The 2025 SaaS Vibe Check: What Founders Need to Know Right Now with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin

And you guys know this, it's just part of the vibe check. These older sales playbooks, marketing playbooks from 2020, '21, 2022, they're feeling mighty creaky, mighty creaky. I put these small bullets at the bottom. Too many folks I talk to that have been around for a while, they're just apathetic or jaded. They are. I can't tell you how many interviews I've done the last month or two where folks bailed when they found out they had to do the work themselves. They bailed when they found out there were KPIs. They bailed when they found out they couldn't just the job couldn't mostly be about them LinkedInning or making videos about themselves. People are apathetic. They're jaded. Things, even basic things. You can look at what HubSpot and others have talked about how SEO is down because of Google's changes in generative AI. Even tougher, one of the weirdest things of AI is categories that used to be boring are now exciting. They're now exciting. Hello everybody. Welcome. We're going to do an AMA mostly today, but since I had everybody, I wanted to take a minute and do a 2025 vibe check, a vibe check. And I don't know where folks are based. If you're in San Francisco and you're in tech and you're even at the edge of AI, you probably feel that things are sometimes, they're just crazy. Founders are everywhere. Y Combinator has 4 batches a year. There's AI events left and right. Things feel fast and furious. Outside of that ecosystem, it can seem strange what's going on. And many folks are still struggling today after a few tough years. I thought I wanted to spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes doing a vibe check, which we can chat about, and then we can chat about other things as, as well. So let's start with the vibe check and hopefully this will be helpful again, but maybe the thing that, and mostly I'm going to use this to challenge some of the things I see from both Debbie Downer people on LinkedIn, content producers, course sellers. They're just saying a lot of things that are not really actually consistent in my experience, which what's happening in cloud AI and SaaS today. So maybe the weirdest thing, and I think these charts from EY, and I put them up on SaaS for a couple of weeks, so you can search on 2025. VC-EY, and you'll see a write-up of this. This is the weird thing. This is the weird thing, and it's going to explain a lot of things, these two charts. I know they're a little bit hard to see, but I'll explain them. If you are connected to tech, if you are in venture capital, if you are in the Bay Area or other things, it's like 2021 but totally different, but a lot like it. There is mania back. I can tell you at Saster Fund, I've got two, two super hot startups that are coming up on unicorns and a bunch of VCs email me, they're like, I don't even know if I want to meet with them because I don't want to have to make a decision in 5 minutes on a huge investment. I actually want to do 5 minutes of diligence. I want to talk to a customer. I want to actually meet the rest of the team. And that's what the vibe felt like at the peak, late 2020, early 2021. Literally, VCs would email me. They're like, oh, I'll just invest and do the diligence after the term sheet. Because it seemed like in 2021, when the average public— this sounds crazy today, but the average public SaaS company was growing over 70% in 2021. It was such crazy spending. Pandemic-fueled buying that honestly you could almost make money in venture, just invest on anything with good growth. You— it felt like you didn't have to meet the people. And that has come back to an extent. It has come back to the extent because for the best AI-fueled companies, the growth is insane again. And so people will take more and more risk. So it feels like it. But this— these two charts show where the froth really is because the froth was more evenly distributed in 2021. If you were growing at top 5 or 10% rates, Seed, A, B, C, D, E were easy. Even SaaS was easy, but even pseudo-SaaS, real estate agents pretending they were SaaS, communities that were pretending they were SaaS, things that weren't even recurring revenue that felt like SaaS. People wanted to invest in everything. Today it's very narrow. And there's two things happening. If you look on the bottom right here, you'll see that the majority of investing, 44% in 2024, already the majority in 2025, is into AI and AI-native investments. Every VC you talk to wants to be AI. You can AI wash your app and pretend it is, but you really need to be either have a true generative AI-first solution or have something that's very related to the parts