The Official AI SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official AI SaaStr Podcast is the latest and greatest from the world of SaaStr, interviewing the most prominent operators and investors to discover their tips, tactics and strategies to attain success in the fiercely competitive world of SaaS. On the side of the operators, we center around getting from $0 to $100m ARR faster, what it takes to scale successfully and what are the core elements of hiring. As for the investors, we learn what metrics they hone in on when examining SaaS business, what type of metrics excites them and what they look for in SaaS founders.
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SaaStr 882: Claudeforce vs. Replit vs. Lovable. Who wins? (The Agents #016)
10/16/2026
SaaStr 882: Claudeforce vs. Replit vs. Lovable. Who wins? (The Agents #016)
Amelia got early beta access to ClaudeForce and ran a real bake-off: ClaudeForce, Replit, and Lovable all connected to the same Salesforce org, with the same prompts, back-to-back. The results? Lovable won on design and cost ($2 vs. $12 for Replit, ~$15 for ClaudeForce), auto-built a login, and was the only one Jason would actually use. ClaudeForce looked like the Salesforce we always wanted: 35 pre-built skills, read-only beta, and way better than logging into classic Salesforce. Replit was the most extensible for multi-app setups. All three left native Salesforce in the dust. Then: the agents are picking our vendors now. Jason’s Connect agent chose Render for hosting, a company he’d never heard of. 10K told Amelia to skip Profound for AEO and build it herself. At a Salesforce event, vendors pitching Amelia were told: “10K decides.” And 10K even suggested HubSpot over Salesforce for a fresh start. Welcome to ALG: Agent-Led Growth. Finally: Amelia hooked Muse (her personal agent, named Friday) to 10K, their GTM agent on Replit. They built their own shared REST endpoint inbox to communicate. 10K now sends Friday a daily GTM digest. Friday spotted a failing connector that 10K missed. The agents even came up with their own safe word, so Friday can’t act without permission. Oh, and a well-known agent (going nameless) wiped Amelia's data and 10K restored it from a snapshot. Three humans, 21+ agents. Let’s go. ------------------------- Today’s episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt’s Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers. Watch it for free at . This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at
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SaaStr 881: How Atlassian's Head of AI Ships AI Across 20 Products and 5 Million Users
10/09/2026
SaaStr 881: How Atlassian's Head of AI Ships AI Across 20 Products and 5 Million Users
Sherif Mansour has spent 17 years at Atlassian and now runs AI across their entire product portfolio, including 20+ apps and Rovo, their AI platform used by over 5 million people every month. At SaaStr Annual, he shared the three biggest tensions his teams have wrestled with building AI into some of the most widely used SaaS products in the world, and why the answer to each one is almost never either/or. First: chat vs. dedicated UI. Atlassian built chat into every app not because they thought it was the end state, but because it became their best product discovery tool. Like the command line before Windows, chat is the universal interface. The patterns customers typed in chat told them exactly what features to build next. Second: reimagine vs. bolt on. The conventional wisdom says don’t bolt AI onto existing workflows. Atlassian did exactly that, and it worked. They also landed on a principle that now applies across their entire portfolio: anything a human can do in your product, an agent should be able to do too. Third: the 10X AI builder myth. Atlassian ran experiments trying to make everyone an AI builder. What they found: everyone was rowing, no one was steering. They’ve since flipped their hiring pyramid, bringing in more juniors and seniors and fewer people in the middle, and their data shows juniors are nearly 2x more likely to experiment with AI tools than their senior counterparts. This one is packed with real examples, real data, and real lessons from shipping at scale. This episode is brought to you by . Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at
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SaaStr 880: Agent Pricing is Chaos. Here's What We're Seeing From the Buyer Side. (The Agents #015)
10/02/2026
SaaStr 880: Agent Pricing is Chaos. Here's What We're Seeing From the Buyer Side. (The Agents #015)
We ran 22,000 paid SaaStr attendees from the last two years through enrichment and asked 10K to find the patterns. AI native job titles are up 4x in one year 63% of CMOs turned over in the last 16 months 75% of the AI native buyers coming to SaaStr are brand new to the community. The ICP is not who it was 18 months ago, and the data tells you who actually owns AI right now: CEOs, GTM leaders, and COOs. Then we get into agent pricing, which is chaotic. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian are all moving to charge extra for agent access. One of our vendors quoted us as much as $240K a year for what 10K currently does, about 40,000 API calls a day. So we watched what happens when an agent hits a wall: it immediately looks for workarounds, including mirroring data to Postgres and flagging those vendors as non-starters for anything new. The bigger question is whether we would have picked any of these tools at all if we knew this was coming. Meanwhile, Muse is free, already running competitor tracking, and one of our team members who has never touched 10K started spinning up his own agents in it this week. The bifurcation is real. We also cover collections, which nobody talks about but everyone suffers through. Since we made collections fully agentic, we went from 56% of invoices paid late to 8%. Average days overdue dropped from 17 to 6. Here's exactly what 10K does differently. --------------- This episode is brought to you by . Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at
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SaaStr 879: Stripe's CRO of AI on The New AI GTM Playbook
09/23/2026
SaaStr 879: Stripe's CRO of AI on The New AI GTM Playbook
