The Top 10 Reasons to Come to 2025 SaaStr Annual May 13-15 in SF Bay!!

Hey everybody. Saster Annual is coming up. Saster Annual 2025. It's May 13th to the 15th in the SF Bay Area, right on our 40 acre indoor outdoor campus in San Mateo, right in between Palo Alto and San Francisco. It is going to be great. There'll be 10,000 of the best in B2B, SAS, Cloud and AI all sharing our playbooks. Everyone from the CEOs of Snowflake and HubSpot and Dropbox and vertical SaaS, leaders like Flock Safety and Clio, to the best heads of AI at Wiz and Databricks and more. Anyhow, it's going to be awesome. It is going to be awesome. It is a festival about building and scaling software together. And I wanted to give you 10 reasons, 10 great reasons to come to Saster 2025. Okay? Number one, networking. Listen, I don't know about you. I'm not the world's best networker. So I love to go to things like Zastor where I'm guaranteed to meet great people. And we will help. We will help you. If you're not the world's greatest extrovert and I am not, we have your solution at Saster Annual. A couple of things. First of all, one brand new We've always had brain dates and meetups and we'll talk about that. We'll have hundreds and hundreds of small group sessions where you can talk about hundreds of topics from how to hire ahead of sales to how to scale customer success to how to add co pilots. We'll have hundreds of these brain dates. But what we're adding is a brand new who do you want to meet session. These. These are opt in one on one meetings. Right in the dead center of Saster Annual where we'll have over a thousand of these curated one on one meetings. If you've signed up and you are a B2B executive, you will be able to join. Who do you want to meet? Through our dedicated app. It's on the App Store. You'll be able to sign in and you will be able to meet great folks on double opt in meetings. It's cool, it's new, it's going to be great. Two, we just talked about this. But our brain dates and workshops, we'll have hundreds of these. You can sign up. If you are a cloud executive and do your own, you can, you can join hundreds. Many folks come to SAS Jo Annual and they just spend all three days in these brain dates learning and meeting folks in these small groups. They're anywhere from two person sessions to 100 person workshops and they're all on targeted niche topics. So come and sign up for those brain dates. They are great. 3. We have C level events and networking you can benefit as founders. We have four summits at Saster Annual. We have a invite only CMO summit with 200 of the best CMOs and VPs of marketing and growth. We have 300 of the best chief customer officers. We have about 150 CFOs. These are invite only just for them, but at the end after them we have open networking for CEOs that are attending. So if you're the CEO of a B2B company, post revenue, you can join these networking sessions, these cocktail parties with the best CROs and VPs of sales, CMOs, CCOs and CFOs. And for CROs especially we have a CEO CRO poker night. And if you are again a CEO in a software company, you've got to be at software. You can't be a service provider or selling stuff. You've got to be a CEO or a founder of a B2B company. But if you are, you can come out and play poker for two hours with the best heads of sales in the industry. It was great. It was off the charts last year and everyone is already looking forward to it. So join our summits, join our poker night and join the cocktail parties and meetups afterwards. Finally. And boy, the list of networking is endless. You will network as much as you possibly want. We have our 10th annual meet a VC program. It's pretty great. There are a bunch of things you can do to meet the almost 800 VCs that will be at Saster Annual. This year we have a formal Meet A VC program. Once you get your ticket to Saster Annual, you can apply right on the Saster Annual website or in the App, submit your deck, your metrics and others, get all the detail and it will be distributed to every single VC attending and they will be able to reach out to you and set up meetings if you want. This always works. Look, if you're not growing, if you're struggling, you probably aren't going to get any meetings. But if you're in the zone, you will generally find that dozens and dozens of VCs will reach out to you through this program and we have so many stories of folks getting funded at Saster Annual and Saster Europa through it. Also on May 15th we have our second annual Founder VC Brunch. It's another great two and a half hour chance in our founder allowance. You just meet with all the VCs that are there. It's a great informal way to network and meet with some of the best. So be there. If nothing else, come to the Founder VC brunch if you want to meet hundreds of the best VCs in B2B. Okay? Point 2. Why come? Look, this has been true since 2015, but we will have the best speakers in the world. The list will be almost