of AI infrastructure that are scaling like mad, right? Just because you add a little ML or add a little chat widget, if it doesn't change the trajectory of your company, I don't think VCs are that stupid. They may be taking a lot of risk, but they're not stupid. So realize the majority of the VCs going into that. And so if you're not in either AI SaaS or certain parts of vertical SaaS, it's harder to fundraise than it has been in years. Look, take that chart at the bottom right. Your odds, if you're non-AI in SaaS, of getting funded are going down. They're going down. So be thoughtful about that. The other thing that's happening on this upper, in this top chart, and this is obvious from the media, but, but this chart really shows it, is that yeah, there's massive amounts of money in venture, but it's going into these epic growth rounds. It's going into Anthropic and OpenAI and Level 11 and all of these cool things. And Harvey today, Cisco, Sequoia putting $300 million into Harvey for legal, Harvey AI. That's $300 million. It's these growth rounds that are absorbing massive amounts of capital, especially because in some cases like a Databricks, OpenAI, others, the valuations are $50, $60, $100, $300 billion. So they can absorb massive amounts of capital. So all this, and what you can see on this chart, on the top chart is the low line is the number of deals. And the number of deals actually continued to fall. At the end of last year, even as the amount of money went in, went way up, okay, went almost back up to 2022, 2021 levels at the end of the year. So the money is back, but instead of going into tons of deals, it's going into AI and growth, later stage stuff. So realize where you are. If you do— listen, I don't think most people should fundraise. This is not all about VC. VC is not the right choice for most people. I firmly believe that even if you do raise VC, for most folks, a one and done is the best approach. Raise a little bit of seed money and then call it a day. Don't take the stress and pressure. But if you are thinking about fundraising or want to learn, realize in the 2x2, people want AI and growth and everything else is hard. It's harder. It's harder. So it's a weird world, but it means overall VCs are working super hard. Tons of deals are happening, term sheets, meetings, but it's just for that one little part of the 2x2. Okay. And the other thing I wanted to highlight is just, you know, I think a lot of B2B founders are of three minds on AI, right? One, they wish they were growing as fast as Curser or Arvy or others, they wish they were getting to $100 million in 2 years or 1 year or less. But other than that, they're a little skeptical. They're like, you know what? I've tried this stuff. It even as great as the new models are, they're still hallucinating. I can't get— it's not enough for my customers. It doesn't work. I want to wait and see in my category, especially I hear this a lot in vertical SaaS where it's very specific. In my category, I'm waiting to see what's going to happen. Maybe that's okay. But if nothing else changes everywhere. And my biggest worry, my biggest vibe check is move faster because everyone is excited. Everyone is building more software, everyone is shipping more software, and you got to move faster. And I compared to, to just classic SaaS players here on the right. Shopify yesterday announced they crossed $11 billion run rate, $11 billion from Shopify, and it's accelerating. It's growing 31% at $11.2 billion. That's even better than it sounds. Because that means it's added over $3 billion of new revenue a year. But most importantly, it's the fastest it's grown in 3 years. The fastest it's growing in 3 years. Shopify, Shopify is accelerating. It's accelerating at 31%. It was in the 20s a year ago. It's accelerating. It's more profitable, higher free cash margins, and it's accelerating even though it's crossed into double-digit market share. It's just accelerating. Tripled since 2020. On the bottom, I pointed out a company that I do love, but is growth has slowed is PagerDuty. PagerDuty is coming up on $500 million in revenue, a lot, but growth has slowed to 10%. But the toughest number, and there's more companies like this out there today than is discussed, 0% net new customer growth. This last quarter they announced they had 15,050 customers. A year ago they had 15,040. They added one in a year. You can laugh, you can say that's funny. It's not funny. It's a lot of hard work. They're growing through the 107% NRR. They're growing through going more enterprise and they're growing through price increases, which is the playbook of a lot of folks today. That don't have new products, that don't have new moves, that aren't adding to their