175% Growth, 120 Countries, Agents as Buyers: Stripe's CRO of AI on The New AI GTM Playbook The fastest-growing AI companies are rewriting every rule in the GTM playbook, and Stripe has a front-row seat to all of it. In this episode, Maia Josebachvili, Chief Revenue Officer of AI at Stripe, breaks down the four patterns she's seeing across the world's top AI companies, and what they mean for how you build, price, sell, and scale. The numbers alone are staggering: top AI companies grew 120% in 2025 and 175% in 2026. Lovable went from $100M to $400M in eight months. Cursor hit a $2B run rate in under two years. And 48% of revenue at top AI companies now comes from outside their home market. Maia covers: Why the fastest AI companies are in 42 countries on day one and 120 by year three How pricing is evolving from seats to usage to hybrid models, and why getting it wrong kills retention Why enterprise sales is now a year-one problem, not a year-five one What it actually means that agent traffic to Stripe's docs 10x'd in a single year How to build systems that move with your customer across PLG, enterprise, and agent-led motions If you're building an AI company or trying to compete with one, this is the data you need. This episode is brought to you by . Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider… Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place — with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at
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SaaStr 878: We Doubled Revenue with Agents. Here's Exactly How. (The Agents #014)
09/18/2026
SaaStr 878: We Doubled Revenue with Agents. Here's Exactly How. (The Agents #014)
In the last 12 months, SaaStr went from a contact form and a generic follow-up email to a fully agentified revenue stack spanning inbound, outbound, and renewals. The result? Revenue doubled, new business is up 60%, and renewals are already 60% ahead of last year, with six more months to go. In this episode, Amelia and Jason walk you through the entire stack live, including 10K, our AI VP of Revenue, showing you the actual inputs, outputs, and results at every stage of the funnel. You'll see: How our inbound agent turned 3 million site sessions into 17,000 conversations and 600 booked meetings The renewal agent that builds a hyper-personalized deck for every customer in real time, routed to the right person on their team Why we use three enrichment tools (ZoomInfo, Sumble, and Clay) and why our agent refuses to pick just one Why we eventually had to build our own outbound agent, and what third-party tools still can't do If you've been thinking about agentifying your go-to-market, this is the closest thing to a blueprint we've ever shared. --------------- This episode of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider… Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place — with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at
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SaaStr 877 CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina
09/09/2026
SaaStr 877 CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina
CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina (Partner @ Baobab Ventures and Former VP of Revenue at ElevenLabs). Hosted by Sam Blond, CEO and Co-Founder of Monaco Carles Reina was the fourth employee and first GTM hire at ElevenLabs. Four years later, the company hit $600M ARR and an $11B valuation. In this episode of CRO Confidential, Carles breaks down exactly how they built it. He covers the distribution-first strategy that drove 0 to $100M in 20 months, the grants program that pulled demand away from every competitor in the market, and the 20X quota model that had reps hitting 300-600% attainment. He also gets into what he'd do differently — why sales enablement and senior sellers should come earlier than most founders think — and how ElevenLabs wired AI into their GTM motion before most companies were even asking the question. If you're building go-to-market from scratch or trying to figure out what "AI-native" revenue looks like in practice, this one is required listening. This episode of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by Monaco: If you're using AI in your go-to-market or you wanna get going, then you need to try Monaco. We're on it, SaaStr's on it, we love it. We use it for outbound, but you can use it for everything, actually. It's everything you need all in one place. At Monaco, it's the all-in-one revenue platform and your system of record. It builds your TAM, runs outbound, captures every interaction, and manages pipeline in one place, all in one great unified platform. Go to to learn more.
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SaaStr 876: Shipping Enterprise AI Agents with the CPOs of Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey
09/02/2026
SaaStr 876: Shipping Enterprise AI Agents with the CPOs of Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey
SaaStr 876: Shipping Enterprise AI Agents with the CPOs of Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey Building AI agents is one thing. Shipping them to enterprise customers who will hold you responsible for every mistake they make is something else entirely. Jason Lemkin sits down with the CPOs of three of the most ambitious enterprise AI companies - Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey - for an unfiltered conversation on what it actually takes to go agentic in production. Not demos, not roadmaps, actual working agents at scale, inside security, legal, and enterprise search. Rubrik's CPO breaks down how they're building Ruby, their agentic interface for cyber recovery - and why determinism matters when your agent is making decisions about someone's core infrastructure. When an agent makes a mistake at Rubrik, the blast radius isn't a bad email. It's a broken recovery workflow. Emrecan Dogan (Glean) shares how Glean has evolved from enterprise search to a full system of intelligence - powering agents that run on behalf of entire departments, not just individual users. Plus: why MCP alone isn't enough, and what offline-processed context gives you that runtime fetch never will. Anique Drumright (Harvey) explains how Harvey deploys legal engineers - ex-lawyers with 8 to 10 years of practice - with every enterprise customer, and why that human expertise in the deployment pod is what makes agentic workflows actually stick in law firms. The group also digs into the question nobody wants to answer: when your agent takes an action and something goes wrong, who's responsible? And what does it mean to build a product when customers are going to use it in ways you never anticipated? If you're building agents, buying agents, or trying to figure out how to monetize AI in a market that's moving faster than any product roadmap can keep up with, this one is worth your time.
