What Happens When AI Kills Your SaaS Growth? Live Q&A with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

I've dropped everything. I'm here for 2 months just to learn. What do I do? First of all, if nothing else, in SF, there's endless meetups, hackathons. Like, just ingratiate yourself in it so that the stress that Aaron's feeling, that Yamini's feeling, that you're feeling, that you're just acclimated to. It's a new normal. I know it sounds silly, but it's not. Like, adjust to the stress, right? Adjust to the pace. Adjust to the 2x pace. Even me, like, it's not the same, but even I'm working in terms of output. I'm working twice as hard, me, as a year ago. And then, I mean, this is only sort of helpful, right? I'm just trying to be a therapist. Meet all these people, hang out with more folks that are stressed out, right? But even if you don't really care about the content, socialize with the people that are stressed out, right? And then figure out a way to work twice as hard. Ship features twice as hard. Make the product twice as good. Hey everybody, get excited. We just hosted 10,000 of you at the SaaStr Annual and AI Summit in the SF Bay Area. It was insane. It was off the charts compared to last year. It was a deep dive on everything new, everything AI, everything go-to-market. And we're getting ready because SaaStr AI is coming to London in December. It's Christmas with SaaStr. On December 2nd and 3rd, we're bringing SaaStr AI to the heart of Europe. This is your chance to connect with thousands of SaaS and AI executives, founders, and investors, all sharing the secrets to scaling in the age of AI. If you're a founder, a VC, a revenue leader. Saastr AI in London is where the future of B2B meets the power of AI. And we just announced tickets and sponsorships, so don't wait. saastrlondon.com to grab your tickets. Saastr AI in London, where B2B meets AI and the next wave of innovation begins. See you there. Thanks everybody for being here. We just have a tradition. This was a pretty good— everyone have a pretty good day 3? Yeah. So we don't have to do it, but usually we've had a slightly quieter day 3 this year, which was probably our best. So I sort of did a tradition of trying to answer any questions we didn't get to over these days. But I will say in closing, like, I am really happy this year. I will tell you, it took me a while to reflect, but how many folks were here last year? Yeah, I mean, last year you probably thought it was good. I actually thought it was the worst SaaStr ever. It had nothing to do with the production values were great. It looked good. It was well done. But at a Million Dollar Green, the vibe sucked. The vibe sucked. And it sucked because people thought we were in a downturn. They thought AI sucked. Well, there was a lot of woe is me. And I'd walk out and meet founders last year and executives and half would be like, man, everything's terrible. I can't close anything. And it really weighed on me the last 11.92 months. And then the whole 3 days, it's been great. I haven't had a single Debbie Downer conversation the whole time. It is right. And if you were here with Aaron Levy, he's like, I'm stressed but excited. That's That's how you should be. But yeah, it's hard, but you should be excited. So for what it's worth, I want to take a question, but I'm reinvigorated with AI. I'm excited. You can see it in what I've done. And even just the tenure here, there's like, the energy is so much more fun than last year. Last year I kind of had to put the smile on my face after. I'm like, we did it. It was great. But man, it's like, there's a Debbie Downer vibe in B2B and it's behind us. So like, I'm super excited. Not a single person I met here said, oh, we're in a downturn. Life is terrible. I didn't. And then thank God. I think they all stayed home this year. and I think they should either go get excited about AI and join something new or just, just stay home. I don't know which one, but thank you everyone. It's, it's been a delight for me and Emilia and the team this year. Really, really great and total 180 from last year. So thank you.

So I have two thank-yous and one question. First of all, thank you for doing SaaSFair in May. Uh, this time around it was my birthday yesterday, so this was like a birthday gift.

Yeah.

Second thank you is 3 years ago, roughly, it was in September, my co-founder Abdul asked you if, uh, I remember YC is, uh, worth doing.

Yeah.

We took your advice.

We did it.

It was the best thing that, you know, happened to our company.

So good.

And I think as the demo, uh, the AI demos just shown YC is still very much worth doing in 2025.

Now, well, you guys are perfect. You guys were for what it's, I mean, ask your question, but I'll answer the different question. Why I told you to do that. I mean, I do believe in YC, right? But you guys were the perfect— you guys had a ton of energy, a ton of drive. You knew a niche market, but you were outsiders. Nobody knew you, right? And so I'm not saying everyone should do it, but anyone like that that goes through YC, it is a gift, right? You'll be validated. It doesn't— it doesn't get everybody customers. It's not going to get you if you're in solar. It's not going to matter. But to take someone that didn't go to MIT or Stanford and didn't wasn't the top engineer at Stripe and didn't like work in the— it really can be magical, right? And I probably more so today, right? But that was— that's why I said it to you, because I'm like, you guys have the raw ingredients of success, but like, this is— this will just lever you up.

Awesome. And so the question is, as you know, we're a vertical SaaS, very much like a traditional layer K, just now starting to think about AI. In the best possible universe, just because like these are our laws of physics, small market, we're going to be triple, double doubling, like in the best possible universe. We're never going to have a windsurf or a cursor style J-curve. So, okay, the question, listen to your chat with Rory and then Harry a couple of weeks ago. So here's the question. Is that still kind of an attractive asset class, right, for maybe 1.0, 2.0 investors like yourself who understand what You know, just how rare even triple, triple, double doubling is and how do we just conceptualize this as a vertical SaaS company? First AI, second in today's day and age.