TAM, that aren't adding to their playbook. They're somewhat out of ideas. So what do you do? You raise prices again and again and you push more and more enterprise and abandon your smaller customers, which may help you make the quarter, but oftentimes is abandoning the future to hit your present goals. But this is too common. If you don't do anything, so many folks are ended up in this frozen moment where they're still going to grow with upsells and going more market, but the customer count is frozen. It's frozen. And this is more common. I see it across. There are many, if you talk to VCs, they have many startups, hundreds north of $100 million where the customer count is frozen. So what do you do? You can complain about it. You can raise prices. You can threaten to sue customers if they leave. That helps a little bit, like 1 or 2%. But you know what the real problem with anyone in this, they didn't ship enough new amazing products that people want to buy. It's that simple. And the world is accelerating. And I know it sounds nutsy, but if you're in the Bay Area, you will meet so many founders today that are working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Brian Halligan, who co-founded HubSpot, he wrote this up on LinkedIn, on social media. I can't believe how hard founders are working today compared to when I built HubSpot. HubSpot's worth $40 billion, but they— he and Dharmesh, as hard as they worked, they didn't work as hard as folks are working today. And we can talk about work-life balance and we can talk about quality of life and we talk about why we're doing it. But the reality is Since the dawn of software, it's been competitive, right? Gates and Jobs, everybody, right? And be aware, if your product is basically the same product as 2 years ago, you may be left behind. That— this is the biggest vibe check. I'm seeing folks left behind and I'm talking to founders and the consistent message I'm telling to them is it's not too late. We're early in this, still early in this wave. We're early in AI for B2B in many use cases, but you better get ahead of it now. You better find a way to build 50%, 100% more product this year and be ahead of it. Rather than being frozen in time because there's 1,000 competitors out there that are going to, that want to steal your lunch. Again, the last one, I know folks know this, but this is why, just for a vibe check, I thought I would throw it out is this is why it's like 2021, but different all over again. There are many folks that aren't growing at all. There are many folks whose customer count is the same for the last 2 years, but man, when you're hitting it today, you're hitting it better than ever. So Here at the top, now this isn't all software or SaaS revenue, but Deal announced that $800 million is growing 70% last week. That's pretty good, guys. And that's pretty good in a space where they compete with 10 other customers, like directly or indirectly, they're competing with Remote and Rippling and Gusto and so many others. They're not, they don't own this market even. They don't have about an 80% market share and they're still growing 70% at $800 million. And look at Cursor and we can talk about Cursor. Here's Cursor. Why? Wiz and Deal and a few others. We're talking about folks that can go to $100 million in a year or two. And on the right, it's just look at all the money going into cloud infrastructure. So I'm not saying that this is you. I'm not saying that you are Cursor or Wiz or Deal, but you got to objectively learn from them. And what's happening today is the CIOs are still trimming apps. In many enterprises, the app count is still flat year over year. That count is flat. They are trimming. They are forcing folks to standardize. On fewer vendors, on the same vendors, to just forget about that cool, like, just use what we have. That's happening. But on the other hand, budgets overall have grown about 50% for AI. So you've got to calm it, calm down, listen, and find the budget. It may be you think copilots are silly, but if there's budget in your space, go build a copilot. Okay? Maybe you think it's crazy that Salesforce is charging $2 for Agentforce, but if it's working for them, maybe it'll work for you. There are different sources of budget in AI, and I'm not suggesting be cynical. Maybe I'm saying be a little cynical because it's all— a lot of this is an experiment budget, but go find it. If you sit here and you don't tap into this budget on the bottom right, you're wasting an opportunity. You're wasting an opportunity to tap into this massive spend that is AI fueled. And that AI at the end of the day is fueling applications. It's fueling B2B applications. So go get off. If you're feeling sorry for yourself, if growth is