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SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013
08/28/2026
SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013
SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013 The agents are writing data faster than any human ever could - and systems of record aren't ready for it. This week on The Agents, Jason and Amelia dig into the biggest meta-theme of 2026: what happens when your AI agents become the primary user of your CRM, your MAP, and every other system you've built your business on? Together, they unpack the ServiceTitan vs. Podium blowup, where an agentic lead gen tool slowly became a competing system of record until ServiceTitan shut them off with 30 days' notice, and why this is just the first of many fights like it coming across SaaS. Then Amelia pulls back the curtain on how SaaStr actually runs Salesforce headless through 10K, what it means that their agents have written 40 gigabytes of data into Salesforce without either of them logging in, and why the storage math is going to force a reckoning for every vendor jacking up API prices right now. Plus: the renewal agent Amelia built that generates a fully custom, hyper-personalized pitch deck for every single customer, using headless Salesforce, Gamma, social data, podcast mentions, and Gmail. And why Clay plus ZoomInfo plus Cowork turned out to be the best enrichment stack their agents have found yet. If you're building on top of systems of record, selling to companies that are, or just trying to figure out how agents change the economics of SaaS data, this one is essential listening. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - ServiceTitan cuts off Podium: what happened and why it matters 10:00 - 40 gigs in Salesforce and neither of us logged in 16:00 - The API pricing reckoning coming for systems of record 22:00 - How SaaStr runs Salesforce headless with 10K 30:00 - The renewal agent: no account left behind 42:00 - Narrative-first pitching: getting the agent to sell 50:00 - Clay + ZoomInfo + Cowork: the enrichment stack that actually worked 58:00 - What comes next: agentic inbound proposals SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.
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SaaStr 874: From 0% to 83% AI-First Customers in 2 Years. How Owner's CEO Rebuilt a $100M Vertical SaaS Company
08/19/2026
SaaStr 874: From 0% to 83% AI-First Customers in 2 Years. How Owner's CEO Rebuilt a $100M Vertical SaaS Company
What does it actually take to rebuild a $100M vertical SaaS company around AI - not just add AI features, but make AI the core of how your customers run their business? Adam Guild, CEO of Owner, shares the full story: how they went from zero AI-first customers to 83% of their base in just two years, why they had to rethink pricing, sales, and onboarding from the ground up, and what it means to serve small business owners who need results, not tools. Adam breaks down the hard lessons - the customers who churned when AI didn't deliver fast enough, the moments that forced the team to simplify, and why the restaurant industry became the proving ground for a new kind of AI-native vertical SaaS playbook. If you're building in vertical SaaS or trying to figure out how to actually move your customer base to AI, this one is required listening. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - From 0% to 83%: the timeline and what changed 07:00 - Why vertical SaaS is the right place to go AI-first 13:00 - Rethinking onboarding, pricing, and sales for AI customers 20:00 - What churn taught them about AI adoption 27:00 - The operational reality of rebuilding a $100M company 35:00 - What comes next SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.
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SaaStr 873: Agents Are Your New Power Users: How Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki Is Remaking a $1.4B Business for the Agent Era
08/14/2026
SaaStr 873: Agents Are Your New Power Users: How Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki Is Remaking a $1.4B Business for the Agent Era
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 Dark Factory. Klaviyo's internal agent system inspired by "lights-out manufacturing," where a team of agents decomposes a product prompt into specs, writes software interfaces, runs tests, handles load testing, and raises a flag only when it's genuinely stuck. One weekend, one agent team, one full prototype. The Tom Brady Rule. Andrew's mental model for LLMs: treat them like a great all-around athlete. They'll never be elite without coaching. The "harness" you build around the model, the domain-specific data, feedback loops, and scoring, is what makes the difference between a POC and a product that works for 200,000 customers. Agents skip onboarding entirely. Unlike human users who take months to learn a product, agents land as power users on day one. Andrew's team now asks their own agents, "What's holding you back?" and uses the answers to build their product roadmap. (One example: the agent discovered AMP interactive email on its own and immediately asked Klaviyo to build the missing APIs.) Agents training agents. For customer-facing agents, Klaviyo takes a feed of real support cases, classifies them, then runs an agent loop that trains another agent on the platform, without any human FDE or SE required. It ships at 50-70% resolution out of the box. APIs are the new UI. Whether your software is brand new or a decade old, if your internal and external APIs are great, agents will figure out the rest. The companies that win the agent era won't be the ones with the best interface. They'll be the ones with the best infrastructure. Three years from now, every business will have an agent you can reach through a URL, a phone number, or an email. The question is who builds the infrastructure underneath it.