Well, that means it's a good question. I think Rory and I both have an opinion. We did address it. I've talked about it a couple of times and, but let me, it's so important. Let me, let me, let me restate it, right? Which is, look, you're right. Until 18 months ago, for folks that have been in B2B since Aaron and I started, The gold standard was triple, triple, double, right? It was triple, double, double. However long it took you to get to a million, 1 week, 10 years, no one cared. It took UiPath 10 years to get to a million, right? There are plenty of— took Squarespace like 5 years to get to a million in revenue. They all did well within limits. No one cared. But when you got to a million, they wanted to at least see you triple, double, double. 1 to 3 to 9 to 18 to 36. That was the path. And then what I actually learned from Rory on the podcast, the second time I met him was at an Upfront Summit. In LA in 2013 with Mark Susterman, and he's like, now the new bar is 1 to 10 and 5/4 or less, the best ones. And so I started thinking that was, that was the prime version of triple, triple, triple. I didn't know until Rory explained it right, because I didn't know, didn't know anything. But if you do the quick math, it got you to $100 million in IPO. Triple, triple, triple got you to $100 million before your grandchildren were running your company. Okay. When Rory invested in Box with Aaron, when Rory's invested in HubSpot. Those are pretty good ones. Shopify. These guys all IPO'd around $100 million in revenue, growing really fast, often 50, 60, 80% at like $800 million valuations. That was how it worked. So you're like, okay, I got to get to $100 million. And people would IPO in 7 to 8 years back in the day. Now they're going to IPO. Like eToro just IPO'd today. I think they're like 16 years old or 18 years old, but you don't— but you're not at $100 million. Now they're all at $500 million. Okay, that was last year. All the IPOs that we've had in B2B recently— Klaviyo, OneStream, Rubrik— that was here on— they're all $500 million growing 50%. So then stop your math. Okay, now I got to go even further and faster. Then the new math became $550 million, not like 50 or 60 to 100. Then AI changed it all. Then everyone's like, holy crap, some of these startups for whatever reason are growing at insane rates. And then what I started to see about a year and a half ago was a lot of the B2B investors I knew, old school, the bar had just gone up, right? And like I had like my catch-up with Byron Dieter, who's OG, you know, was first one of the first investors. ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan. So many great ones. And I met him about a year and a half ago. I was like, yeah, honestly, we're only doing AI investing because the bar is so high. He's like, I'm— that's it, right? And then, then they went on to invest in Anthropic late and others, and that's what they're looking for. And So when someone like Byron, that is as OG as they, you know, been a SaaS CEO himself, done Box, done so many early ones, is now looking all in on this, that's where like 80% of the B2B investors are. Okay. Now, if you listen to Rory and I both said we still like triple doubles. Okay. So what is the, the long-winded or longer, less TL;DR version If you're triple, triple, double, double, as hard as that is, as hard as that is, maybe only 20 to 30% of the investors that would've been interested 18 months ago are interested today. 20%, 20 to 30%. So you can say, woe is me, or you can do what you have to do in sales. Talk to more prospects, talk to everybody. That's just the reality, right? But the only thing I would add at the end with that is a dagger. And you probably saw it with Jack from Clio and Tidemark if you were there. Overall, there's a little more in vertical SaaS today than in other categories. So you'll get more meetings and it's viewed as more durable. Most vertical SaaS companies had no downturn, so-called downturn. And, you know, I did— I was with the CEO of Owner this morning. They had no downturn in restaurant SaaS, right? So there is— there's a lot of reasons people are more into vertical SaaS, but generally the investors are taking more risk for more growth. And they're crazy. I know it sounds crazy, but if you listen to the one I did with Rory and Harry, a lot of investors, when Box and HubSpot and Shopify IPO'd, they're looking for billion-dollar outcomes. Okay. Then it became disaster 2016, 2017. Everyone's talking about decacorns, $10 billion outcomes, right? If you listen to that 20 VC we did, VCs are now looking for trillion-dollar outcomes. People have decided that every couple of years there'll be another OpenAI. Not every week there'll be a trillion-dollar company. Like, these companies are smaller. Facebook wasn't trillion, Google wasn't trillion, Tesla wasn't trillion, SpaceX isn't trillion. Now that there's multiple trillion-dollar companies, it's no longer viewed as an anomaly. It's viewed as a factory. Like, we will create— and folks believe that AI will create more of them, right? So if you're a VC and you have a lot of money, and you want to get rich, do you want a $2 billion, a little $2 billion exit? Like Databricks just bought this, some Postgres company for a billion, right? Does that really make a difference for your $2 billion fund? If you own 10%, 10%, I made $100 million. Hooray. So a lot if your fund is $10 million, if your fund is $5 billion, then $100 million you made off that is 2%, right? 2%. Right. Doesn't even go above the line. So this trillion-dollar outcome, guys, it's not so. And you can laugh at it and you don't have to take it too seriously, but realize smart people aren't laughing. Like, they're really— the Peter Thiels and Marc Andreessens are like, how can we find the next trillion-dollar company? Trillion-dollar company, right? And it probably won't be you, but maybe it is. Like, I'm not saying it won't be, right?