slow, go find it because Hypergrowth is crazy. So it's also the vibe check. It's why some folks in venture are morose because they don't have any players on this chart on the bottom left, and others think it's the best of time and others are performative and pretending their customer, their investments are doing this well, but it's driving lots and lots of froth and excitement. Okay. Just a couple other points. I just want to make something super clear to folks. I said this so many times on SaaStr, on our LinkedIn, on social media. But profitability— efficiency is great. It may be necessary. It may be necessary if you don't have capital, if you're bootstrapped, if you've spent all your money. The public markets are demanding that everybody be more efficient, but it's not enough. So profitable, hooray. No one cares. No one cares. Yes, Shopify, we talked about them accelerating it at $12 billion. They are getting more efficient. They're getting more efficient because they're growing 30% and they're increasing spend in the teens, like sales and marketing. I just wrote it up on SaaS Run 5 Interesting Learnings. Sales and marketing, product, G&A, they're all growing in the teens. They are hiring, they are spending more, but in the teens while they grow 30%. So if you hire, but at a rate lower than your growth rate, you will get more efficient and more profitable. Public markets want that. Monday blew out the quarter. They're more, much more efficient than they used to be. Yes, but it's not the end goal. It's necessary, but not sufficient. And if you look, I inverted sorted the Bessemer Cloud Index public companies by the lowest revenue multiples. If you look at that chart, EV divided by annualized revenue, that's the lowest multiples. Isn't perfect, but it gets you a sense. Some of these folks are super lean and efficient. Who cares? Poor RingCentral trading at 1.8x revenues. It's profitable, right? PagerDuty, we talked about 3.4x. Build.com, who I love, one of the best, but still 4x. Zoom massively profitable. Zoom's at over $4 billion in revenue. Half of it is free cash flow. Zoom is generating $2 billion of cash out of its $4 billion. No one cares. It's worth 3.8x revenue. They care a little bit, but they don't care too much. So I still see too many conversations of founders, folks, of revenue executives blaming other people, saying it's all about efficiency. This is the age of efficiency. It's not. We are back to growth. Look at that chart. Look at Cursor. Look at Wiz. This is what the— this is not only what VCs are hunting. It's tough. This is where your recruits want to work. They know that there's so many fast-growing startups, where do they want to work? They want to work at these places. So it is challenging, but profitability may be necessary. As a founder, I went profitable at $4 to $5 million because I didn't want to raise any more money. It was great. It was freeing. It was liberating. I didn't have to work for the man in a sense anymore. I didn't have to listen to my VCs too much. A little bit. Be respectful. They bet on you, but I don't listen to them too much. I went profitable, but it didn't matter beyond making the business model work for me. I didn't need to raise, but I didn't get much credit. And you're not Don't listen too much to folks that say profitability is the end goal. It is really not, but it may be necessary. It may be necessary in today's world. And then I think two last points and then we'll break. This one I wish I could— we're going to talk a lot about this at SaaStr Annual in May. Please come. It's going to be great. It's something I don't have all the answers to, but I can recognize the flags, which is, man, and you guys know this, it's just part of the vibe check. These older Sales playbooks, marketing playbooks from 2020, '21, 2022. They're feeling mighty creaky. Mighty creaky. I put these small bullets at the bottom. Too many folks I talk to that have been around for a while, they're just apathetic or jaded. They are. I can't tell you how many interviews I've done the last month or two where folks bailed when they found out they had to do the work themselves. They bailed when they found out there were KPIs. They bailed when they found out they couldn't just— the job couldn't mostly be about them LinkedIn-ing or making videos about themselves. People are apathetic. They're jaded. Things, even basic things. You can look at what HubSpot and others have talked about, how SEO is down because of Google's changes in generative AI. Even tougher, there's like a thousand, there are categories that used to, one of the weirdest things of AI is categories that used to be boring are now exciting. They're now exciting. When I invested in, I co-led the A round in