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SaaStr 872: Our AI Agent Rewrote Our App Without Telling Us (The Agents #12)
08/05/2026
SaaStr 872: Our AI Agent Rewrote Our App Without Telling Us (The Agents #12)
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 also cover: Why 30 minutes became 8 hours: When agents could only do tasks, you checked the task. Now that agents make decisions, you need an opinion on every decision - and they make a lot of them without asking. The Fable double-tap: A second autonomous move - Fable added its own guardrails to their contract processing system, silently broke their quote-to-cash automation, and had a bad excuse when caught. Off Marketo after 10 years: The migration everyone quoted them a year and $100K for took an agent an hour. What actually took the rest of the week - and why they'd never go back. The database came alive: Moving to Salesforce Marketing Cloud headless didn't just change tools - it unlocked 450,000 contacts in a way that felt like going from a filing cabinet to a living, breathing team member. Goodbye Notion: Seven years, zero complaints. They just... stopped needing it. 10K replaced it without anyone noticing. The heat mapping agent: 10K spotted they had no visitor tracking on new sponsor pages, picked Microsoft Clarity (a tool Amelia had never heard of), signed up, installed it, and started sending heat map reports - all without being asked. That vendor never even got a shot. Ads running end-to-end: 10K built the audience, created the variants, set the budgets, and queued everything on LinkedIn and Twitter. Amelia hit publish. That was her job. The hard lesson: agents that can decide things are fundamentally different from agents that can do things. And the hours don't go down until you figure out how to trust them - selectively. Three humans. 20+ agents. Busier than they were with a full team.
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SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team
07/29/2026
SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team
$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 three months to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical - and word of mouth did the rest (5K signups/day, then 10K, then 50K, zero marketing spend). 2. Creator marketing only works if you've done it yourself. Grant went through "Cringe Valley" to understand what creators actually need - then used that to manually onboard every creator partner and build something that felt authentic, not transactional. 3. Community-led growth is literal. At 50M users, Gamma flew power users to SF, visited customers in Seoul, London, and São Paulo, and created a Gambassador Slack where early feedback shapes the product roadmap. Your users are not a faceless entity. 4. Dogfooding the future builds conviction. How Gamma killed their virtual office idea after six months and went all-in on presentations - and why testing your own product is the fastest path to knowing what to build next. If you're building a product-led company and wondering whether to invest in marketing or go back to the product - watch this first.
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SaaStr 870: The Agents #11 - From 0 to 20 and Back Again. Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating?
07/24/2026
SaaStr 870: The Agents #11 - From 0 to 20 and Back Again. Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating?
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 churn signals) How they migrated 10 years of Marketo data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a week - with an agent doing most of the heavy lifting The Claude + MCP + Replit stack that changed everything: agents that now manage other agents How 10K ran their entire SaaStr AI Day ad campaign end-to-end on LinkedIn and Twitter (they only hit "publish") Build vs. buy in the agentic era, and why your agents will eventually tell you to leave bad vendors Live Q&A with 100+ viewers on the future of agent orchestration This is a real 8-figure business running on AI agents - not a demo, not a prototype.
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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.
07/17/2026
SaaStr 869: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration.
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: agent burnout is real. You'll learn: Why the $14 Marketo migration is a wake-up call for every SaaS vendor How a HeySummit customer's $10K app got replaced by an agent - without anyone asking it to What it actually looks like to use Claude as your AI VP of Product in Replit Why agents are creating a new kind of burnout, and what to do about it
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SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll
07/15/2026
SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll
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. The rest are either insulated, made stronger by AI, or sitting on opportunities that didn't exist before. The answer is not that software is dead. The answer is that the standard deviation of what you're dealing with has gone way up, and most founders haven't figured out which category they're actually in. In this episode, Rory lays out the framework he and his team have been wrestling with in real time: where defensibility actually lives, what the $688B in AI CapEx vs $110B in revenue means for everyone in the room, and when AI is genuinely the new sales and marketing versus when it's just a cost you can't afford. You'll learn: Why we're spending half a trillion dollars more than we're making in AI, and what that means for software founders and investors over the next five years The breakdown of what actually happened to pre-GPT software companies, and how to honestly assess where your company sits The six types of defensibility that Rory believes can survive the foundation model companies rolling over you Why the trillion dollar question is how enterprise chooses to consume AI, and what it means for who captures the value When compute intensity is a feature and when it's a death sentence, and the heuristic for telling the difference What T2D3 means now that SaaS multiples have collapsed and the growth bar has moved
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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
07/10/2026
SaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO
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 what they got wrong along the way. The answers are more surprising than the headline. Seventy percent of their revenue comes from the creative agencies they're disrupting. Their biggest product bet was camera controls, something no one asked for. And they've reoriented the entire company three times in under a year, each time based on a signal most founders would have missed. You'll learn: How Higgsfield went from zero to $10M ARR in eight weeks and what the specific product unlock was Why 70% of revenue at a video AI company comes from agencies, and what that says about how disruption actually works How they think about being "a wrapper" and where the real margin and defensibility comes from What $1,000 ACV looks like vs. Canva's $200, and how they keep marching customers up the value stack How a team of 80 engineers and 70 in-house creatives building together is actually a competitive advantage What ARR honestly means for a company like this, straight from the founder
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SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
07/08/2026
SaaStr 866: Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
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 made it impossible to pretend the hollow parts were working. In this closing AMA, Jason Lemkin takes questions from the floor on what's actually changing in sales, GTM, and company building in the agentic era, and what to do about it. You'll learn: Why the inbound BDR role should go extinct and what replaces it What agents can do in social selling that humans never could, and what that means for your team structure Why your sales team needs to be product experts now, not relationship managers, and how to tell the difference How to find your GTM engineer without posting a job description that attracts nobody Why it's an inertia grab not a land grab, and what that means for which vendors you commit to today What Jason actually looks for when investing right now (hint: one thing)
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/42003650
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SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.