No more questions this year. Just thank you again. You're very much the Rory of my generation and hashtag cry me a river.

Thanks for being back. Congrats. You could cry me a river. Yeah. How you doing, Jason? So we are a 3-year vertical SaaS company focusing on energy. Yeah. When we started the company, the first 2 years it was a SaaS playbook and we literally followed it religiously and it worked for the first 24 months. At least you got 24 months. Well, there you go. And so in the last 12 months it started breaking down, right? And I think you'd be the first to kind of admit from your comments today and during the week that a lot of the kind of traditional playbook is shifting in this kind of world of vertical AI, agentic? I do think— keep going, not to interrupt, but just be— I do, I want to be clear what I'm saying because sometimes it's— I actually think the traditional playbook act, notwithstanding what Kyle and I talked about this morning, if you have intense product market fit, it works fine. It works fine. OpenAI is doing field events. OpenAI is doing webinars. OpenAI has swag. OpenAI has so much product market fit, right? The playbook works, but When you are falling out of product-market fit, it decays rapidly today. Yeah, well, it was more— you have these canonical pieces of content, right? When to hire the VP of sales and so on. You know, which, you know, the context of what you just said, do these need updating? You know, are these kind of core canonical pieces of, you know, content about how to build your company, how to get to that first one, you know, zero to one, one to 10, et cetera. Do they shift in this kind of new, like, area of, you know, I don't think it shifts. I mean, you know, In all seriousness, if you read SaaSer carefully, you'll actually see I am updating a lot of the canonical pieces. A couple times a week, I'll take some of the really good ones and I rewrite them and update them. So I'm cognizant of it. Don't get me wrong. But if you watch what I said, I think 30 to 40% of inside sales will become AI. I think we won't need mediocre customer success. I think marketing is changing. I think it's all happening, right? But the motions are still there. So even though Kyle and I had a little bit of a debate, I don't challenge people, debate on whether a CRO will manage AIs and humans together. I actually think he agrees when he thinks about it. Yes, but it's still the motion, right? It's still discovery, demo, solutions solving. You know, even Sridhar from Snowflake said it's the same thing. It's just the speed and the quality are changing, right? And so we all need to know how the systems, the instrumentation, the quality changes. But even if 40% of sales is done by AI, it's— we're still having sales. I have no problem if it all— if, if million-dollar Snowflake deals can be done by AI, I think it's cool, but I don't think anyone's saying that, right? So I just think the, um, it's more you just have to run these playbooks with AI, with intensity, with ferocity, and everything is faster. That's the— maybe the part that is the most dated of that playbook isn't really dated, but it feels dated, which is We just have to move so much faster, right? We just can't get back to a company in a week and have— pretend we have 3 competitors. We just can't. And I honestly think if you work twice as hard and 4 times smarter than last year, it all works. But most people are not working twice as hard as 4 times. Actually, the horrible truth is most people are working less hard than last year because they're bummed because it's not working because there's a downward death spiral. If you don't think the playbook works, you invest less in it. You don't take it seriously and you just have it. I see this downward spiral. Sales isn't working as well, so I don't try as hard, right? Just want quota relief. I just want to sell less, right? And then it becomes a self-perpetuating prophecy, right? I'm still learning. I'm back in student mode. I'm updating everything. I think sales, marketing, onboarding, support, success are— they're not going away. I hope more and more of it is AI, and I think it's under radical change. But the underlying motions will be the same. We're still, we still need to find apps. There's still too many apps. AI just makes there even more apps. We're still looking for brands. I mean, one of the top questions I got at this conference is, which AI tool should I use for sales? Okay. All over Twitter, all over everyone. You got Kyle's answer. You got my answer. Why are people asking that? Because there's no dominant brand, right? We need 80% of folks buy with brands, right? And so Brand still works. And so the irony of this, all of this is as much as sales and marketing changes, probably the one thing that won't change is brand marketing, meeting folks in person that you've only met on the internet. If you listen to folks that are frustrated with go-to-market on the internet, they're like, we've got to do events in the field because nothing else works. Right. There's a bit of a negative. I think that's overstating it. But my point is brand and multi-touch and reinforcement is going to work in this digital age too. But, um, It's got to be faster. It's got to be better. Thank you. Yeah. Hey, so on the new playbook that you're talking about— Of all. The faster AI-infused old playbook. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you recommend? Your top 3 recommendations to go faster? Look, next year I'll have concrete answers. I'm still learning, right? AI cannot make someone buy a product they don't want to buy. AI cannot build a brand. But all I would do today, if I were tiny, I would just want to make sure that everyone that touches my product at scale has an amazing experience. Okay. Again, if we go back to the Saastr AI, 150,000 chats. If you came to saastr.com or saastraño.com 60 days ago, you'd have no experience. All you could do is like read our content or buy a ticket. Okay. On the two websites. Today we've had 150,000 people have had— most of them have had a great experience with us, right? So make sure whatever they are, however they touch you, use whatever AI and other tools you can so that everyone instantly has an elegant experience. They instantly get the information they need. They instantly get the data. They instantly talk to a synthetic human and then a human that