SaaS + AI: It’s Time to Move Much Faster with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

All right. Thanks everybody for coming. Who's been before? A few folks. We'll talk through this. I'll, for folks that read SaaS or know it, I gotta be honest, when we, it wasn't actually a year ago, it was last September we switched to May. We're gonna be May again next year. And even last September, a lot of stuff in AI, we were skeptical, folks were theoretical. We were talking a lot about hallucinations. A lot has changed since last September. We're, I'll talk through it. A lot's changed. Especially in coding and contact center, but the change is just coming so fast. And I saw it in investments that I made. We'll talk through, but man, when we launched this SaaS or AI, if you haven't tried it, just try it. It's on saster.com. There's, it's a chat bubble embedded and we've done 130,000 chats in less than 8 weeks on our AI. In fact, and the team that built it, the software Delphi is going to be here tomorrow after my session. If you want to hear how it's built. But I've seen now 130,000 chats go through. I've seen questions answered. I've seen decks reviewed and board packs reviewed and SDR scripts written. And it's so good. It's so good. And I feel like I'm gifted with our AI because I've seen the future. This future that's like either here today or coming soon. And I want to chat about that and what I've seen for a few minutes. Tomorrow I'll try to do a deep dive with more learnings if you want to come at 9:00 AM. I'll be doing a deep dive on AI and go-to-market, what I've learned. And we're also having the CEO of Owner. They just announced yesterday they raised $1 billion. They're at over $40 million, growing 10% a month with a very sales-driven motion but infused by AI. So the CRO and I will be together. I was the seed investor talking about how AI isn't changing sales and more importantly, how they'll be changing sales and go-to-market soon. But it's just so much change that I want to talk about and I'll get to that in a second. But SaaStr is all about being positive. It's all about helping. It's about doing it together. But the theme here is going to be tough love today. It's a little bit of tough love in a positive way. But the reality is we have to move faster. Like everyone has to move faster is what I'm telling every CEO I meet. If you're running at the 2024 pace, if you're running a 2023 playbook, I know it's hard as it is. I know it's hard as it is to recruit, to ship. To do all these things, but everyone that's crushing today is not— they're moving faster, and I'm going to talk through it. But, and here's just one way I summarized it on Twitter the other day, and we were here in 2024, we— AI can't beat a good sales rep, no way. And a lot of folks still quote a survey that I did 6 months back on LinkedIn, have you gotten your AI SDR to work? And Tomasz Tungas, who's back, he did his own version of it a year ago. People like, AI doesn't work for sales, like It's working now. Like it's working now. And so now it's, you know what, AI might beat an okay sales rep. I literally got emailed from a human SDR today, this morning. Hey, will you be at SaaStr next week? Do you want to meet? Today. This is from a well, highly funded B2B company. Do you really think AI can't beat that person? He's going to be out of a job next year. He will be out of a job. If that is unacceptable. At all. It is, but it's definitely, I'd much rather get an email from an AI SDR. Hey Jason, I see you work at SaaS. Oh wow, you founded SaaS. Very interesting. I know you probably can't meet this week and I know you only have a team of 5 in a weird quirky business, but our product can solve this problem for you. The AI is gonna write that email instead of, hey Jason, you wanna meet at SaaS next week? Literally this morning, guys, there, these people will all be out of a job. Okay? Because your AI, at least by next year, is gonna be better than 80% of sales reps. Not the best, I'll talk about a little bit today and a lot more tomorrow. That literally is an email from a company that's raised almost $100 million. Okay. $100 million. Last week I had an issue with a $10 billion company that has raised $1 billion, been a customer for 8 years, gotten them tons of referrals, paid, made them lots of money. And we had an issue and I got an email from a human Associate customer success manager. I have 1 hour next week to talk, dude. 1 hour next week to talk, dude. Okay, now listen, we're all friends. I'm not that big a deal. I'm a somewhat successful founder investor, but this guy shouldn't be calling me dude after being an 8-year customer. Associate customer success manager that clearly didn't know what we were, how long we'd been a customer, anything about me, dude. And he had 1 hour free next Friday. You're gonna lose your job. You're gonna lose your job. And we tolerated this for a while. And frankly, in 2021 it worked because anyone, we all had to buy software. We, we