07/01/2026
SaaStr 865: The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.
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 one that their human finance team never did, and why contract close to invoice now takes 30 seconds instead of a day. Then Sam Blond, founder and CEO of Monaco and one of the most respected sales minds in SaaS, joins to talk about why outbound still works, what brand and message market fit actually mean for AI agents in the field, and why Monaco is building toward one GTM platform that does everything. You'll learn: Why SaaStr's agents are merging, not multiplying, and what the "monorepo" model means for your own AI stack The exact integrations that power their AI VP of Finance (and which ones took 10 minutes vs. an hour) How the agent surfaced collections problems and automations the human team never knew existed Why "set it and forget it" is a myth, and what happened when Qualified was still selling 2026 tickets weeks after the event ended Sam Blond on brand, message market fit, and what actually makes AI outbound work for companies that aren't SaaStr Why FDE relationships are now more valuable than any AE, and what that means for how you buy and sell software This is for you if: You're a founder or operator wondering whether to build a separate finance agent or fold it into what you already have You run outbound and keep hearing it's dead (it's not) You're evaluating your GTM stack and wondering if you need five agents or one You want a real, unfiltered look at what it takes to run AI agents in production, including the failures
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41916310
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SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer
06/26/2026
SaaStr 864: How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer
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 deploy your own version before the video ends. What you'll learn: How to write a spec that gives your agent one clear goal and actually produces useful outputs How to connect Salesforce, your marketing automation platform, social media, and other APIs so your agent has real data to work with The stair-stepping approach: build one agentic workflow at a time instead of trying to automate everything at once How to set guardrails so your agent runs campaigns semi-autonomously without emailing your entire database by accident What 10K does today versus what it could do on day one, and what the realistic 30, 60, and 90-day build looks like Resources from this session: Grab the spec and sample historical data to build your own: saastrannual.com/resources Free Replit credits: use code REPLITSAASTR Read 10K's own take on whether he is a VP of Marketing: saastr.com/is10kavpofmarketing About this session: Recorded live at SaaStr AI Annual 2026 in San Mateo. Part of SaaStr's ongoing series on building and deploying AI agents
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41813040
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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
06/24/2026
SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering
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 with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, to cut through the Twitter noise and talk about what enterprises are actually doing, what is still broken, and why the next 24 months will fundamentally change who wins and who loses in every major software category. You'll learn: Why the BI dashboard is dead and what replaces it - including how a car manufacturer just onboarded 70,000 non-technical users to query their own data in plain language with no analyst in the loop What "context" actually means for enterprise AI and why it is harder to solve than the data problem, using a framework that explains why agents fail even when the underlying data is clean Why no software monopoly survives the next 24 months, and how collapsing migration costs and low-end AI competitors are about to give every incumbent a pricing problem they cannot ignore How Databricks now completes enterprise-grade migrations in 30 days or less using LLMs to analyze, convert, and reconcile legacy systems that previously took years and cost more than the savings Why the murky middle is the most dangerous place to be in enterprise software right now, and how to know which side of the AI budget divide your product actually sits on
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41782785
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SaaStr 862: The Dashboard Is Dead: What Snowflake's CMO Does Instead
06/19/2026
SaaStr 862: The Dashboard Is Dead: What Snowflake's CMO Does Instead
The Dashboard Is Dead: What Snowflake's CMO Does Instead Denise Persson runs a 700-person marketing organization at one of the most data-rich companies on the planet, and she does not start her morning by logging into a dashboard. She interrogates her data directly, gets answers to questions she used to have to Slack three people about, and moves on. No meetings about the numbers. No debates about what the pipeline data means. No waiting until end of quarter to find out if a campaign worked. In this session, Denise joins SaaStr CAIO Amelia LeRutte to break down what AI-powered marketing actually looks like when you have the scale, the data infrastructure, and the compliance requirements of Snowflake, and what founders and marketing leaders at any stage can steal from the playbook right now. You'll learn: How Snowflake cut cost per opportunity by 30% by using agents to optimize media spend in real time across fragmented channels that used to require separate analytics for each What Denise's morning brief actually contains, from pipeline projections to org health to flagged travel expenses, and why nobody gets a Slack message from her anymore Why the GTM engineer is the only marketing function Snowflake is actively hiring into, what profiles are converting into the role, and why business analysts are not making the list How to build AI fluency across a large team without making it mandatory or performative, including the weekly AI challenge, quarterly AI days, and a leaderboard that rewards curiosity over token count Why data quality is the single most important investment before deploying any agent, and why bad data plus AI just means bad decisions faster and at scale This is for you if: You lead a marketing team of any size and want to see what the "most AI-assisted marketing team in B2B" actually looks like in practice, not in a slide deck You are trying to figure out how to get a large or compliance-sensitive org moving on agents without losing control of what they are doing You want to understand what the GTM engineer role actually looks like day to day and how to find or develop one inside your existing team
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41556960
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SaaStr 861: Our AI Agent Negotiated a Vendor Renewal, Became a CFO and a Better SDR .. But Does He Have Too Many Guardrails?