going— that instantly— that you don't just have a meeting, that everyone's followed up with perfectly and properly multiple times afterwards and their needs are served and all the onboarding is perfect. And the handful of customers you do get, you don't forget about after. And they're perfectly onboarded and the remarketing and the retargeting is perfect. Use all these tools and there's great AI sales tools here. Can an AI SDR bring you trillions of dollars of business? No. But can an AI SDR help you build a prospect list, target it, and write better emails that then you have to manage? Yes. So use all the information tools, know its limits, and make sure Everyone is treated like a real-time king and queen. Real-time king and queen is my old Saastr post is customers, tiny, small, medium, and large should be treated as kings and queens. My evolution today is real-time kings and queens. Use AI so that they instantly feel like kings and queens. That always works. So, thank you. Yeah. Hey, Jason. Vineeth here. It's my first time at Saastr. Loving it. Thank you for coming. And I am so petrified of what AI is doing and how I'm not ready for it. Are you more petrified after this? No, I'm just as petrified. The same petrification, the same petrification as when you got here. Okay. But I've dropped everything. I'm here for 2 months just to learn. What do I do? Listen, it's good. First of all, if nothing else in SF, there's endless meetups, hackathons, leftathons, MCPathons. Like just ingratiate yourself in it so that you, the stress that Aaron's feeling, that Yamini's feeling, that you're feeling, that you're just acclimated to. It's a new normal. So just lit— I mean, and I know it sounds silly, but it's not like adjust to the stress, right? Adjust. It is the new normal. Adjust to the pace, adjust to the 2X pace. Even me, like it's not the same, but even I'm working in terms of output and Amelia too, we're working twice as hard as 12 months ago. Right. And I don't know, I have my own stresses, but listen, your life's more stressful than mine. I'm working twice as hard, me, as a year ago. Adjust to it. Adjust it or quit. Right. And I know you're not going to quit because you're here, but adjust or quit. That's the best advice I can. Right. And then, and again, this is only sort of helpful, right? I'm just trying to be a therapist. Meet all these people, hang out with more folks that are stressed out. Right. Go, if you want an SF, if you're ever doing this, you literally can go to a hackathon or an AI meetup every fucking night. Right. There's just, Almost too many, right? But even if you don't really care about the content, socialize with the people that are stressed out, right? And not so much that you want to jump off the roof. And then figure out a way to work twice as hard. Just to clarify, maybe the stress, you know, it's not therapeutic question. I'm asking from a playbook perspective as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, figure out how to work twice as hard. On what? All of it. Ship features twice as hard, make the product twice as good, work 7 days a week. I mean, listen, it's brutal. I don't know. This was toxic to talk about 12 months ago. Now it's okay. Like when Kyle from Owner was here and, you know, they're coming up on $50 million, growing 10% a month, just raised $1 billion. That company works. They work 7 days a week in the office. Now they've made some exceptions as they've grown. They're partly remote. Folks have more families. So it's okay to work 6.5 days a week in the office. Adam's going to get a little mad. I mean, they're more flexible, but not really. And this, this is of all the companies I've invested in, and I have some really good ones. I think Owner is the most— has the highest rate of the highest rate of software output, the highest rate of development. And the team is great. And the engineering team is as good as Kyle. Okay. On the revenue side, but they don't work 40 hours a week, man. They work, especially Adam, the CEO. I literally, every CEO works hard, right? Come on, everyone. But I mean, Adam, 11:00 AM, 6:00 AM on Sunday, whatever. It's in Burlingame, it's in SF, it's in Florida. The customer is in, in Orange. I like, I saw him the other, a lot in Orange County is meeting with the restaurant down the street when I was orange, just It's a lot, man. I don't know if this is answering your question, but you got to work twice as hard for maybe 50% more hours. And then my last point, and again, I know it may not be helpful, but if you listen to some of the things folks have said, and it may not help you, but if you have a team, just make sure everyone is using tools every day. It is good advice. I mean, even, even Amelia, who runs Saastr with me now, we use so much AI across, like, this logo, right? I mean, we have our designer here who's one of the best I've ever worked with, but this was done by AI. Almost all of the drafts of this were done by AI. Our videos are done in this app called Higgsfield, right? Descripts AI does our podcast now. And so now we do a lot more podcasts and they're a lot better, right? There's so much— AI writes like this session that we just did here. These will all get written up really well by our AI and they'll be much better than a human. So like, make sure everyone on your team is spending hours a day Again, not just a recipe in Claude, and I don't know if that's helpful, but it's the best I could do for today. But thank you. Yeah. You said yesterday that there are all these $100 billion revenue companies that have suddenly hit a wall. They're going, oh, hundreds. And hundreds. AI is maiming them. Yep. So can you dimension that maiming a little more? Is it more competitors moving faster? Yes. Is it internal build? Yes. Versus build versus buy, or is it the internal development process speeding up? Why are they all slowed down? Yeah. What's, what's driving this contact? What's the— It's probably compounding effects. First of all, one of the biggest— there's probably, there's probably two issues. The first two, there's probably a bunch, but the first two have nothing to do with AI. One is too many didn't go multi-product. If you listen to Tope, I don't know if you're with Tope for Calendly, he's not telling you what's coming this year, but when you heard him say multi-product, They're well over $200 million. I don't know where they are. I