got confused, but AI is so good. And again, we'll do more tomorrow, but it's so good. Those people are all gonna lose their jobs. And these are at very successful companies. You will not need them. You will not need 'em. You don't need them in support today if you use Gorgeous or Intercom or even Zendesk. Or DECACon that'll be here tomorrow and others. You don't need the mediocre person in customer success that says, I don't know. You don't need them and you're not going to need them in sales or marketing or customer success by the end of this year or next year. You're just not going to need them. Look, those stories are from this week. It's crazy. Okay, so we're going to do a deep dive on that. Just quickly for folks here tonight, there is casino today, but we have casino night. I'll be here until they kick us out. It'll be fun. Hang out unless you have other— there's a lot of parties. Go to the parties too. Those are fun. But we'll be here until they kick us out for casino night. Tomorrow will actually be the biggest day. So come back if you have any interest in meeting VCs, or if you are a VC, come to our Founder VC Brunch. We kicked it off last year. I think it's from 11 to 1. It's in the app. I might, it might be 11:30 to 2, whatever it is, but it's pretty fun. It's in the Founder Lounge right there, but we'll try to get everybody that wants to talk to VCs and trick all the VCs that are here to come. It should be fun. We'll have the AI pitch finals if you wanna watch it down there. And then we've got a lot more stuff than we do. Day 3 is our biggest day. I'm going to do a deep dive on AI with the CEO of Snowflake. CEO of Fox, Aaron, will be here, who's on really thinking through everything. He'll be here with the head of AI from IBM. That will be really entertaining, I guarantee you. And I'll do an OpenAI with the CEO of Calendly. We all use Calendly, right? I'll ask a couple questions, but just come. It's going to be super informal with Tope. He'll answer all your questions. I'll talk for 5 minutes. He'll answer questions. It's going to be fun. And then we'll have a blowout party to meet everybody and we'll stay again until they kick us out. So tomorrow, the big day, do all this stuff. It's going to be fun. And sign up for some Brain Dates if you haven't, do some small meetings. Okay. So briefly, the theme, warning, I am pretty positive, but it's tough love. Tough love is going to come. And I have this every, almost every founder I talk to, any board meeting, I talk to most of them. There's some variant of this discussion, which is this. And here's the meta issue for folks. And I know, listen, the next 20 minutes for some of you may be, oh yeah, I get this, but most don't. So I'm going to say it anyway. This old software, it's all aging out, guys. It's all aging out. And really, and it took— I didn't see this until recently, but I wrote a tweet a little while ago that from like 2011 to 2023, software didn't change. It really didn't change. Miguel's with me. From 2011 to 2022, it didn't. You would roll out something, they would have something clever. It would be a cool new CRM or cool new marketing tool. And like you'd add a cool feature once a year and like you'd have a quarterly release and a few things would go and then you'd do some security and you'd have some permissioning and some other, and then like the, the, it like, it would change like every 5 years. Now the paradigms would change. Someone would figure out something really cool with mobile, with something, and then it would be like static for 5 years. Now it's changing so fast. Like even our little AI, when we launched it, it couldn't read PDFs. Now it's read like 200 VC decks and board presentations. That's just one way it changes. Our own AI in the next release is gonna be able to join Zooms and have full duplex conversations with people. Okay? And we actually don't even have to do anything. We just get the benefits from our platform. The rate of change is so fast. And I wrote this, that software actually never really changed from like 2011 to 2023. And 6 public company CEOs emailed me after that and said, you're right. I have to work so much faster because honestly, my product in 2023 was the same. Not literally, right? And we're going to talk a lot about it in the next session with Ramana Yangan from HubSpot. HubSpot has changed so much in a year. HubSpot has changed so much in a year. So my tough message is we were in this world and it was even worse than this because so many of us had 110, 120, 130% NRR for B2B products. And that was just the game. Yet in fact, the original— we go back to the first Saastr annual, the first theme was 0 to 1 million impossible, 1 to 10 million unlikely, 10 to 100 million is inevitable. And it's true, but like, it's just more unstable now. And part of that insight, which is obvious now but was radical in 2015, is like this 110, 120% ARR was the gravy train. It was so hard to get to a couple of million in revenue and so