smart, all too product aware. Again, going back to the point, we're expecting almost infinite, infinite value. So you really don't need value selling if you're a product expert. They'll leave. They just don't. Just don't want to talk to those sales reps. It's my strong feeling. I know folks, a lot of sales folks want to fight this on LinkedIn, and I— but I know a lot of them, they're not crushing it. The ones that are fighting it are fighting the future, and you got to embrace the future. You got— you got to find your tailwind. So thank you. So this was a question on vertical SaaS. Yes. Selling into some companies where AI is still just being used for Copilot, for email communication summaries. When you're trying to sell new AI services, some of the people that are buying are actually fearing the AI for taking their jobs. So from a sales perspective, penetrating the organization to influence them to buy AI, What are some themes that you're seeing in the market for influencing and what stakeholders are they? Well, we've got a couple of sessions on that tomorrow. Marcel from Mango Mints is going to talk about that with vertical SaaS for spas and salons and the issue that as their Gentec product gets more penetration, you know, there is some threat. Now, I think what she's going to tell you is it is, it is a recurring issue, but like the SMB owners, they're fine with it. Like they want the efficiencies, right? So it depends on who there is on the buyer. I don't have all the answers, but what I've learned, I think, from most founders I've worked with is embrace it, be honest about it. Yeah. And the answer is always some version of this. Look, for the best folks on your team, this is an enabler. For the best, the best folks, the best SDRs, these tools are going to be good. The best AEs are going to benefit from, from all this selling, the best everything. And in your vertical thing, maybe you won't need everybody on the team, but your best folks will benefit from it. They'll be able to work on the highest value things. They'll be able to provide the highest value solutions, and they won't be doing monotonous things. And someone will be able to do it on the weekends and nights and other days. And so, you know, a lot of folks on LinkedIn say this thing, and it's just not true that AI agents are going to be wonderful for sales folks because it's going to just make them all into superstars. You know, and I called this the mech AE a while ago on SaaS, and it's true, but it's only true for a subset of folks are going to be mech AEs. Most are not going to evolve. They're not going to become product experts. They're not going to become mini forward-deployed engineers or solution architects, and they're going to fall behind. And I think you just got to play into the fact that not everyone will benefit, but your best folks will benefit. And I found other folks— you can talk to other folks. I found in vertical SaaS that message, it's honest and it works, and it's not your whole— it's not going to rip through your whole team. It's gonna benefit the best and not the rest. That's the best advice I have for today. You're the boss. Where are you pointing? Oh, okay. Hello. I would like to ask about traffic generation. Traffic generation? Yeah, for online shops. There were a time that that traffic was coming mainly from Google, from Google Ads, from Google search results. And what do you think? Are the AI tools going to take the first place so that the traffic generation would be coming from AI agents, chatbots, or ChatGPT? What do you think about that? I don't have all— I wouldn't consider myself an e-commerce expert, But I'll tell you what I know. I was the seed investor and I'm on the board of a company called Gorgias that's about a little over $100 million that used to do support for Shopify for e-commerce stores, I think 20,000. Now it does everything. It does support, sales, marketing, omnichannel, everything. And so it's only the second part of your question. It's all converging. It's all converging. I'll come back to the— I'm not a total expert in how do you get traffic to your store. Obviously folks see lower performance from Facebook. They complain about Instagram, but Black Friday, I mean, Black Friday was off the charts. Shopify grew 25%, Klarna was up almost 50%, Stripe was crazy. So like, if you're not tapped, like this is a tailwind. If you're not tapping into the best Black Friday we've ever had in e-commerce, you're doing something wrong. Okay? I got an investor update from a company that has a lot of e-commerce, I wouldn't call it e-commerce, but a lot of e-commerce companies about $180 million in revenue, saying expect a poor Black Friday because of difficult economic headwinds in the United States. Like, have you looked at your 401(k)? Have you looked at stuff? Like, what are these difficult headwinds? It's just they're not in market with the right product, right? And they're gonna— I know I'm gonna get