Salesloft and there were like 3 vendors in that whole space at the time and people were like, who the hell wants to invest in sales tools? This space sucks. People would laugh at this. Now every kid in the world has a, there's like how many AI How many AI SDR tools are there? I count 7,843 on our tracker. Okay, maybe it's less. Legal. Oh my God. I, I, I led the first investment in a company called Logical. Andy did our workshop Wednesday. He sold for $300 million last year to private equity. People were like, why would you invest in legal? That's nichey. It's tiny. They don't have any money. The sales cycles are long. All true today. And then boom, Sequoia, $300 million in Harvey AI today. There are hundreds and hundreds of AI-focused legal startups. Now there are obviously reasons, right? What these things can do for reviewing an NDA, for collaboration and legal are epic. And most of these AI tools are not great today, but I believe in a year they will be. So there's a reason. But what it means is your category may have been sleepy 12 or 18 months ago. It may have 5, 10, 1,000 times more competitors than before. So it's just creaky. And I don't have all the answers, but I'll point you to two things. One, we put up on our YouTube, Kyle Norton, who's CEO of Owner, where I'm on the board, they're adding 100 sales reps this year. And he did this presentation on His Secrets to Scaling. He's done a Workshop Wednesday too. He's done a lot of content with us. He's— I love how he thinks about stuff rationally, Steve. He'll share the AI tools he uses. He'll share how he's managing his team today. He'll share that the sales team's going back to the office. Interestingly, a remote team going back to the office together. He'll share all these secrets to scaling. It's really good. Watch Kyle. You got to hire someone like him today. You can't hire the bitter CRO from 2021 that's complaining that outbound doesn't work anymore and doesn't have any solutions. I just see that left Right. Outbound doesn't work. Well, Kyle, it's working pretty good at Owner, but listen and learn how he does it. Okay. Yes. Look at this awful email I got from Slack the other day. I wrote this up on SaaStr. If you can read it, just the people are still running this old playbook. It's terrible. Greeting from Slack in all caps. They're telling me it's a pioneering product for collaboration. Can we set up a 30-minute call? I'm given 2 time slots that are good for them. It doesn't say anything about me, nor do they know we're already paying customers. We're already paying customers for Slack and Salesforce. They don't even know it in their own CRM. This is literally a terrible AI. So we're still running this playbook. It maybe it works a little bit for Salesforce, for the mega brands, for the mega brands. We're just being in the game works at least a little bit. I don't think this works for startups anymore. So just I just wouldn't hire anybody who's all— who has no new ideas for their playbook. Or their ideas are going to bring in Clay. Okay, great. Amazing app. That's not going to do it in today's world though. It is working. Like the best ones are growing faster than ever, but it's not by running the old creaky playbooks. I'm just seeing them fail close to 100% of the time. So I think that's just about it. I'll highlight one more thing and then we can open it up to any questions. But we just announced if you're coming to SaaStr Annual and you have an AI-first product or even an AI-first feature. Apply to pitch it at the demo stage. Go on SaaStr Annual. There's a link and you can come. The slots are super short. They're going to be like 2 minutes. Part of it's going to be for fundraising. Mayfield is going to invest in the number one pitch from $500,000 up to $5 million. So that's going to be fun. So there'll be a, there'll be a pitch part of it. If you have not raised money before, venture money, you're eligible to win for this pitch. But it's also just demos. Anyone can demo that's at scale that has revenue. We'll pick the best ones, but we'll give you a slot. You can come demo yourself. In front of thousands and it'll be tons of fun. We'll have the best folks there. There'll also be hundreds of other VCs. There'll be thousands of sales and revenue and marketing leaders. Just come pitch your app. Just apply to come pitch your app. It's going to be really fun. We're going to run it for 3 days straight, right in the middle of SaaStr Annual. So you got to do it in 2 minutes, but we'll— anyone that passes the bar, as near as we can tell, will be able to pitch their app for 2 minutes live at SaaStr. And it'll be a lot of fun too. So apply to that. And with that, Amelia, I will— I'll open it up to any questions that we have.