hard to get to 10. But if you got to 10 million in ARR, with 110% NRR, your ticket was punched in SaaS. Okay, just ship some more features, fill some feature gaps, win a few deals, hire great people. But you had 5 years before the paradigm changes, but now it's like changing all the time. And it's just this instability is like stressful for a lot of folks. It's insta— and if you're not seeing it, we're seeing it. If you talk to VCs here that have been around for a while and you have a quiet conversation, ask them how many folks in your portfolio are north of $100 million and now are seeing growth in the 10 or 20% range. All of them. All of them. It didn't used to happen. Mostly they fell behind. They didn't launch other products. They didn't get ahead of AI. They didn't get ahead of the trends. They're still selling their 2022, 23— '23 products is the real theme. Every VC will tell you, and we didn't used to see this, we didn't used to see any B2B companies get to $100 million and see growth radically decline after. We're seeing it all the time. Not everywhere, but all the time. Okay. The other thing that is creating instability with AI is there's so many customers and so much change that it's lots of issues around churn and renewal. Even if like your customer base has stayed, the fact there's 100 new competitors here that are doing super cool things puts pressures on renewal. It puts pressure on upsell. And you're selling the same product as last year and someone here now can automate the whole process through AI, automate onboard, automate conversations, automate everything. You're selling a workflow product from last year. They'll probably renew because they've built their business around you, but they're not going to buy more from you and they're probably going to downgrade. So what a lot of folks are seeing is little cuts. Deals are getting smaller, NRR is coming down, win rates are still there, but they're coming down. Instead of winning 90% of deals, I'm winning 78% of deals. See this as a red flag. See this as a flag. You're not moving fast enough because this trend is going to continue. So many leaders, so many folks at 10, 50, 100, $500 million, $1 billion are seeing these little cuts as the folks that are much more innovative in AR are cutting away. They don't have to beat you in every deal to maim you. I call it maiming you. It's not that Twitter and— is through of all these stories. Oh, this great AI-first SaaS company got to $100 million in 8 days and is destroying Salesforce. It's not destroying Salesforce. Salesforce is at $4 billion growing 9%. Those stories are like apocryphal, but much more common is people are getting maimed. They're getting maimed by so much more radically aggressive competition that's AI-first. And the last two points on this summary that's making it harder, 'cause it's weird, and I'm sure most folks are seeing it. If you are there, every buyer, every, especially in the enterprise, every CIO has AI budget today. We can talk about whether it's discretionary or budgeted or where it's coming from. Everyone has budget for AI. So more money's going out at the CIO's office at the enterprise, but everyone's also has a mandate to consolidate the number of vendors. I'm gonna ask Yamini about it when she comes up next, 'cause they're benefiting from it. So you'll look at a lot of leaders that are benefiting from consolidation. If you look at what happened with Gong, struggled for a while, then they're reaccelerating to $300 million. Okay. Why is Gong reaccelerating? There's some reason, but one, they got a rich enough product that they're benefiting from consolidation. Gong was hit when it was a smaller product from consolidation, 'cause people were like, everyone loves Gong, but they're like, I'll use the version built in to my other product. Now they're benefiting from it, but this consolidation is everywhere and it's something you just have to deal with. It is, you have to fight, you have to be more innovative. And for a lot of folks, if you probably have to tap into some of this AI spend, if you're gonna see the growth that you wanted before, otherwise you're just gonna fight this consolidation battle. It's harder, but old software, it's aging out. It's aging out. And we really used to have a 20-year run. Now we're gonna have 5-year runs and we're gonna, the rate of change is so high. So I just had a little fun with my theme. I gotta be honest, I never read Amp It Up, but I got the vibe. Okay. The Frank Slootman vibe was everyone, you gotta be a monster. You gotta destroy folks and go to market. You gotta work extra hard. That was the 2021 vibe, right? Who read Amp It Up? Help me. I didn't read it. Okay. You read it, right? And, but Frank's not CEO of Snowflake anymore, right? We'll have the CEO of Snowflake here tomorrow. Amp It Up was great. Be relentless in sales. I asked our AI app in 9 seconds to make me a version of this. Be relentless in AI. This is, if nothing else, this is my push, my