don't know if they're past $300, but they're well over $200 million. Multi-product is the game. Okay. Too many folks got to $100 million with one product. Too many, I call too many folks got to $100 million pretending they had a second product, but it was really an extension of the feature. Right. There are some folks like Parker Conrad that disagree with me, but although we'll do something with him on it soon, I don't actually think we disagree, but I think if your second product is smaller than your first, you're not multi-product because it doesn't get you anywhere. If you get to $100 million and it takes you 2 years to launch a product that can only do $50 million, it doesn't get you anywhere, right? It's got to be bigger. So too many folks didn't go multi-product, pretended it was multi-product. It was just a second feature. It wasn't a whole new product, right? So that's root cause number 1 of the slowdown at $100 million. Root cause number 2. And so the lesson learned, and it was funny, I was rewatching the chief product officer of Samsara, which is one of the most top 10, most— he, he said last year at SaaStr, you got to go multi-product by $10 million in revenue. You got to go multi-product by $10 million. And I think it's the right way to think about it. Okay. Second reason they're decelerating, which is, which is they just couldn't recover from how easy it was in 2021. They couldn't recover culturally. They couldn't recover the fact that in 2021 anyone would buy their product and they couldn't recover that. Because of that, their product is the same as 2021. And so in 2021 they grew 70% and then in 2022 they grew 40%. And then in 2023, oh shit, it's 20%, it's 20%. And then they hit this year and that— what did it decelerate to? So many folks went whatever that— went some version, 70%, 40%. And then, then 40%, the investors are like, oh, we're nervous, but 40% is still pretty good at 100%, right? And then you see the 20s and you're like, well, as long as Jason M. Lemkin turns it around to 20%, and then you fall into the teens and everyone gives up. And then where do you go from the teens? You end up like just ripping off your customers because there's— and then what happens after the teens is you start getting investor update and it's no new customers. The customer count is the same, but they raise prices again. They raise prices again, right? So living in 2021 killed people. Not going multi-product killed people. That alone led to this. And then the AI competitors, so fierce because not only is all the discretionary budget going into AI, which you heard from everybody, that's bad enough that the that CIOs especially want to put money— they want to do two things. We ran out of time in the opener. They want fewer vendors. And even Toph said that's happening at Calendly. We want to consolidate vendors, but we're putting more money into AI. So you're either benefiting or getting screwed by that. Either you're getting consolidated out of existence or you're benefiting from the AI. So too many folks are getting consolidated away, right? That's the third trend. And then the fourth one, to answer your question longly, and then this is it, is look, even if none of that is an issue, if AI just creates— if you just got 5 new competitors here and they each have 1% market share and you lose 5% market share, that even 5% is really stressful. It's really stressful, right? So that's the nick— all these things can like nickel and dime you and make your growth go from okay to not okay, right? The line between okay, it varies at your stage, But after $100 million, if you're growing less than 30%, it's big yellow light, right? And if after $100 million you're growing less than 20%, you fell out of product market fit. $100 million, you have so many thousands of customers, they should be telling their friends and they should be leaving and going to new companies and bring you in and all the stuff you've seen. It's almost impossible to grow less than 20% at scale if the engine's working. So your engine is not working. That's a red effing flag, right? So I don't know if that helps, but those are all the causes. It's a lot. Helps a lot. One follow-on, are you seeing much of sort of, "Yay, let's go all AI," and then boom, we've wandered into a minefield, product development goes to hell, just adopting AI itself begins to kill your— Not really. Not really. I'll answer it. Usually I don't like two questions, but it's a really interesting question. Have I seen teams that went all in on AI and then everything fell apart because it was too hard and too complicated, right? The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is, of course I have. Of course I've seen it all the time. Teams fighting with each other, resource contention. Even more, what I've seen is teams that actually build a great 1.0 AI, right? They're like, oh my God, it's so awesome. It's autonomous. It does all this. The next week their competitor launches an AI that's the same. The team's exhausted. And then you find out you got to work even harder because your competitor just launched it last week. This I've seen again and again, and the team's getting tired. And the demands are going up. And then the mediocre start to say, you know what, I'll do it, but I need 50 more engineers. Okay. I've seen this again and again and again and again. It will kill the mediocre. It will kill the folks that don't care. It will kill the folks that aren't all in, but the best have already pushed their way through this. The best have already found a way to do this, but it is a huge issue for folks that haven't, right? Plenty of excuses in that story. Hiya. Hey, Jason. Thanks for coming. First time at SaaStr as well. Yeah, so as a non-AI-first company trying to fundraise and so many funds going to like AI-first companies. Sorry, you're non-AI. There's someone over here. Oh, sorry. I just lost interest. I know you said something about being a non-AI-first SaaS company, but— Yeah, we have AI features, but not really dive deep. That's my answer, by the way, in a joking way, but keep going. Okay. Yes. Uh, so yeah, as a non-AI-first, uh, company, how many resources should we be devoting to like make ourselves AI-first, or should we be focusing on making our offering better and the things that we do well? At the end of the day, listen, I mean, I'll give you the market answer and all