an email that says this is a terrible Black Friday when Shopify was up 26% and Block was up and Stripe was up. So this is the best of— this is the best Black Friday we ever had. You better have captured those headwinds. But I don't know the answers. I'm— listen, all I can tell you for like LLMs is what everyone else says is what our data says. And this is— I do think some marketers confuse this. Is our traffic disaster from ChatGPT way up? For sure it's way up. I already said our traffic is down 8% overall from SEO. It's not even enough to make up for the 8%. So if you want to live in a delusional world where writing 100 Reddit posts is going to get you to $100 million in revenue and solve all your problems and magically being in every ChatGPT answer is going to work, it's not going to work today. Saastr has so much authority. We are cited so often in ChatGPT. We're cited. I can see it on— I don't always see it on ChatGPT, but where I can see it very easily is on Grok because so many people ask Grok questions on X. I see it in my disaster searches, we're so much authority, it's not enough, right? So don't expect that LMs and GEO is going to bail you out from other structural trends, but it's the best Black Friday ever. On a related point, just for folks, I do think it's— I think folks should really think of it. It is very interesting to learn because it's something we're seeing in e-commerce that is relevant to everybody, which is that in the space of just a year or maybe 3 categories of B2B e-commerce have all combined: sales, marketing, and support. Okay, it's just happening in the rest of B2B, but it happened first in e-commerce. One, because there's a lot going on with SMBs. But think about it, when you go to a shopping cart, when you go to a brand that you like, when you want to buy a new phone, what might you be doing? You might be buying this phone, or it might have a problem, right? Right. So buying would be sales. A problem would be support. Or you might be interested in the phone, but maybe not today. These foldable phones, they're not cheap. Okay. So you might— so you might not be ready. That's marketing. Okay. And those used to be different in the e-commerce world. You had Klaviyo, which is kind of like the HubSpot for marketing. It just had a great Black Friday too. You did that for marketing. You'd have a whole different type of ways to get some sales. You'd have support. Gorgeous was number one. You'd have remarketing. These are all different apps. But AI lets you combine them all into one prompt, one agent. And so a little bit about a year ago, you'd go to a lot of e-commerce sites and they'd have like 5 different agents, like talk here for support, talk here for marketing, talk— now they're all— they've all combined in the e-commerce world because the AI should be able to— and AI can easily understand, is this a sales call? Is this marketing? Is this remarketing? Is this support? Is this customer success? In most B2B, we're still running multiple apps. Vertical SaaS is one area it's converging to. But it's not— that's not going to last. People don't want 28 agents on your website interact. They just want one agent to solve their problems. So it's not quite what you're asking, but this is massive convergence. And, you know, I mean, we talk about it ad nauseam with Saastr. We've gone from, you know, 1 to 20 agents ourselves this year, really 0 to 20. But it's at the edge of too many, not only for us to process and manage a business process change, But when you guys go to Saastr.com or Saastr London or Saastr Annual, we don't want you to see 11 AI agents either, right? So I'm not sure how many more we can use, and we might shrink our number of agents just so that there's not agent conflict. And like Amelia's running, like Amelia has to be kind of careful which data she gives different agents so that they don't market or sell to the same person multiple times, right? There's data cleansing and other issues, but all this stuff is being remixed, and we may not, these discrete, walls between these categories. AI is going to break them down because we just want to talk with one agent as customers, as prospects, as users. We just want one agent to solve our problems. So thank you. I would do like one or two more. So in your first comment, you mentioned something around needing to replace people or cut down on the number of people and increase productivity in apps. Do you have an outlook around HR tech, taking that into account? Well, you know, it is interesting. Workday this week, like, we're all making— everyone that's not crushing, it's making excuses, right? But they said seat contraction is the number one headwind. Workday said it, right? Number one, number one HR player. They said, listen, we're having trouble Now the economy is booming. NVIDIA is hiring plenty of people. OpenAI, I mean, there's plenty of folks hiring people, but overall, like, revenue per employee continues to go up. Microsoft