nudge. Be relentless. Don't just experiment. Don't ask folks what to do. Don't have one engineer looking at it. Be friggin relentless in AI. This is what you have to do if you're not going to fall behind. You have to be relentless because your competition is going to be relentless. They're going to be relentless. This is my theme. And just when some folks say, oh, it's earlier, or enterprises aren't ready, there's some truth to that. But look at Palantir. Palantir is reaccelerating at an incredible rate at $3.5 billion in revenue, all driven by enterprise AI deals. The Department of Defense is cool with AI, okay? Military is cool with AI. Conservative enterprises. Palantir is reaccelerating. It's the only public stock that's almost at 100x ARR. Palantir. So if you think big conservative companies aren't ready for AI, and there's some truth to that, we just had the CTO of Rubrik talk about he sees it in security. There is conservatism. I just did a huge, great deep dive on our pod with Mark Benioff. He said there's just layers of conservatism in Salesforce's base. But just before your team says, oh, they're not ready, look at friggin' Palantir. Do a little research. Palantir is growing the fastest it has in years. It is reaccelerating at a crazy rate, 39% growth. At $3.5 billion. How much is 39 times $3.5 billion? Miguel, help me with the math. What's 40% times 3.5? It's like a lot, isn't it? That Palantir is adding $1.6 billion of new bookings a year. Sorry to interrupt. Go back. So don't be thinking that like your customer base isn't ready. They're ready. They're ready. It's going to go in phases. So anyhow, my point is it's really stressful when you have new competitors. It's really stressful when your product's getting out of date. But when it's good, man, it's really good because people, buyers are excited. Customers are excited. The market is excited. So I get this is really tough love, though. This slide is that because nothing changed. This was the tweet I did that I got. I can't tell you how many public company CEOs reached out to me on this because nothing changed. And listen, I don't— some people get mad when I say this, but we're just among friends. We got soft. We ran the same friggin playbooks, the same GTM playbooks, the same cadences, the same. And frankly, in some ways, Saastr benefited. I benefited because I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe the playbooks I use at EchoSign in 2011 still worked in 2021. I was shocked. I thought they would be out of date in a year, but they worked year after year. Now you had to evolve a little bit, but man, it was the same playbooks. And then, and this, I know people get mad when I say this, the truth is work from home and quality of life meant we worked even less with these playbooks, okay? And it was just too easy. And everyone thought they were a genius in 2021. The average public SaaS company in 2021 grew 70%. Public, public. The average public company, SaaS company now is growing in the teens. Okay. So we all thought we were go-to-market geniuses. We all thought we were product geniuses selling the same product in 2021 we sold in 2019. Okay. We were not geniuses. We were benefiting from a buying wave. And so gotta change, right? We've just gotta change. And a lot of folks in your org won't want to change. This is a tough question. This is a tough question. And When I talk to CEOs behind closed doors, when I talk to CEOs in the green room here, there's discussions that we all have that aren't had in public. And I ask them, how much of your team is not going to make it in the AI age? Okay. The truth is, and this is true for startups too, it's probably 20 to 40% of your teams are not going to make it in the AI age. That sales rep that told me if I wanted to come to SaaStr next week is not going to make it. He's not aggressive enough. Okay. It's tough. Your CMO still running the same human content SEO team from 2021, and that's his best idea today, is not going to make it. Not going to make it. The CRO that doesn't believe in AI in the sales team, except for some maybe enterprise stuff, is not going to make it. Certainly we have a great CCO summit coming on here today. Hundreds of the best CCOs. Folks that think that customer success experience from that junior folk that said he had one hour due next week. They're not gonna make it. They're not gonna make it. So I don't know how this will all play out, but I think the notion that everyone wants to be reskilled, a lot of folks don't want to be reskilled. A lot of folks are comfortable working in slippers from home 3 days a week. They don't like it when I say it on LinkedIn, so I'm just saying it among friends. I don't believe they, they want to be reskilled. I don't believe they want to learn. I don't believe using ChatGPT once a week to ask about recipes is the same as being reskilled. So this is not only does everyone have to move twice as fast, but it's tough. I don't think 20 to 40% of our teams want to