that. Look, at the end of the day, no matter what anybody says, for investors, you mean? All the only people care about is how quickly you're growing. No one cares. No one really cares. No one really cares if there's IA or AI or API or IA. No one, no matter what anybody says, the only reason any investor cares about AI is because they want insane growth. They don't really care, right? Listen, there is a, for example, there's a renaissance in fintech today. Okay. A lot of fintech companies are doing really well. There's only so, like, I know they're excited, but there's only so much AI in Revolut. There's only so much AI in Stripe. And Chime, which is going public. I'm sure I haven't read the Chime prospectus. I'm sure it says it's AI for consumer banking, but it ain't much AI. Okay. But then they put up the numbers, man. Revolut, Chime, they put up the numbers, right? So that's your answer. You got to put up the numbers. Now, before you have the numbers, the more exciting your product is, the more exciting the founders are, and the more topical it is. The more people will take the risk. It's just that simple. So if you don't have pedigreed founders, you're in an unattractive category and you don't have the numbers. That's why they invented angels. I hope these angels come because professional investors, if you don't have the pedigree, if you don't have the numbers, like the growth, or you don't have, or you're not in a super hot space, it's 3, 3 risks too many. Like if you have to. Even pre-seed inception investors don't take all three risks. So it's the best I got. But at the end of the day, I guess what I would say on the meta topic of how I should be, right? Listen, don't be cynical. Build what makes the world's best product for real today. What would you build today? Again, to say this again, but I think it's important. What's the absolute best product in the entire world you can build today that your customers will pay for? That's always the answer, not what VCs think. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thanks. Jason M. Lemkin from Brazil here. Oh yeah. You came back, right? Last year. Yeah. Thank you for coming. Is it better this year? Got the mug? Yeah, much better. Good. Feel even more humiliated than last year, which is good. Come back to convince the team on this. Uh, but my question, I was discussing with a lot of, uh, my friends here on the traditional VC model, if it's perhaps become even more extreme. I see like The small funds are betting on extreme outcomes. Yes, as we already talked about, more extreme. And like the large VCs are turning almost into a private equity play. They want to— maybe, but as a founder, so what? Like, what? Who cares? You're right. Exactly. Like the ones who start a company on the traditional, uh, uh, SaaS-like, uh, playbook, the triple, triple, double, double, double. Uh, where does this middle, uh, come? Where they go from here? That's pretty much my question. Listen, I hear your point. Honestly, I don't think it's any different. It's a good question, but I don't think it's any different than the prior question. I just think it's not that nobody wants a great— to invest in a great SaaS company. It's just the bar is $500 million and 50% growth. You got to get there before you retire. Okay. There's no point in investing. And the AI is the fastest way to get there today, but If you, you heard Rory on the podcast, if he want, if you're triple double double, send him an email. He made plenty of money from HubSpot and Box and others investing in those companies as have I. It's just, you just have to meet more people. It's not that it's, it's not like the, like all this stuff in the media about private equity and cross-over, blah, who cares, right? At the same time, like Josh Browder from Do Not Pay, he's spoken here twice. He just raised a $30 million fund today. Himself. There's so many new funds, so many— Jack Altman, who was CEO of Lattice when he spoke, he's raised $340, $400 million. He co-invested with owner with me. So there's so many new investors in the market, so many hungry folks, sources of capital. You just got to be in the zone. And if you've got the numbers but you're not perfect, you just got to work harder than 2021, just like everything else. It's really that simple. And, um, but the last insight I'll give you, which is obvious too, and then let's break because we could do it forever. Even though you have to work harder to get investors interested if you're not AI native or AI first, and even though there's so many more startups today, like they're, they're everywhere, right? Just remember, if you're trying to understand getting funded, um, realize this: whether they're pre-seed, inception, growth, crossover, there is no great investor, no truly great investor that says, I have met with Too many amazing founders. No one. Okay. Almost everyone here is pretty good. And so I don't— what I'm going to say next, I don't mean to be critical or anything. Pretty good. But from an investment standpoint, okay, I'm not Marc Andreessen. I'm not, but I'm a pretty good investor. I'm 10x lifetime, almost 5x in the last fund. Like, that's like top couple percent. Okay. And people know Saster, right? Again, I'm not these guys. But I will say I am lucky if once a month I meet a founder I truly want to invest that works in my box. That works in my box. Yeah. I met Varun from Windsurf a couple of weeks ago. I guess if he was raising at $5 billion, I could put some money in, but it's not in my box. Okay. I'll meet guys that are too early, not in my box. There's a million reasons, but here's my last meta insight for folks. I meet one a month. It doesn't matter if I do 1,000 meetings, it doesn't change it. It doesn't mean there's not more great ones out there. But the point of the story for me, just as a small example, is I don't know any VC, Rory, any, any market who says, God, I just met with 10 founders that were amazing and the company was amazing, but I can only pick one. That's not the way it works. Every investor will say, I've never met with enough Alex Carps, Aaron Levys, Drew Houston's, Topes. No one's ever said I've met with too many Topes. And in fact, The first time I just worked in startups at all, my first job was on Sand Hill in tech. Okay. And I didn't know any, I didn't know anything. And my, and, um, my old boss introduced me to what then was one