SaaStr 843: Software Stocks Have Massively Crashed. Here's What Founders Need to Know.
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Release Date: 02/25/2026
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
Before AI, Klaviyo had an insight that changed e-commerce marketing forever: don't show merchants how many emails they sent, show them how much money those emails made. That single shift helped Klaviyo capture 80% market share, earn a cult following among Shopify merchants, and IPO in 2023 with $1.4B in revenue. Now Andrew has to do it again. In this session at SaaStr AI Day, Klaviyo's co-founder and CEO breaks down how he's rebuilding a dominant pre-AI company for the agent era, including some of the most practical AI-at-scale lessons we've heard from any founder this year. What's inside: The...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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:...
info_outlineThe 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....
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineSAASTR 843: Software Stocks Have Massively Crashed. Here's What Founders Need to Know.
SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin joins the TBPN show for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of SaaS, AI, and venture capital.
Jason shares how he shrunk his team from 15 to 3 people by going all-in on AI agents, why he's lost patience with companies that haven't re-accelerated growth, and the real economics behind running large-scale events. He breaks down why PE has "said goodbye to B2B," how vibe coding is flooding the market with competitors, and what's making the IPO window both exciting and treacherous. Plus: why the agent that closed a $100K deal on a Saturday night matters more than any demo day pitch, and how AI discoverability is quietly reshaping how businesses choose their software stack.
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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.