is the fittest it's ever been, right? Everyone's the fittest there. And Workday is saying, we're not sure we can get ahead of this, even with more modules and more products. So yeah, to some extent, the API model, the usage model, lends itself well to the AI world. This seat model is under stress. Marc Benioff said the same thing. All you can do is find more software to sell people and have more flexible business models at the end of the day. If we hire less people and you're selling payroll, you're gonna have a few less seats. But at some level, as a startup, it's an excuse. It's like seasonality. You know when I lose a little respect for a founder? Or especially a CRO? When they come in and they say, yeah, I know I missed the quarter hard, but It's seasonality. I'm like, you didn't know? Like, you've been around for 5— first of all, you should be growing fast enough as a startup that seasonality is almost indecipherable in your growth curve, right? I mean, it's not that it isn't a little bit, but it's no excuse for sales to go down. Secondly, like, you know, you didn't know last year? So wherever it's going, it— maybe it makes selling HR products 10 or 20% harder, but on the other hand, If you're, if you're solving massive problems with AI, you should have much more demand, which should overwhelm it. So don't let it be— my best idea is don't let it be an excuse, even though it's true. Don't hide. I mean, Workday is so— I wish I knew exactly what Workday's ARR was. I mean, it's one of the 5 biggest. Maybe it's true. Maybe they can complain about, you know, just the sheer number of humans running at all of work running out. But you don't— you do not have 90% market share. So you have no excuse. But it's an issue. Alright, one more we got? Yeah. What, uh, you mentioned earlier that, uh, the motions are the same in a lot of cases, inbound is not dead, outbound is not dead. What are the characteristics that have changed in like a successful outbound, um, motion? And what stayed the same? Well, we'll show you all of our data again, to be redundant, we'll show you all our outbound data tomorrow, okay? And I will— I don't have all— it's a great question, I should know all the answers to. I can tell you one thing that we learned from our outbound AI is geometrically more volume and the same results. So our results have not gone down in the age of AI. By training the AI with the best scripts and ideas that humans did, we basically saw the same, in some cases a little worse, in some cases a little better, but same as humans for the most part with much higher productivity. So I mean, it's outbound isn't dead. And if you, if to some extent, no matter how much sales you've done, if you've never been a buyer at a big company, you don't get outbound. Okay. And then I'll do one more, one more different point, and then we'll wrap up. Let me step back for a minute. I remember, you know, back in the day when I was an early SaaS founder, I was at Dreamforce and we had a, we had a large SaaS company that SAP bought called SuccessFactors was on a panel with me. And I didn't even know him, never met him. He turned around, he's like, yeah, I bought your product, Jason. I'm like, wow, great. He's like, why? He's like, well, it was the end of the quarter. Our fax machines were broken and you said you'd figured out e-signatures and I needed the product today and I bought 300 seats. Okay, so one of his top problems at a given time, right? High ROI, immediate value proposition. Read a cold email from a company at $2 million ARR. Okay, now all the other emails, they, you know, You know, we help, we can enrich your data better, we can help you do— look, it just, it didn't, the fact was his team couldn't get the fax machines to work, okay? Or some variant thereof. So, my point is, and this goes all the way up to the CEO level, every CEO I know of at the biggest companies, I asked Brian Halligan, Chairman of HubSpot, this the other day, I asked Yamini too, I asked Yamini at SaaStr Annual this year, do you read your cold lead balance? She's like, I read 'em every day. Email is the best. Even today, it's the best thing in the world. Everyone reads it. It's an open medium. They get it. And your job is not just to have your LLM get you the right headline. Your, your job with outbound is to solve one of the top 3 problems of your buyer, whether it's CEO, SVP, VP, wherever. If it's the top 3 problems, you're going to get a meeting, okay? Whether it's a top 3 pain point or a top 3 initiative, like I don't actually— all these AI, SDR, BDR, agent force, Artisan that's here qualified. I don't actually know if this is a top 3 problem for a lot of buyers, but I know it's a top 3 thing on their mind. Everyone wants to— I want to figure out how to do an AI SDR. So it's either a top 3 initiative or a top 3 problem. If you're in the top 3, you're going to see super high open rates. If you have a, if you have a differentiated product and crystal