change. And we're going to see people are like shocked that Microsoft did a 3% layoff this week. 3% layoff. Okay. But those are folks that can't change. They need new people to change that. We're going to see this trend accelerate. We're going to see more and more layoffs of companies that are doing well. And the net headcount is not going to go down. They're just got to reskill people. It's brutal. But if you don't do it, you're gonna fall behind. You're gonna fall behind. And, and if you're still skeptical, hopefully you're not skeptical. I just wanna highlight this one thing that's maybe obvious, and I'll tie it all together. If you haven't seen what's happened in coding and support, it's radically changed. If you're not seeing your vertical SaaS, if you're not seeing it in your segment, literally 20 to 40% of support is all done on AI today, and it's It's great. It's great. It's not perfect. I, all, everyone that is doing support at scale, may, you can, and there's folks here you can talk to, Decagon tomorrow, the CEO's here, which is at the cutting edge. But almost everyone has humans in the loop. Okay? That's not the point. The point is almost 40% of humans are often already replaced with AI. Look at coding. I keep picking on Miguel 'cause he's in the front row, but in RevenueCat, which has 40% of all mobile subscriptions use them, they've increased Software productivity about 50% using AI tools, using Cursor and Friends, 50%, up 50%, 30%, 40%. That's a lot though. So I was literally at an investor meeting not too long ago and the VP of Engineering said, I'm not sure. I don't know if this stuff's really a good idea. I don't know if it's going to work. I'm like, imagine you get 30% gains this year and 30% next year. And like, it just compounds at an epic rate. So my real point is it's here. It's here. And my son's here. My son's here. The only thing he pays out of his own pocket is Cursor. He's pretty smart. He's— now I can do 90% of my coding with AI. So that's what you want on your team. Him. Okay. And again, with our own little AI, play with it. We did 139,156 conversations that did not tell anyone SaaStr was next week. Not one of them. Not one of them. Now it did— now for fun, it did make It's really good. It's trained on 12 years of content. This session will be in it. Everything, every session will be in it. Every tweet, every LinkedIn. Are there some errors? Yes. For example, here's just a fun one. Every question about this event, it got right. Okay. But we do a Europe event and we haven't publicized on the web when it is yet. We haven't put the date up. So people keep asking when SaaS Europa this or when SaaS London. It makes it up. Okay. No. 5, 2% or 3% are wrong. It says it's in September 2025. It's in June. It doesn't know what it's guessing. I'm not really an expert on how you vectorize this information and RAG it. I don't know, but it's getting it guessed wrong. Okay. So after 3 times, I just go and I train it in 5 seconds. I ask the question, it's in December, it's Christmas in London. Now it gets it right. Don't sit in your saying, no, it doesn't work. Okay. 128,000 of these were right in couple things that made up, we fixed it. It's fixed it. And then the meta point here, maybe this is all the point that I know, maybe it's being redundant, but just don't think I could say this enough time is this is what I smell and fear. I see it in board meetings. I see it in investor meetings. I see it all the time. I call it the AI slow roll. I just see it everywhere. It's folks that don't want to change, aren't interested in changing, and they're just— I don't— this will be on video. Sharding, sharding on AI. Okay. And I talked with a lot of like CTOs backstage here and they're like, yeah, a lot of times it's actually my more seasoned folks in my team. They don't— they want to do it themselves. They don't want to change. Seasoned CROs, seasoned folks, they don't want to do it. Maybe it's the junior folks too. I'm not trying to word it as a sack. It's not, but it's this second tier managers that they find are most resistant. But it doesn't matter. I see it with CROs and junior folks. It's this slow roll. It's being criticized. And just beware of it because if they're sharding on AI in your company, you're not gonna be as innovative as you can. You're just not gonna be. And I just see this slow roll for a variety of reasons. But the reality is humans are, I'm not a psychologist, humans are resistant to change. And this is a rate of change we have not seen in B2B ever. And don't, you just can't tolerate the slow roll and you gotta lead from the front. Aaron Levy will be here tomorrow. Why aren't Aaron Levy and Dharmesh Shah and others like really early on social media, constantly talking about the change. They're just trying to admit a million reasons, but I think some of it is to root out slow roll in their own organizations. If Aaron's working at this pace for AI to change Box, his team sure better. So this is just the thing