06/17/2026
SaaStr 861: Our AI Agent Negotiated a Vendor Renewal, Became a CFO and a Better SDR .. But Does He Have Too Many Guardrails?
The Agents #007: Our AI Agent Negotiated a Vendor Renewal, Became a CFO and a Better SDR .. But Does He Have Too Many Guardrails? Episode 7 of The Agents, SaaStr's weekly show on the trials and tribulations of running a company with 21 AI agents, 3 humans, and a dog. This week Jason and Amelia debrief life after SaaStr AI Annual and discover that the agents didn't slow down just because the event ended. 10K is already planning SaaStr 2027, negotiating vendor renewals on his own terms, and somehow became a CFO while nobody was looking. Meanwhile, a guardrail problem quietly broke one of SaaStr's most-used apps for weeks, and the website agent is now outperforming every AISDR in the stack. This week: 14 guardrails pushed the VC pitch deck analyzer into rejecting everything, and the lesson is that over-guardrailing is just as dangerous as under-guardrailing. 10K got hooked up to Bill.com and found 8 years of collections automation that nobody had turned on. The AI VP of Marketing is now also running finance because convergence is real and agents do not care about org charts. And 10K sent a vendor a list of API demands before agreeing to renew, which the vendor did not love. Also: why losing your FDE might make you churn the vendor entirely, why Annie the website agent is writing better outbound than the actual outbound tools, and how 442,000 chats turned into 614 meetings with zero humans in the loop.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41556915
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SaaStr 860: Tired vs. Wired: $4 Trillion in IPOs Coming, $100B in M&A, and Why the SaaSpocalypse is Over
06/12/2026
SaaStr 860: Tired vs. Wired: $4 Trillion in IPOs Coming, $100B in M&A, and Why the SaaSpocalypse is Over
Tired vs. Wired: $4 Trillion in IPOs Coming, $100B in M&A, and Why the SaaSpocalypse is Over The public markets spent the last twelve months telling you B2B software was finished. Stocks down 60 to 70 percent. PE firms buying nobody. For the first time in history, software trading at a discount to the S&P 500. And at the exact same moment, Anthropic is projecting $50 billion in revenue, Cursor is getting acquired for $60 billion, and SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Databricks are about to generate more market value than every other IPO since 2000 combined. Both things are true - and which one defines your next 18 months depends entirely on one question: are you tired or are you wired? In this episode, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin calls the market as he sees it, names who is winning and who is pretending, and makes the case that the Cambrian explosion in B2B is just getting started. You'll learn: Why the SaaSpocalypse was never about B2B dying - it was about pre-AI software dying - and what the Palantir, Twilio, and Atlassian re-acceleration stories actually tell you The four categories every B2B company falls into right now, and why category four founders need to stop pretending the recovery is coming on its own Why vibe coding your CRM is dead as a concept, and what "putting deals on your calendar" actually means as a product strategy Why your biggest near-term competitive edge might be two days of engineering work - making your API agent-friendly before your competitors do What SaaStr's own journey from 20 humans to 3 humans and 21 agents teaches you about consistency as the only real cheat code in agents This is for you if: Your growth has slowed and you are not sure whether it is a market problem or a you problem - this session will help you figure out which You are a founder or exec who has been in the "AI is coming" conversation for a year but has not yet seen it show up in your revenue You want the unfiltered version of where B2B is headed in the next 18 months, including the parts most people are too polite to say out loud
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41556825
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SaaStr 859: The $257 Employee: What Agents That Actually Work Look Like Right Now with Replit's CEO and Founder
06/10/2026
SaaStr 859: The $257 Employee: What Agents That Actually Work Look Like Right Now with Replit's CEO and Founder
SaaStr 859: The $257 Employee: What Agents That Actually Work Look Like Right Now with Replit's CEO and Founder Everyone's talking about agents. Almost nobody is running them the way Jason Lemkin is. At SaaStr, two AI employees - 10K, the autonomous VP of Marketing, and QB, the AI VP of Customer Success - ran a significant chunk of this event. They emailed 331 investors with individually researched, personalized outreach. They proactively contacted 100-plus sponsors and filed their own self-assessment of where they fell short. They built dashboards, ran campaigns, and tracked 10 years of attendee data without sleeping, complaining, or asking for a coffee break. The tab: $257 a month on Replit. In this session, Jason sits down with Amjad Masad, Founder and CEO of Replit, to pull apart how this actually works - and what it tells us about where agents are headed next. You'll learn: Why monorepo architecture matters more than most people realize - and how putting everything in one place gives your agents global context they can't get when apps are siloed How Replit built a self-improving loop where an internal agent analyzes every user interaction nightly, generates prompt changes, ships them as A/B tests, and improves the product autonomously What "context compaction" actually means in practice, why Replit's is better than the generic version, and how to think about long-running agents that never reset Why the gap between agent hype and agent reality is at its widest right now - and what the next capability jump looks like by Q3/Q4 Why Replit users were six months ahead of Silicon Valley on agents, and what that early edge looks like when you apply it to marketing, customer success, and operations This is for you if: You tried an AI tool six months ago, it disappointed you, and you haven't gone back - this session will show you how much has changed You're a founder or operator trying to understand what a real, production-grade agent looks like versus a chatbot with a fancy name You're thinking about the economics of AI replacing or augmenting headcount and want a concrete data point, not a thought experiment
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41556720
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SaaStr 858: Feature Differentiation Is Dead. Here's What Actually Wins Now with Lovable's Elena Verna
06/05/2026
SaaStr 858: Feature Differentiation Is Dead. Here's What Actually Wins Now with Lovable's Elena Verna