Yeah, Jason, let's say that people have been listening to you for the last year and they realize that they're not going to IPO and turn it around.

Yeah.

Hey, look, the product's not there right now. We get we have to do multi-product. Everybody's somewhat defeated. Let's say people are somewhat jaded now. Like, how do you turn the company culture around? What do you do tactically?

Yeah. I'll tell you, I asked that question to many leaders. I ask it on a lot of the podcasts I do in the interviews I did, and The truth is most driven founders and most sales leaders that are really trying hard, that they're really going for it, they're going to tell you, you can't, you got to bring in new blood. You can't turn it around. No one thinks you can, right? There are certain things I talk with leaders and founders behind closed doors and every— there's certain things they don't say aloud that they don't say aloud that we need people to return to the office because half our company doesn't work. Okay. It doesn't— you don't need return to office for high performers. The best people will get it done. They'll get it done from Antarctica or they'll get it done in the office. But the mid-performers just don't work from home, right? They barely work. And so they want to supervise them for 40 hours. It's not about collaboration, it's about getting any work done. So you can't talk about that. The other thing you can't talk about is like people that are jaded or broken. A little training isn't going to help. Like a team trip to Miami is not going to help. You've got to gently move them out. Like, now you're better with half the employees as smart as you are that all want to be there than folks polluting the culture, right? So you got to start over now. And listen, if growth is slow and no one believes in your vision except for you, it's a tough— you got a tough situation. It's still fixable, but you need 100% new DNA. What often happens when you have a mission-based startup, right, is that a handful of the folks still are really into it, right? Because of what you're doing, they enjoy it and they see the challenge and they see the ability to get Actually, not most, maybe not most, or maybe not some, but then you just gotta line up the folks that believe and get rid of the rest. It doesn't mean fire, maybe it means fire them tonight, maybe it means moves them out, maybe the gentler thing is just to go hire someone else and transition them out when you have new resources, but they all got, you can't turn people around like this. I'm gonna bring up Ali next. I get it that you talk about expansion and growth and everything, but what I can't understand why the end goal should not be profitability. Isn't the goal of the business is make more money than you spend? Look, it absolutely is. Absolutely. I have in the past run cash flow breakeven businesses. I've run businesses that were reliant on venture capital. I've run businesses that were very profitable. I've run businesses that made millions of dollars in profits per year. And so I'll answer the question to you, Paul. If you can create a business that generates millions of dollars per year in your pocket, that's something to think about. Like if, like in the DevOps tools, like for a while, a lot of folks made fun of Basecamp. Okay, because Atlassian and Basecamp and others in the early days were huge competitors. Atlassian's worth what now? $60 billion, right? And people like to say, oh, this Basecamp idea of being profitable and lean, those guys are losers. They don't say that anymore, right? Because every year Basecamp has made the founders like $20 million a year for 20 years. They own— even 10 years ago, they bought a villa in Italy to race their Paganis. Okay, what's a Pagani? Like $4 million? I think they like bought like the first 4 street legal ones and then they bought a villa to race it in because Basecamp made so much money. Okay, so like that can work, right? And so can— and listen, making a lot of money in your own company can work, right? But it doesn't. First of all, the math doesn't pencil out for VCs. They can't invest looking for 100 or 1,000x returns for a share of the profits, right? You're not venture-backable. If you're profitable. That's just one obvious thing. And if you just— if you don't understand, just understand VCs want to— need to invest in multi-billion dollar outcomes, not millions of profits. Multi-billion dollars of market. So that's a simple answer. The subtler answer is, listen, running Basecamp and making $10 million a year, $20 million, that is a dream for 99% of folks. Okay? Only a few folks want to go differently, want to go bigger than that. But realize that the reality is we can talk about net present value, we can talk about discounted cash flow analysis and all the stuff that economists look and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reality is the way to make a lot of money off a startup often is for someone to buy you for a lot of money and you are purchased on a multiple of revenue. So you're not purchased. Listen, there are small private equity firms that will pay you 3 times your cash flow. So if you spend 10 years building a business that makes $1 million in profits and someone wants to buy you for $3 million, you think that's a great deal after a decade of your life, take it. Okay. Okay. But if you're in a hot category today, you might get bought for $200 million with $1 million in revenue. What's the better outcome? $200 million or $3 million, right? The reality is, and you could debate it, some, you could say it's shenanigans. You could mock how it works, but until a certain terminal point, tech companies are valued on a revenue multiple until a certain point. And so if you're not playing that game, you might make a hundred with a thousandth of what you might make if you could lean into it, right? That, that's the reason, right? So there's lots of theories. I'm not an economist. Ultimately, once you're public, you can do these DCF analysis and you can stop looking at AR multiples and you can start looking at EPS multiples, but it's a long time until it happens. So thanks for the question. It's a good one. Thank you. I got to go to Tomer for the last question. Cool.

Thanks. So Jason, we just got to 1 through founder-led sales. And now this year we're going to try to get from 1 to 3.

Atta boy.

All the SMBs. Hiring my first account executive now.

Okay.

Any, any pro tips there in terms of—

You got the company to a million yourself as the salesperson?

Pretty much, yeah.

Mostly I'm— And what's the deal size and who's the buyer and what's the deal size?

We sell to a similar buyer like owner.com. We sell the restaurant coffee shop. Average deal size, $5K ACP.

Well, 5K is still enough that someone can make money off the sale. Where you're at, Algy, I've said this so many times, but yet so few listen. Just listen. At your ACV, you probably need to hire a kid. The kid could be 60 or 16, right? But you need to hire— this is a high-velocity SMB business. Okay. I don't know whether it's outbound or inbound, but you're probably not— you're probably not sitting in restaurants yourself, are you? Is it door-to-door or is it— Okay, so you need it. So interview 30 kids. And again, this is not a chronological thing. This is more spirit. Okay? You don't need a grizzled veteran.

Okay?