of the most successful VCs. Like, I didn't even know exactly what VCs— he introduced me to this guy and, um, pretty cocky guy. VCs used to be more arrogant than today, believe it or not, because founders had less choice. And, um, and he said to me, many IPOs, wildly successful. He said, listen, sitting here on center is like once a quarter I meet someone and I just chase them down the parking lot. That's my only job. Nothing else. I chase them down the parking lot until they take my money. You'll hear that Sequoia is famous for this. Sequoia is a great investor, super aggressive. But when you've had a portfolio company that Sequoia wants to invest, they just sit in your lobby. They just sit in your lobby until you take your term sheet, right? So they don't do that if they have a trillion deals to do, right? So a little fun way of saying it's harder than ever to get funded. The box is narrower, the expectations are higher, but hack this. You got to hack every system. It's the job is to hack it right and realize, you know what, your email sucked. Like if you're sending emails to VCs, why? Like read your email. Would you fund that? Like I've put several cold emails I've funded on Saastr. I've had other folks do press. Read the post I did. Most people when they read my— I had two founders that said that shared their cold emails. They're like, yeah, I'd invest in that one. Was your email that good? No, my email wasn't that good. Well, what do you expect? Everyone opens their email. Yamini was here yesterday from HubSpot. She opened 2 cold emails that were video that were good. The CEO of a $40 billion company. So do VCs. But if it's not epic, you know, no one wants another coffee. I've already had 5 cups at SaaStr. I don't want another coffee. Right? So just some insights. Harder than ever. Talk to more people, but stop wasting your chance. Stop wasting your shot. No VC. Has enough S-tier opportunities? No one, right? No one. And the reason VCs don't— you know, there's a lot of— it's interesting. There's so much— if you read a lot of industry stuff like you do, you'll see, oh, the median returns of venture are terrible. The median returns of venture are not as good as Nasdaq. The average VC doesn't even double their investors' money and it takes 15 years. It's all true. But do you know why? It's because they don't invest in good enough founders. And why don't they invest in good enough founders? They don't see or win enough deals and they compromise. They comp— they're like, God, if I don't do a deal this year, I'm going to get fired, right? And, you know, that's the best one I met, so I got to do it. But in life, you got to settle sometimes. But settling for a bad investment is like settling for a crappy VP of sales. I don't know if you've done that. Most people have. What happens when you settle for a crappy VP of sales? It don't work, does it? So that's why VCs have shitty returns, right? So be that out. Be the outlier for real. If you're the outlier, you will get funded like no matter what anybody says. So thanks for the rambly answer. Congrats once again. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Hey, Jason, great to be back. Thank you. Love it. Came in September. I think I told you when I walked in, that was my first SaaStr in 8 years. Oh, wow. So it's kind of wild to be back so soon after the last one, but it's been great. Thank you. Kyle Norton said something pretty interesting. Okay. He's pretty smart. He said a lot of interesting things, but the one thing that really stood out, there was a bit of a tension there that I noticed where you asked him how— attention to what he said, not between the two of you. There's— you asked him how they're instructing a lot of their reps to use AI or like what they're suggesting to them to do or whatnot. And his response was pretty interesting. He actually said something along the lines of like he didn't want his reps experimenting. He wanted that. It wasn't, I think he said it wasn't necessary to him today. Maybe he said he didn't want, I don't think he said he didn't want his reps curious. I just think he said it wasn't necessary today because they said, he said his managers needed to be all in. They need to be hacking, playing with the latest sales and other tools and AI constantly. He said he didn't care so much if his junior AA, uh, AEs and SDRs did, he said, which surprised me, but I get it. Maybe you're answering my question just now, but I was going to ask, is that something you've heard much from other revenue leaders that they don't care about their reps experimenting? Well, listen, Kyle has an incredibly efficient engine, right? And I think his point is he wants to take the most aggressive because he gets so such good inbound because he's got such a high profile. You get what you want and you don't— you just don't want the lazy people in sales. You want the ones that want it. That are— you want the ones that are effing hungry. And I know we pretend most folks in sales are, but have you managed a sales team? Yes, I have. Are all of them hungry? Come on. Most sales reps want to earn 80% of what they can for 30% of the work. So Kyle has set up an org of folks who all want to be— they all want to be Kyle. That's the genius of someone like a Kyle or a Sam Blonde or all these folks on our team. They recruit folks who want to be the next them. Okay. It's incredibly— you need the goods, you need the brand, you need the capital, but then you get the super ambitious ones. And his point is, listen, I'm going to arm you. I'm going to arm you with data. I'm going to arm you with AI. I'm going to arm you with calls. I'm going to argue. I'm going to handle you, help you do onboard. I'm going to arm all around you. But I just want you to come in and sell like hell is what he wants today. I think if we ask Kyle next year, he'll say he's only going to hire AEs and SDRs that are, that are incredibly curious about AI, right? He's saying my managers, it's required. And then my managers build the armor and I can't solve for everything in this world. So I want the ones that are like hungry. He didn't say that, but I know that's, that's what he really— he's willing to give on the rest. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This may be a weird last question for this conference. Well, then I'll turn it around and make it a different question, if it's okay. Yeah. What's the question? Appreciate that. You know, some amazing insights this last couple of days from product, go-to-market, sales perspective. I'm kind of curious from a marketing perspective, specifically brand, where, you know, how you think about the importance of brand in this new reality and any insights you might have about how AI and humans kind of fit into that. Yeah, well, two things. One, we actually will integrate it more. We had a big CMO summit, like 300, and I tapped into— we integrated a little bit of it. We'll do more next year because that was a big topic. I actually couldn't participate because I had 11 sessions today. I'm only supposed to have one on the last day, but it was all fun. You're working very hard. But I love it. But listen, I do think the one thing we— I will say is worth— this is just my experience and my view, but I'm pretty sure it's right. Brand, again, 80% of buyers buy based on brand. Maybe actually, you know, 95% are influenced by brand and 80% by the market leader, the one or two choice. We don't have time. There are moments in time where we do a lot of app discovery. 2020 was one during the pandemic because we all of a sudden we realized, hey, we need a contact center, we need these signatures. So the amount of discovery that happened in March through October 2020 was insane, right? Discovery. And the amount of discovery that's happening now is insane, right? But it's exhausting, right? At the end of the day, we just want— most of us, we don't have time. We just want to buy the market leader. And if the market leaders, no matter Oh, everyone's like, I'm going to compete with Calendly. Most of us should just buy Calendly, right? It works. Everyone uses it. Most of us should just use Box or Dropbox, or most of us should just use ChatGPT. 85% of the world uses ChatGPT. Most of us should not experiment with other solutions, right? I mean, folks in this room should, right? So my point is brand has always been important in choices. It remains. That's why I said I think F1 is going to be the biggest beneficiary of FI and things because people are going to, they're going to invest in in these big— because the F1 and the Super Bowl ads, as silly as they seem, you get everybody, right? They're not silly when they're done well. You get everybody. So that's going to still matter. The last thing I will say is, having said that, the problem with brand is always important. And most of my generation, when Aaron and I started together and David Sachs and people, we thought brand was stupid. We're like, this is what old fogies say, right? This is like Mad Men. It's like, We do PLG, we close customers, we build great— brand is what losers talk. Like, brand doesn't work on the internet, right? When we were starting in SaaS, David and me and others, but then you hit $10 million and $20 million and then they all come because of your brand, right? And so you learn that, wow, I was wrong. Brand is like most of the game in marketing. And you're like, now I kind of get why the big companies like Adobe, everyone does brand, right? Because everyone's heard of Adobe. So your job is that when you're top of mind, you buy Adobe and not somebody else, but they've already heard of you, right? So super important. That's not going to change. What I am— what I'll break on, and this is my caveat of my advice, is it doesn't mean you can run the 2021 playbook. And what I've already seen happen, and it worries me, and when I tell people it worries me, they get mad at me. A lot of people— no one here got mad at me, but I worry when marketers, brand marketers, just want to keep doing the crap they did before. And some of it works like these booths are going to work. Like, we'll be objective. We'll tell you how these booths perform. I bet they perform better than last year. Okay. And so do the ads. But that alone is not demand gen. That alone is not turning every interaction into a highly personal and personalized interaction like Yamini said. So brand is the ultimate answer, but you got to earn the brand, right? You got to earn the brand. And ultimately, and a different way of looking at it in B2B, and then we'll break. Sorry, it's got to be the last one. I apologize. If you really want, we could do one more short one and then that's got to be it. A different way of looking at brand is that whatever data you look at in B2B, and HubSpot used to publish this, I put it on SaaStr, everyone gets most of their leads from word of mouth at scale. Okay. I didn't, when I was a founder at first and back in the days of Aaron and, and, uh, and David, I went to a founder event at Intuit in Mountain View and the founder came out. And he said, change it. When I founded Intuit, we had CD-ROMs and floppy disks and CompUSA, and then we sold software in the stores. And, and it was, but he said, and then it was, then, then that we got learned how to use dial-up and then it went on and on. And it sounded like a kind of a silly story. And he said, everything's changed at Intuit except one thing. Since I founded Intuit, 80% of our customers have come from word of mouth. Now how that word of mouth, that flywheel has been accelerated. Whether it's virality, whether it's whatever, but still at the end of the day, it's 80% word of mouth and brand's going to reinforce that. But the way you reinforce that word of mouth is going to continue to evolve in this age. And the, you know, the most stressful example is SEO going to ChatGPT. People are still searching for brands, right? But what that means is so different than a Google search, right? So if you meet a marketer and listen, I am getting tired. And I know this is a really tough ask of a marketer in May. But if they don't understand what they're going to do about the fact that search is going from SEO to ChatGPT, and I don't know the answer, but I know the issues, probably can't hire them, right? Because brand still matters, but the way you get it is changing. So those are my best thoughts, and we'll do more on brand. We'll do more on brand and the way it matters over the coming year because it's a good topic. So thank you. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you. So we'll slip one last quick one in. Just, just— Hi, Jason. I actually came to save you to say thanks for SaaSTA, but can we party now? Yeah, let's party. Let's have a drink. Thanks everybody. Really appreciate it.