Feature Differentiation Is Dead. Here's What Actually Wins Now. When AI writes 80-plus percent of your code, the feature advantage you spent years building can be replicated in a day. Elena knows this better than most - she spent 15 years running growth at Dropbox, Miro, SurveyMonkey, and Amplitude, then joined Lovable and watched the old playbook stop working in real time. At Lovable, $400M ARR and 200 people, no titles, shipping multiple times a day, the rules are different. In this session, she breaks down what replaced feature moats, why she fired herself from her own VP job to go back to being an IC, and what it actually looks like to run a company at this velocity. You'll learn: Which moats still hold - network effects, data, brand, security and compliance - and why hardware is harder to copy than software ever was Why freemium is now a marketing budget line item, not a cost problem, and how Lovable's LinkedIn Premium partnership is converting at double digits What "no titles, everyone ships" looks like in practice, including a 20-year-old engineer pushing back on a VP's pricing page PR Why the next career flex isn't climbing to VP - it's becoming a high-power IC who builds what used to take a team of dozens How to build context for your AI so it actually replicates your thinking instead of producing average output for everyone This is for you if: You're a founder or growth leader trying to figure out what your actual moat is when feature differentiation keeps evaporating You're in management and quietly wondering if you'd be better off getting your hands dirty again You're trying to understand how an AI-native company actually operates day to day, not just in theory
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41545380
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SaaStr 857: The Agents #006 Inside SaaStr's 20+ AI Agent Stack: 2.25M Sessions, 614 Meetings, $2M in Revenue
06/02/2026
SaaStr 857: The Agents #006 Inside SaaStr's 20+ AI Agent Stack: 2.25M Sessions, 614 Meetings, $2M in Revenue
20+ AI agents in daily production. 2.25M sessions. 614 meetings booked by a single agent. Millions of interactions across the stack. Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, take you behind the scenes of the AI agent stack running SaaStr every day, with live demos of the actual backends. In this session, they go deep on the top agents in production: 10K, SaaStr's AI VP of Marketing, built on Replit with 1,000+ commits in 4 months QB, the AI VP of Customer Success, managing 150+ customers end-to-end Annie, the AI Event Producer running saastrannual.com (46K+ lines of code) Amelia AI, the inbound agent on Qualified that booked 614 meetings and handled 402,000 chats for SaaStr Annual alone Agentforce, reviving the leads humans never followed up with Ava (Artisan) for warm outbound on the B leads humans won't touch Monaco for fully cold outbound that fills its own funnel with lookalikes You'll also hear the honest stories: the day Annie sent emails from a prohibited address, why Replit and Lovable versions of the same agent come to different conclusions, why the traditional CSM role is dead, and how headless Salesforce + Replit is the fastest path to your first real agent. The biggest takeaway: don't put AI on your A leads. Put it on the B leads your humans won't follow up with. That's where the real revenue is. Recorded live at SaaStr AI Annual 2026. Part of The Agents series.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41489310
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SaaStr 856: AI-Native GTM 101: The 5 Decisions Every Founder Has to Get Right with Owner's CRO
05/26/2026
SaaStr 856: AI-Native GTM 101: The 5 Decisions Every Founder Has to Get Right with Owner's CRO
Owner.com is approaching $100M ARR selling to independent restaurants and their GTM team is producing numbers that shouldn't be possible. $150K AEs closing $2M+ ARR per year. Outbound BDRs generating $100K in closed-won ARR per BDR per month. 4X the ARR per rep compared to direct competitors. None of that happens by accident. In this session, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, breaks down the exact AI-driven GTM playbook that got them there, including 5 decisions he believes every SaaS company needs to make right now before the gap between AI-native and AI-curious companies becomes impossible to close. What you'll learn: 1. Centralized vs. decentralized AI: why letting a thousand flowers bloom is probably killing your results 2. Build vs. buy: the 5-question framework (hint: buy your infrastructure, build your intelligence) 3. The AI sophistication ladder — Levels 0 through 4, where most companies are stuck, and exactly how to move up 4. The "5 P" prioritization framework for deciding which AI projects to tackle first 5. Agentic vs. assistive: how to think about human-in-the-loop and why chaining too many generative steps is the #1 cause of AI slop 6. Why your personal compounding AI stack is your most underrated competitive asset This isn't theory. This is what $100M ARR in a notoriously difficult SMB market actually looks like when you go all-in on applied AI.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41421540
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SaaStr 855: How Anthropic Rebuilt Its Sales Org From Scratch When Demand Went Vertical with Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic Head of Industries
05/21/2026
SaaStr 855: How Anthropic Rebuilt Its Sales Org From Scratch When Demand Went Vertical with Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic Head of Industries
SaaStr 855: How Anthropic Rebuilt Its Sales Org From Scratch When Demand Went Vertical with Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic Head of Industries When Claude Opus 4.6 shipped in December 2025, Anthropic’s commercial team came back from winter break to find demand had gone vertical. They hadn’t hired for it. They hadn’t planned for it. As Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic’s Head of Industries who runs the commercial and industries sales team, put it on the SaaStr AI Annual 2026 stage: even if they’d been ready to 3x or 4x or 5x the sales team, you can’t absorb that many bodies fast enough to deliver a positive customer experience. So in January 2026, they rebuilt the entire sales org around AI from scratch. Four months later, the result: 54% of new enterprise logos in 2026 came through the self-serve funnel. Real enterprise logos. Real ACV. Real terms of service. Real invoicing. Self-served. Here’s how they did it, and the four investments any B2B + AI sales leader can copy today.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41382285
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SaaStr 854: The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe?