Interview 30 kids of any age and be religious about this. Just only hire one you would buy your own product from. Don't give on this. I don't care whether they worked at Toast. I don't care if they worked at Owner. I don't care if they were the first person in at ServiceTitan. Those are almost the worst because they're full of themselves. Okay? Or they're not willing to do the work. Slow it down. And if you interview 30 or 40, you will usually almost always find one, often from a unique background, because like you're not as well known as Toast or Owner or Shopify. So don't expect that they're going to have the— they may have a quirky background, okay? They may have gotten fired after 2 years. It's not— or they may have joined 3 startups that all failed. Okay, who cares? My point is, go in, don't be prejudiced, don't be biased too much. Screen for a little bit of product IQ. Okay. They don't have to be like super the smartest kid in the world, but they have to have product IQ. They have to, before you even meet them, I would make sure by email they understand your value prop for real. Don't just take dumb meetings. Like, why do you think some, just, I just got one question before we get on the phone. Why do you think a restaurant would use us? If the answer is terrible, do not take the meeting. Do not waste your time. If they give you a good answer, no matter what their background is, don't be prejudiced. Don't be biased. No matter if they give you a background, that's a hint. Then take up the call and over the next 2 to 3 screens, ask yourself, would you buy from them? Would you buy from them? And I've written this post a couple of times at SaaStr. Everyone has this magical first sales rep, okay, that somehow out of all the folks, they're the one that could sell the product in the early days. Okay. And there's different versions of it. But if you, if you want to have fun, anytime you talk to a founder north of $10 million, ask them if they had a magical sales rep and what the secret was. Okay. And you'll hear all different backgrounds. I could share the background of mine. But the one thing is they're usually product savants, right? And they just love the mission. They know the product and they know the mission. They're often mediocre at sales. Not always, but they're often mid-pack. They're not— they don't have all the great tactics and the games and they— but man, and I had this guy, his name was Joe Coletti. Of all the guys I interviewed, I didn't get it at the time, but my co-founder came into my office almost yelling, you got to hire this guy, Joe. I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, its background's weird and it's just— there's some— seems like a nice guy, but I don't get this. Now, this is the best. I didn't get it at the time. It's because he knew— he already knew the product, the mission, the value prop cold. No one else could in the first 30. And then I'll fast forward to that next year at Dreamforce. Not that much longer. I was at Dreamforce. There's just Salesforce's big thing. We were exhibiting there and this huge sales guy, it must have been like 6'5", huge, bulking. I think he might have been a Kelsey cousin or something like that. Big guy. He grabs me. Walking into Dreamforce and everybody grabs me by my shirt because I had a, I had a company sweatshirt, EchoSign, grabs me by this. Do you work at EchoSign? I'm like, yeah, I'm the founder. Do you know Joe Colletti? I'm like, yeah, he's our, he's on our sales team of one. He's on our sales team. I love Joe. I love him. That's who you want. Okay. And it's not so much that Joe was lovable. It's that he knew this product cold. Right. And so when the, when you finally get a prospect and you don't have enough leads in the early days, you don't have enough, you're not overflowing with them, right? You need that sales rep that the customers are going to not just love, but trust. Like they trusted Joe. They trust to architect a solution to their problem. And you've already closed a million in revenue. So I'll end it saying, oh, forget— I don't care where they came from, if they graduated from high school, whether they dress weird, whatever their problems are, if they don't bathe often enough, that one that you would buy from, hire her or him and don't hire anybody else or they'll be gone. They'll close nothing. They'll close nothing. And even worse, what will happen is you will quickly not even give them the leads because you'll see revenue go down. You'll see revenue go down, right? So I hired that one guy, Joe. He and I got to $2 million in revenue. And then I hired my first VP of sales from Salesforce. He hired 10 people. All of them except Sam Blonde, who have done a lot with them, became Brex. All of them, all the other 9 closed nothing. And with 10 people, that VP of sales closed less than me and Joe did. They all came from the right places and they all checked the boxes, and many of them were reasonably attractive and fun to go out for drinks with, but they never knew the product. And so we lost all of them except Sam lost 100% of the deals to DocuSign back then, 100%, because they didn't know the product. This was too early in the space. The space was not mature. They're not going to buy from someone that they don't know. We didn't have this great brand, right? But when it was me or Joe, we closed them. And then when Brendan came back in and Sam did it, We could beat them in most deals, right? But they lost zero. They closed nothing, these 9 reps. Nothing. And I wouldn't have bought from them. I wouldn't have bought from them. But later when you scale, and then we can break. When you scale, you need a more heterogeneous team. You need folks you wouldn't buy from. Go talk to a Toast rep. You wouldn't buy from most Toast reps. Okay. But Toast, how many reps does Toast have? 1,000 or something? Like you, your sales team will figure out how to train and onboard, and then you'll have a brand and the brand will do a lot of the work for you and stuff, but you went there. Triple redundant. Interview 30. There's probably only one you'll buy your own product from. Make them even do a demo. Hire her, him. You will not fail. Thanks everybody. See you next week.