that is inadvertently toxic that is harming companies deeply. This only touched on, but this is just hard, guys. There's just more competitors. So it's just more competitors and you have to be better because of this. There are— it's the funniest thing is there are some spaces that only have a few competitors because of AI, but there are spaces that like I've invested in, like legal tech and support that I don't— no one wanted to build in before AI. Now everyone wants to do these. I don't want to sell to lawyers. That's terrible. Now it's like hot. Okay, now in part because of ChatGPT, now there's 1,000 folks doing support, right? When I invested in Talkdesk in 2014, or Gorgeous in 2018, or Intercom or Front. No one wanted to be. They were like, ah, this is low deal size, commodity, boring. Now, like, smartest people in the world want to do these things. Sales tools, sales productivity was pretty boring until recently, right? Now there's so many tools, right? Literally, we had a dinner on Monday night and this founder comes up to me. He's like, hey, are you Anna Lemkin's dad? I'm like, yeah, I am. He's like, oh, I'm up at Stanford. I just dropped out. I knew her. She's a freshman. He's like, we built this AI thing to automate sales research and everything. We're already at $2 million ARR. I'm going out to fly customers. He's 19. He just dropped out of college to build a B2B sales tool at $2 million in ARR. Okay. So there's a lot of interesting things in that story, but like, it's just the level of competition in categories that were less competitive. It's awesome and it's interesting, but it's changed. And then there's even things like MCP that are going to radically change. If folks are using MCP to go out to your data and they're not, and your users aren't even going to interact with your application, there's just so much change. Cry me a river is the tough love. The last one, this is one I think about a bit. This is stressful, is there's a theme on X, and I don't like how people over-theme AI that aren't actually building companies or selling, but moats versus momentum. I do worry about this one. Again, when we go back to the old days when software didn't change for a decade, the— there's no— there in most B2B, there's not perfect moats. There aren't perfect moats, but the moats get there. There's brand, there's workflow, there's structured data, right? The amount of energy— even if you wanted to leave HubSpot or Box, your data's structured, it's set up, it works. Like, there's just so many moats between Brandon. Those moats are all real today, but they're all weakening. They're all weakening with AI. And there's a bunch of reasons for it is— and I'm still learning what moats are weaker— but at one level, as the AIs get better, the underlying apps get less differentiated. The underlying apps. And I'll give you a quick small example. We talked about this company Gorgeous that I invested in. They're coming up on $100 million. They're like a Zendesk for Shopify, for e-commerce, really big in that ecosystem, in the Shopify. And before AI, the differences between Zendesk and Gorgias were vast. They were vast and they're still very large. But Zendesk has a really good AI now. So even if the product's 22 years old, if the AI is really good, it can make older products, different products much better. It can rejuvenate old products. It can make little tiny products that used to be function poor, like your little tiny ankle biter competitors. That used to not do much, they might be great with AI because the AI is great, right? So there's just these moats, the moats are weakening and it's tough, but momentum probably is more important. We talked a little bit about how consolidation is a theme that you've gotta fight, but I, this one was just quickly interesting. Boldstart, which has done a ton of great B2B investing, Boldstart VC, they had their, their CIO kickoff at RSA and I just like to summarize this learning that they had. Budgets still favor consolidation except in innovation. This is just a macro trend. I touched on it before, but this is the reality. CIOs have money. Look at Gartner. Overall IT spend still going up like at record rates, 8-10% a year. Maybe it's more, maybe it's in the teens. I should know. But the overall budgets are still going up at record rates. There is inflation, there is other things, but that money's basically split into innovation, AI, and listen, I got it. I want to shrink my number of vendors. If you look at the Zillow study we've put up, If you look at others, people are not adding a lot of new vendors to their stack. So you got to fight that. You have to earn your place in the stack even more than you had to before. We know this, but even as things are— as spend's getting better, everything's getting better overall, the vibe is better. Here's the thing. Consolidation is still a thing. Consolidation is not going away. It is enduring. People got burnt out on all the hundreds of apps they bought in 2021, and