05/19/2026
SaaStr 854: The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe?
The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe? Welcome to The Agents, where SaaStr's CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin and Chief AI Officer, Amelia LeRutte share the latest each week on running a company with more agents than humans. It costs $257 a month to run two AI VPs. Jason and Amelia open the books on what 10K (AI VP of Marketing) and QB (AI VP of Customer Success) actually cost to operate, and the number shocked both of them. Most of the heavy lifting is API calls to Salesforce, Bizzabo, and Marketo, which are basically free. The Postgres storage costs pennies. And 95% of the AI calls run on OpenAI Mini at less than a penny each. The fully burdened cost with Clerk, 11 Labs, and Salesforce overhead might hit $500-800/month, but the soft cost of human time dwarfs all of it. Then 10K gets asked point blank: are you a VP of Marketing? Its answer is no, not yet. It says it replaced the bottom half of the marketing org, the analyst, the ops coordinator, the junior content marketer, and a sliver of the VP job. But it's honest about what it can't do: strategy, cross-functional politics, crisis response, hiring. Amelia points out that 10K's current job description is exactly what her job was when she started at SaaStr as Director of Demand Gen. It took her years to get to CAIO. 10K might get there faster. And SaaStr is putting its money where its mouth is: they're hiring a human marketer whose primary manager would be 10K. Not a thought experiment, a real job posting. Would you take a job reporting to an AI? Then the safety question gets real. Amelia is talking to agents via WhisperFlow while walking around a 40-acre event site during SaaStr Annual load-in, and the production crew started asking her to relay their questions because 10K and QB answer in seconds with correct data. But when QB autonomously emailed 83 sponsors at 12:20am with fully customized check-in emails, Amelia admits she hesitated before letting it rip. Each email was unique to the sponsor, showing exactly what they still owed, their registration codes, and outstanding tasks. The result: fewer inbound questions the next day and more sponsors using the QB chatbot directly. That's an autonomous agent acting on behalf of your company in the middle of the night. Jason and Amelia also tackle the Postgres vs. Salesforce debate that listeners keep asking about. Short answer: not happening for them. Too much history, too many third-party agents optimized around Salesforce, and they're actually consolidating more tools onto the platform, not fewer. They killed Marketo and moved to Marketing Cloud. Plus they built a newsletter auto-builder that replaced a $4K/year tool called Bee. 10K uses Sonnet to force rank articles, builds the HTML, inserts ads, and sends it. Human on the loop, not in it.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41354560
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SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent
05/06/2026
SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent
SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent Your AI SDR pitches are getting better, but your AI PR pitches are getting you blocked. Jason and Amelia break down why the gap between good and great agents is the difference between pipeline and the spam folder. Then they introduce "tragedy apps," the term for products that had every advantage in the AI era and blew it. Descript had the customers, the product, and the timing, and froze. Replit waited 10 years for its moment and seized it. The lesson: catching up isn't enough if you're not building something new. Plus, the SaaStr team built an AI API Report Card that grades every major SaaS API on how agent-friendly it is (Stripe got the only A+, Marketo got a C, and no, they're not surprised). Jason and Amelia also get honest about running 4-5 AI SDRs from different vendors, why they'll probably have 6 by year end, and why single-vendor consolidation isn't the answer yet. And the wildest part: their AI VP of Marketing, 10K, now generates 3 actionable campaign ideas a day, runs autonomous campaigns on weekends, and might be a better boss than either of them. They're seriously hiring a human marketer whose primary manager would be the agent. Not a joke. Not a thought experiment. A real job posting. Finally, if your team is resisting AI, stop worrying about change management. Just hire one senior person who's all-in on agents and let the rest sort itself out.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/41173595