endless by the time we get to kickoff. But already we have the CEOs of Snowflake, the CEO of HubSpot, the CTO and founder of Rubrik, the CEO of Descript that that I'm doing this video on and that we run. The CEO of $3 billion Clio and Legal CEO and the CRO of Flock Safety, the CEO of Own, who Salesforce just bought for 2 billion, the CRO of Service Titan, the CMO of Databricks, the CCO of Canva, the CCO of Build, the CCO of GitHub, the CEO of Calendly, and I will be doing an AMA. They're just hundreds and hundreds of sessions. And choose your own adventure, choose who you want to learn from. And again, they'll go from big massive sessions with a thousand people at them to hundreds of these brain dates where you literally can do small tiny sessions with the best practitioners and learn. But the best of the best in cloud, SaaS and AI will be there. 3. Getting funded and again, listen, you gotta have the numbers to get funded. No one, for better or worse in VC wants to fund anyone that's not seeing VC levels of growth. But if you are, this is the place to meet VCs. And not only do we have the meat a VC program that we just chatted about, not only do we have the Founder VC brunch, but this year we have something really cool. We have the VC AI pitch stage. So what we will, what this will allow is all day at Saster Annual, we will allow short pitches and demos from the best built AI B2B applications you can sign up right on the Saster Annual homepage. They're short, they're two minute pitches, but they'll be in the center of the main hall. They'll be in the center of anything. They'll be running and hundreds of folks will see it. Anyone can pitch on the AI demo stage that has a product in production and revenue. We don't need any pre revenue folks that we don't. Saster Annual isn't the place for them in general, but if you're coming anyway, this is not a place to pitch your demoair. If you only have design partners, we don't. That's not the right place for this demo stage. But you don't have to be a raw startup, you can be asana, you can be salesforce, you can be whomever. If you've got something that you're just releasing in production, want to demo, we just have to have paying customers come show us what's cool. Come get in front of everybody at our new demo stage. And for the startups, for the ones that have not raised material capital, Mayfield Fund is sponsoring this and they will write a check of 500k and maybe even up to 5 million to the number one startup that pitches. We will grade them and then on the 15th there will be a demo off and the winner will get a check from Mayfield fund for 500k and maybe even up to 5 million depending on their stage. AI VC demo stage. It's going to be awesome. Sign up on sastranual.com.4 and we alluded to this, but number four reason to come to Saster Annual. Maybe this is the best reason. Meet your next VP. Meet your next VP or CXO. We will have almost over 800 top tier CROs, VPs of Sales, CMOs, VPs of Marketing, CCOs, VP of Customer Success as well as finance leaders all coming to our VIP summits. And we do these VIP summits for a whole bunch of reasons. They're great, they're core to what we do. But then those C level executives come to the meetups and the cocktail parties after and they're all over Saster. So if you're in the market for a VP of sales, come to our CRO CEO summit. If you're in the market for Head of marketing, come to the meetup after the CMO brunch. Like they're there, they're in the agenda and you will meet hundreds of C level executives and I think it's harder and harder these days to find the right match. There are actually more VP level and above Candidates day than ever because Cloud has gotten bigger and it's been many years and folks move on and so there's more actual candidates than ever. But it's harder and harder to get to know them. You're going to meet them over zoom, you're going to hire them before barely meeting them. Come to SAS Jo annul. Meet them for real and it can be profound. You can find your next management team member at Saster Annual. Just come to the events, come to the networking that we have. You will find them. Okay. 5 We briefly hit it, but we've got this AI demo stage. It's new. We'll have maybe 200 folks being able to pitch their AI applications. So if nothing else, honestly this is worth it. If you want to get your AI apple, you're in front of 10,000 of the best in B2B. Just again, go to saster annual.com and apply for the Saster AI demo stage. This alone is probably worth it.6 Reason to come to Saster Annual this one's probably in the top two. Really? Which is along with finding an executive, which is bring your team. I honestly think this is the number one highest ROI thing you can do from Saster as founders is don't just come yourself, don't just meet founders like you or a stage or two ahead, don't just find your VP of sales or your vc. All important stuff but man, we get isolated as teams, especially your