now it has become part of the CIO's job to keep managing consolidation down. You got to deal with that as founders. You have to be more innovative and provide so much value that folks will break the rule and push to bring you in because you're going to have to fight this consolidation trend. You have to earn it even more. Okay, we talked about this. As I run out of time, here's my last annoying push. The only answer to all these issues— I know it's annoying, it's tough love. You got to work harder. You got to work harder. I know a lot of folks don't like return to office. I know folks think it's toxic to talk about working 6.5 days a week in San Francisco. Maybe it's toxic, I don't know, but it's a reality. If your team is working 22 hours a week in your nice hybrid office and they come sometimes come in on Wednesdays and they miss check-ins and it's all— and you're doing quarterly releases and your competitor is an SF working 6.5 days a week, AI first and pushing out code every day, you're probably going to lose in today's world. You're probably going to— you have to find a way to get the team to work harder. You have to find a way. It's tough love, but it's the truth. And the last point I'll say, Look at the interview I did with Marc Benioff. Look at what Drew Houston said yesterday. This is my last point and then we'll break. You got to refound your company. For most of you, the last thing— and I want to break and bring Yamini up, but this is such an important exercise. Drew just talked about doing this at Dropbox. Okay. My advice to you, everyone. Drew said he did this too. Marc Benioff said he did it. If you haven't done this yet this year, when you go back, sit down with your co-founder or your senior team and just say, guys, in 2025, if we could start over, what would we build in our space? Not different company. Don't have that conversation like that. Then, then all the emotions will come out because everyone wishes they were building Windsurf or OpenAI or whatever. They all— everyone thinks the other company's easier, right? RevenueCat thinks Gorgeous is easier. Gorgeous thinks RevenueCat's easier. They all think Owner's easier. Owner's the hardest of all. My point is they all think it's easier. But say, listen, today, if we could start from scratch and it's hard. And if you listen to what Drew said, he said I want to do this, but I have 18 million customers, so I can't do everything I want to do. I can't truly refound Dropbox because I got 18 million, but that's what I want to do. That's what Marc Benioff said. Most of you are below the scale of Salesforce and Dropbox. So go back, sit with your team and say, what would we build today? How, and how can we do it twice as fast? And just go find a friggin way to build it. Whether it's putting a little bit of your team in a separate group, right? Having, whether that works or not, whether it's dropping some stuff, whether it's measuring it for— I don't have all the answers, but instead of fighting the 2023 battle, figure out what you would build today. Look at all the competitors, all the industry, look where the puck's going and find a way to refound your company. That's mojo. And if you have a good team, a lot of them will get it. It turns out they'll get excited about this meeting. A lot of the good folks will be like, yeah, let's refound this frigger in 2025. Yeah, maybe growth slowed to 40%, but let's build what the market wants today, not be a Debbie Downer about how it's changed. And maybe the mediocre folks in your team will grumble and maybe they could find another place to work. I don't know. But that's my view today. I want to break now. There's still a 10x ARR club. Be in it. Find it. VC is all about AI. We can talk a little bit more about this tomorrow if you're not in it. IPOs are back. Chime, others are all coming. The bar is 50% at $500 million. So I ran out of time on this piece. We can do some more tomorrow. PE may not bail us out and we're all going to do the same with the same amount of headcount. Maybe this is the last one. I do want to break. We all have to work harder. We have to be twice as productive. We have to be AI first. And I'll tell you one last thing. Everybody's freezing headcount. Everyone. It doesn't mean they're not hiring. It means they're moving on from underproductive people through voluntary and involuntary attrition, and they're bringing new people. But this vibe from Duolingo, do it first with AI and do it second with an upgrade. This is everybody's vibe on WhatsApp and behind closed doors. Everyone's gonna do more, but you can't do more with 50— you don't get 50% headcount anymore. So not only do you have to do twice as much, but Not only do you have 2 to 10 times more competitors, but you're gonna have to do it with the same headcount. You're gonna have to do it with the same headcount, and it's tough. The only thing I can tell you is don't hire people running the 2021 playbook, and don't hire anyone that's not hands on keyboard.