Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Secrets to Spotting Early Winners in Billion-dollar Exits

1 May 2024 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin discusses how he recognizes operationally successful startups early and his experience spotting "winners". He notes that while some companies (Pipedrive, Algolia, Salesloft) surprised him by growing far larger than he expected, he anticipated Talkdesk's strong scaling from early product-market fit. The excerpt emphasizes the difficulty of predicting which startups will become billion-dollar exits despite early operational signals.

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You don't think you make a lot of money on one? Oh, no, I totally think you do. But you know your winners early for those that are the Figmas in the Hashicorpes or the sales lofts or the Algolia. Yes. Do you know it early or you ever surprised? I can only share my experience. I think people have different experiences. I think, you know that they are operationally successful early. You know that they're going to grow. I had no idea that any of my cash unicorns, right, the ones that were exited for billing, I didn't think any of them would except for Talk Desk. I did. I. And it's not that I didn't love the founders, it's just. It's just so hard, right? It's just so hard to build these companies that I would not have predicted that Pipedrive Algolia Salesloft would get that big. I knew Talk Desk would just because going from, you know, 1 to 15 million with so few employees in a year was so much product market fit in there that you're like, okay, well this is going to be worth a billion but not more, right?