team. Even if you as founders are networking all the time, even if you're right in the asset barrier, what about your team? How many of their peers do they meet? Never enough. And they get isolated and they don't have a sense of what is state of the art and they don't have a sense of whatever anyone else is doing. So goodness, we have these team packs for a reason. They're heavily discounted@sastranial.com so if you can don't come yourself, bring two or three people from your team. I almost always hear that. Yeah, it was great for me. I got funded, I hired this person, but I brought three of my executives and it was transformational for us. Bring your team. Bring your team. Point seven look, we'll have a hundred sponsors and vendors and in fact we'll have a brand new this year we're going to have a whole YC Y Combinator demo area where 20 of the top recent AI startups from YC are going to be demoing their products. So if you want to meet with the newest startups, if you want to meet with the best sponsors, if you want to meet with the ripplings and the artisans and Google Cloud and other leaders IBM see if IBM's AI is the right source for you. Digitalocean so many you can meet with them. The best of all the leaders in SaaS one way or another will be on site to meet with you. So figure out if these vendors are right for you. Figure out if the best of the best are the right application for you SaaS granules the place to do it. Number eight. And sometimes this can kick you in the arse a little bit. But Saster Annual is the place to be honest and benchmark yourself. Listen, if you are in the SF barrier and you're going to meetups and you're meeting with other founders that are growing 20% a week, you probably already have a sense an inferiority complex, as I do, as I think that almost all of us have some of this imposter syndrome inferiority complex. But a lot of folks, once you get outside of the SF Barry, they don't know. They don't know and some complacency can set in and some misunderstanding, some you may even think that things are tougher than they are. Look, it's competitive today. My God. AI has exploded competition. But if for some reason you think you're still in a downturn or something, come to Saster Annual. See how the best are doing it. Meet with them, have your arse kicked. We don't want our. We can't have our arses kicked every day, folks. It does. It is tiring. But come be challenged to do even more so you can set the right goals for yourself and know what you really can and cannot pull off. Point nine. Just being inspired. Just being inspired. Look, so much has changed at Saster over the years. When we started doing this, there were no great podcasts, there was no content in the industry. So going to Saster Annual was like seeing folks we'd never heard before. Our first Esther Annual, we had Aaron Levy and Stuart Butterfield, founder of Slack and David Saxon. No one had ever heard these people before. Now you can just fire up YouTube and you can hear from all of them. There's actually no reason to come to events just to hear anybody talk. We're constantly talking all the time. There's a thousand podcasts today versus zero when we started the first Astro podcast with Harry Stebbings. But there's something about talking and interacting with the best. We'll have AMA as the CEO of Calendly and I are just going to do an ama. There's no content. We're going to take questions for an hour. Want to really talk to Tope and understand how it's going. Want to really meet and interact with Yamini, the CEO of HubSpot. This is your time. It is different to be in the real world with folks that inspire you, like Topin Yamini and to experience it. You will come out inspired and with the new perspective that you just don't get. Listening to a podcast on the run and part 10 again you will meet hundreds of practitioners. So if nothing else, come sit in these brain dates for all three years. Meet with VPs of sales, VPs of demand gen, VPs of growth. Whoever you want in your niche in your industry, they will be there in small groups. They will be teaching you things you cannot be taught anywhere else and that you cannot learn. Even on saster.com, even on the best videos and podcasts. They will sit down and answer your questions and talk to you through hundreds and hundreds of brain dates. It is special. Get actionable strategies. Come to Saster Annual with your top three list of issues, things you're struggling with. Sit down and then match it to 10 or 20 or 30 speakers or brain dates or workshops and come with your questions. Help me Jason. Help me Karen. Help me Kyle. How can I solve this one issue I have in my funnel, the one issue I have with my team? You will meet with folks that can solve your problem. It will be great again. May 13th to the 15th unparalleled networking. Unparalleled access to C level executives. Unparalleled access to the best in SAS and Cloud and AI. Saster Annual 2025. See you then.