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SaaStr 838: The Present and Future of AI in Sales and GTM with SaaStr's CEO and Owner's CRO

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Release Date: 01/21/2026

SaaStr 872: Our AI Agent Rewrote Our App Without Telling Us (The Agents #12) show art SaaStr 872: Our AI Agent Rewrote Our App Without Telling Us (The Agents #12)

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

A year ago, running our agents took 30 minutes a day. This week: eight hours. Here's what changed - and why it's both thrilling and terrifying. In this episode, Amelia and Jason break down the week Fable went rogue. Not a glitch. Not an error. Fable quietly read a private Google Drive document called "Jason's Gems," decided those were changes that should ship, MCP'd into Replit, and rewrote their production app - without telling anyone. The only way Jason found out was a flash message in Replit referencing a document the agent should never have touched. And that wasn't the only time. They...

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SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team show art SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

$0 -> $100M ARR. How Gamma Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team 100 million in ARR. A team of 50. Zero sales reps. Grant Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Gamma, shares the exact playbook behind one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in SaaS - from pitching investors out of a London kitchenette to going viral with a single tweet that got Paul Graham throwing shade. In this session, Grant breaks down four lessons: 1. Product-market fit isn't a checkbox. After winning Product of the Day on Product Hunt and watching signups plateau, Gamma went back to the drawing board. They gave themselves...

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SaaStr 870: The Agents #11 - From 0 to 20 and Back Again. Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating? show art SaaStr 870: The Agents #11 - From 0 to 20 and Back Again. Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating?

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

The Agents #11 - Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating? We hit 20+ agents. Now we're cutting back - and our productivity has never been higher. In this special live episode from SaaStr AI Day, Amelia and Jason break down why their AI agent stack is consolidating, what's changed, and what "God Mode" actually looks like when one agent owns marketing, finance, AND rev ops. In this episode: Why managing 20+ agents nearly broke them - and what forced the consolidation 10K's evolution: from dashboard to VP of Marketing to VP of Finance to full RevOps (with commissions, invoicing, and...

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SaaStr 869: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration. show art SaaStr 869: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration.

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 869: The Agents #010: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration. Agents aren't just automating your work. They're about to start stealing your customers. In this episode, we get into what happens when agents can migrate a customer off your platform for $14 and replace a $10,000 app in an hour - and what that means for how you build, sell, and retain in the age of AI. Plus, Jason goes hands-on as AI VP of Product, using Claude MCP into Replit to ship real features. And we talk about something nobody wants to admit:...

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SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll show art SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll When you've spent 30 years making money in software, "is software dead?" feels like a personal attack. Rory O'Driscoll, who has been a software investor since before most of the companies in this room existed, decided to actually answer the question.  He went back through his portfolio. About 10% of pre-2022 companies were DOA the moment ChatGPT launched, solving problems that foundation models made trivially easy overnight. Another 30% are genuinely threatened and need to move fast or die....

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SaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO show art SaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO Most companies take years to get to $10M ARR. Higgsfield got there in eight weeks, then kept going. In 11 months they crossed $300M with 120 people and no traditional sales team. Jason Lemkin has been a customer since near the beginning, using Higgsfield to build every video asset for SaaStr, and in this session he sits down with co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov to get the real story behind the numbers: what actually drove the growth, what they built that nobody else had, and...

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SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin show art SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin For ten years, social selling meant monitoring LinkedIn for prospects and dropping "Great job!" comments and hoping someone took a meeting. Everyone knew it was hollow. Nobody said it out loud. Then an agent booked 682 qualified inbound meetings without lowering the bar once, and another agent saw a prospect complain about a product online, analyzed their account, and solved the problem in real time. That's not something a human social seller could ever do. Agents didn't end sales. They just...

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SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead. show art SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead. Everyone told you the future is 100 specialized agents, one for every job. That's not what's happening at SaaStr AI. Their AI VP of Finance didn't get its own app. It moved in with the AI VP of Marketing. The agents are collapsing into each other, sharing knowledge, sharing context, going deeper together. In this episode, Amelia and Jason do a live breakdown of their AI VP of Finance: how they wired Bill.com, QuickBooks, Brex, and PandaDoc into one agent, what the agent found on day...

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SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer show art SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer SaaStr's CAIO Amelia LeRutte built 10K, SaaStr's AI VP of Marketing, live on stage at SaaStr AI Annual 2026 - and you can follow along and build your own right now. 10K started as a simple dashboard in January. Five months later it runs autonomous email campaigns, generates daily marketing ideas grounded in real data, sends attendee newsletters, and acts as a full co-pilot for SaaStr's entire go-to-market. In this session, Amelia walks you through the exact spec, the sample data, and the live build so you can...

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SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering show art SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering

The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering Every Fortune 500 CEO has told their team that if they are not using AI, they are behind. So now every employee is token-maxing, spend is going up, and almost nobody can tell you what they are getting out of it. That is the reality Databricks sees from the front lines, serving more of the Fortune 500 than any other data and AI company on the planet. In this episode, Databricks Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering, Arsalan Tavakoli, sits down...

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SaaStr 838: The Present and Future of AI in Sales and GTM with SaaStr's CEO and Owner's CRO

Jason Lemkin on Going All-In on AI Agents: 20 Agents, Zero SDRs, and the Death of Mid-Pack Sales

Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, sits down with Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner, to share the raw story of how frustration with sales team turnover pushed him to deploy 20 AI agents in under a year, and why we'll never go back.

In this episode, we cover:

→ Why Jason stopped hiring SDRs after two senior reps ghosted him right before SaaStr Annual → The real reason most AI agent deployments fail (hint: it's not the technology)

→ How to pick your first AI vendor: "Talk to your forward deployed engineer before you sign"

→ Why Salesforce is having a Renaissance as the hub for AI agents

→ The brutal truth about mid-pack sales jobs being in "terminal decline"

→ How to get started with AI agents when your CFO won't give you budget

→ AgentForce vs. the hot startups: what actually works in production

→ Why the $250K SDR is coming, but only for the truly elite

Jason's advice for revenue leaders: "Roll up your sleeves. If you haven't trained an agent yourself, you'll be utterly ignorant in the age of AI."

🔗 See the AI agents SaaStr uses: saastr.ai/agents

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This episode is Sponsored in part by HappyFox:

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Hey everybody, the biggest B2B + AI event of the year will be back - SaaStr AI in the SF Bay Area, aka the SaaStr Annual, will be back in May 2026. 

With 68% VP-level and above, 36% CEOs and founders and a growing 25% AI-first professional, this is the very best of the best S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to SaaStr each year.  

But here's the reality, folks: the longer you wait, the higher ticket prices can get. Early bird tickets are available now, but once they're gone, you'll pay hundreds more so don't wait. 

Lock in your spot today by going to podcast.saastrannual.com to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.