In this brief conversation, Jason M. Lemkin discusses the current state of public SaaS companies versus founder‑led firms, using Atlassian as a standout example. He notes Atlassian’s recent 23% revenue growth and a 44% increase in remaining performance obligations (RPO), highlighting that the company is still accelerating while most public SaaS and B2B SaaS firms are decelerating. Lemkin raises concerns about how profit and revenue stacks are being redistributed across the industry, the pressure from limited partners (LPs) to see re‑acceleration of growth, and the broader macro trend of infrastructure spend shifting toward inference and software. He also points out that the SaaS funnel lacks fresh, high‑quality entrants, which compounds the deceleration problem. The dialogue reflects a mix of cautious optimism for Atlassian, criticism of the broader public SaaS slowdown, and worry about investor expectations.
We're working out where the profit stack and the revenue stack gets redistributed. As you talked about beforehand,
maybe I've got my Atlassian numbers wrong. Forgive me, but Atlassian had a pretty good quarter. I know Mike probably doesn't want to talk about this, but somehow we got down it. But atlassian is growing 23% and RPO is up 44%. Right. That's pretty good. Okay. But more importantly, and I don't want to put Mike on the public, it's accelerating. Okay. Atlassian is doing better. The problem with so many peer companies, and these are the best founder led companies, almost all the public SaaS and BDP are founder led. Right. Very few are. Is there? They're not. They're still decelerating. And how long do you get in my. The limbs are open to everybody. You have a year, you know, Claude, 3, 5, 37 were really good. Like you've had seven months since then. Do you get 12 months? Do you get 18 months? Like how long do we give you to recapture some growth and some revenue from the revolution? Because it's. Atlassian's got this layer, but it's also got growth. If you, if you spent the last year with 50,000 engineers building all this, this great stuff and now your growth is in the teens, maybe heading down to 10%. I mean, better CEOs than me. But that's the one where, Rory, I think you should tell your LPs you're worried. And it's more of the public folks have seen no re acceleration than half. More of them have seen persistent deceleration go. And we're going to see more this quarter. And I wish it wasn't the case. My life would be better if it wasn't. My life would be better if SAS was on autopilot like it was through 2022. But you got to show me the money in 2026. At some point all that, all that infrastructure spend goes to inference has to go to software. Like it's got to go down and you've got to show, you've got to show a connection to that spend or you, you may not have a reason.
Presumably, if you look at history, some of that goes to new companies that arrive. Right? You nailed it. I was actually exactly right. Is that the problem with looking at the overall SaaS growth rate now is we haven't added any good ones to the top of the funnel, right?