clear value proposition, this has not changed in the age of AI. This has not changed. And I don't know why people thought crummy emails for the 10,000th, you know, Cadence product worked and maybe it did work. I'm actually, I'm actually flabbergasted that those emails worked, right? Maybe they're sucker bets, but your job is to be in the top 3 initiatives or top 3 needs of your buyer. And then the last Captain Obvious thing I'll say, but this is why you have to read your team's emails. Humans or AIs, you have to listen to their calls. It's got to be great and it has to be something you would— you buy your own product from your email. I would challenge everybody to go back and read emails from your sales team, your revenue team, your marketing team. Read the email they sent out about your product and ask yourself, would you buy based on this email? I'll bet you not over 90% you would not buy your own product from it. So why would you expect anybody else to slow it down? Read that email. You know, the next age of AI and sales prospecting. But why would you buy that product? Slow it down. Put some data in it. Even better, put it— put it the best, you know, the best one that works. You know, if you're reaching out to Lovable, hey, Replit used us and won 5 big deals. You know, reach out to direct competitors, HubSpot versus Salesforce, whatever. You know, those ones always work when you have a great case study from one competitor, you're going to get a meeting. But the lazy arse email never, never worked before. I guess maybe it worked before. It don't work today. So I don't know if that totally answers the question, but outbound works as well as it ever has if you solve a top need. And sorry, the last— I know it's a lot. What you don't realize, I'll tell you how it works in big companies. Maybe you folks have worked in there. I was just a VP at Adobe for, for a little more than a year. But basically there were, you know, there were, there was unbudgeted, discretionary, and budgeted, right? You sort of know these words, but you might not see them in practice. Okay, getting budgeted money, it was big dollars, but it was really hard. Okay, they're multi-million dollar contracts. These often would take 1, 3, 5 years of discussing and planning until you could close that deal. Okay, maybe get a pilot. But then I was the most junior VP of all the VPs. I don't know how many VPs were 40, 50, but even I had a $500K slush budget. Okay, this was a while ago, so it might be a million bucks. Okay. And everyone had more. And what was my slush budget for? My top 3 needs that I just couldn't get elsewhere in the organization or elsewhere budgeted through the CFO. And I needed— so if you gave me— if you solve one of my 3 needs sitting in my corner tower office and it was some fraction of that $500K to $1 million, I had budget. I didn't even care. It's use it or lose it in big companies. Okay. Now, I didn't have one more dollar than that. I didn't have one more dollar. And I didn't care about my 8th problem. I just didn't care. But selfishly, if you solved one of my problems, I had half a million to a million bucks to buy. So those are the budgets you're fighting for. They haven't changed in the age of AI, but our priorities have changed. And, you know, so many folks have their, their own problems in their own org, but they're also under pressure to bring innovation into the enterprise. That's the AI budget. You got to be, be in these three. But I had— it was really, really hard for me to get a million-dollar piece of software in. It probably would have taken me years. As the new VP, but I had $1 million in aggregate, almost $1 million to spend on whatever I needed to get the hundreds of folks that work for me just to solve their problems. Not even that much per person. Right. But I could, I could do that in a week or two. That was up until that line. And then I was tapped out for the year. So. All right. I think we're over for now. We'll keep going for the rest of the day and bar is open. What's next, Amelia? Great question. What's that? The happy hour here is until 6. Okay. So you guys can chill, have a drink, talk to sponsors. Momentum has an afterparty upstairs. So if you want to go to that, anybody can go. At 6:01? Yeah, 6:01. Yeah. What's it called up there? What's the bar called? It's called Primo Bar. Primo? Yeah. So Primo, 6:01. Yeah, right, right upstairs. And then tomorrow we're doing our kickoff at 9. They're all about AI agents. Yeah. Sharp. So put 9 sharp, put 8:50 in your calendar, right? 9 is calendar. 8:50. 8:50. You're there at 9. Yeah, be there at 8:50 for 9. What's, uh, anyone seen the show Friday Night Lights? I barely saw it, just rewatched it. What does the coach say? You want to be on the team, you be there at 6 AM tomorrow. That means 5:45, Amelia. That means tomorrow, that means 8:45. Full hearts. Full hearts. Cloudy Minds, or I know what it is. All right, thanks everybody. Talk to you in a bit.