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 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.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/42201275
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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
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/42128045
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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
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/42098495
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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
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/42023635
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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.
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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.
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SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before
04/29/2026
SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before
SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before Here's the updated version: This week on The Agents, SaaStr CEO & Founder Jason Lemkin and SaaStr CAIO Amelia Le Rutte dig into what it actually looks like when your AI VP of Marketing starts running campaigns on its own, segmenting lists, writing copy, and asking if you've done the work yet. They also get into why SaaStr's Salesforce bill went up 80% after cutting seats by 60%, and why that's actually a good deal. Plus: Amelia vibed a fix to a critical Marketo unsubscribe bug in under an hour that Marketo couldn't solve in 10 days, how headless Salesforce is already running inside their stack, and what an n=1 AI parking pass app reveals about the future of event ops. They also cover the Red Point report showing 54% of CIOs are consolidating vendors, and which categories are getting cut first, plus the hardest hiring problem in SaaS right now: finding the operator who can actually build and run your agents.
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SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions
04/22/2026
SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions
SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions In Episode 2 of The Agents, Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, share the trials, tribulations, victories, and minor defeats of managing 20+ AI agents in production. With three humans and 20+ AI agents now driving more revenue and output than SaaStr did with 20+ FTEs in 2020, this weekly series goes deep on what's actually working, breaking, and changing in the agentic era. This week's episode covers: 00:00 Welcome to The Agents Episode 2 01:00 Lazy Agents: How an AI agent silently deleted Amelia's session from the SaaStr Annual top 10 06:30 When agents blame the API: agentic accountability and the need for daily QA 09:00 The 60% Solution Problem: Why HubSpot's new AEO tool failed and got vibe coded better in 10 minutes 14:00 Figma Make vs. Replit, Lovable, and v0: Why no one will pay for "good enough" AI products 17:30 Classic Figma is now Grandpa Software: Production breakdowns and why Illustrator's agent is winning 21:00 Stealth Churn in Canva, ChatGPT, and beyond: The hidden metric every leader needs to watch 27:00 Why Claude Cowork created lock-in and killed ChatGPT usage for Amelia 30:00 Forward Deployed Engineers vs. Self-Serve: Why FDE light is the answer for SMB AI deployments 36:00 Vector breaks the agent freeze: How a 15-minute CEO-led deployment won SaaStr's business 40:00 The Agent API Test: Which APIs work best with AI agents (Salesforce wins, Marketo fails) 46:00 Resend, 11 Labs, and OpenRouter: The new gold standard for agent-friendly APIs 50:00 The Marketo collapse: When your marketing automation platform can't honor unsubscribes 55:00 Building an AI VP of Finance: Why collections is the next agent frontier at SaaStr 1:00:00 SaaStr Annual 2026 is three weeks away: May 12-14 in the SF Bay Area Topics covered: AI agents, agent management, lazy agents, stealth churn, vibe coding, Replit, Lovable, v0, Figma Make, HubSpot AEO, Claude Cowork, forward deployed engineers, FDE, self-serve AI, Vector, Salesforce, Marketo, Resend, 11 Labs, agent APIs, AI VP of Finance, collections automation, SaaStr Annual 2026 SaaStr Annual 2026 | May 12-14 | Come learn how to build, deploy, and manage AI agents from the leaders at Salesforce, Replit, Vercel, Cloudflare, and more. Register at saastr.ai Subscribe for weekly episodes of The Agents and the SaaStr Podcast. #AIAgents #SaaS #SaaStr #AgenticAI #VibeCoding
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SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This?
04/15/2026
SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This?
SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This? Welcome to The Agents, a new weekly series where Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, pull back the curtain on everything happening across SaaStr's live agentic stack. Every week, all the bumps, breakthroughs, and real talk from running 20+ AI agents in production. In the debut episode: the meta question nobody talks about after you vibe code your first app, which is who actually maintains it? Amelia Lerutte and Jason Lemkin walk through three live examples from the week including a preview environment outage that stumped both the agents and the humans, micro hallucinations in their AI VP of Marketing that had it reporting 44% ahead of plan one morning and 11% the next, and a model regression in their pitch deck analyzer that nobody changed a line of code to cause. They also get into a story about Clay's agent steering them toward a 5x credit spend, why no lead left behind is the simplest and most important unlock of the entire agentic journey, what happened when Salesforce swapped Agent Force for Qualified on their homepage the day the acquisition closed, and how QB1, SaaStr's AI VP of Customer Success, caught sponsors uploading placeholder graphics to fake a print deadline. If you're on the agentic journey or about to start, this is the show.
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SaaStr 849: How We Built Our AI VP of Customer Success with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
04/08/2026
SaaStr 849: How We Built Our AI VP of Customer Success with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
SaaStr 849: How We Built Our AI VP of Customer Success with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO Amelia and Jason walk through QB1, SaaStr's vibe-coded AI VP of Customer Success that started as a simple sponsor portal replacement and evolved into a fully agentic customer management system. The result: 70% fewer billable hours, 10x more customer engagement, and a hundred sponsors getting hyper-personalized weekly emails in minutes instead of days. They break down exactly how it was built, what broke, and how you can reverse-engineer it for your own business. . ---------------- Hey everybody - we are just about 30 DAYS out from the biggest B2B and AI event of the year. SaaStr Annual is coming back to the SF Bay Area this May, and if you're not registered yet, what are you waiting for? This is where the real deals get done. 68% VP-level and above. 36% CEOs and founders. 25% AI-first professionals. This isn't a conference, this is THE room where S-tier decision makers show up to figure out what's next. But here's the deal: ticket prices go up FAST. Like, actually hundreds. Don't be that person who waits and then pays full price. Lock in your spot TODAY. Go to and use my exclusive discount for SaaStr AI SF 2026. May is closer than you think. See you there.
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SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint
04/01/2026
SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint
SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint In this episode, three revenue leaders at very different stages of AI adoption get real about what's actually working, what's embarrassingly broken, and why nobody should be doubling quota just yet. Panelists: Greg Beltzer — Chief Customer Officer, AgentForce (Salesforce) Ashley Wilson — Co-founder, Momentum by Salesforce Marchelle Mooney — VP of Sales, Mangomint Amelia Lerutte - Chief AI Officer, SaaStr They cover: Why every company has leads they never followed up on (yes, even Salesforce) The "chainsaw without the cover off" problem with AI tool rollouts How Mangomint uses AI to fix terrible salon logos in minutes — and why it freaks customers out Why Marchelle is not raising quota in 2026, even though she could The real resistance to AI adoption (hint: it's not just the CIO) How Momentum is using AI to democratize language for SDRs in Argentina What retention looks like when AI is listening for slow-drip churn signals Why your data is probably worse than you think — and what that means for agents Key takeaway: AI won't magically fix your sales org. Your data has to be clean, your people need training, and you have to rethink workflows from first principles — not just bolt AI onto the old playbook. Recorded live at SaaStr London. --------------------- 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 to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.
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SaaStr 847: How MangoMint Increased Win Rates with an AI-Powered Stack
03/25/2026
SaaStr 847: How MangoMint Increased Win Rates with an AI-Powered Stack
What happens when you go all-in on AI tools in a completely remote organization at scale? That's where Marchelle Mooney, VP of Sales at MangoMint, found herself. MangoMint is vertical SaaS for salons and spas with a ~$4K ACV and a five-day sales cycle. Not exactly the profile you'd expect to be running one of the most disciplined remote revenue organizations in SaaS. But Marchelle's team is closing in on a 7.2x ARR-to-OTE ratio, has increased win rates 7% in two quarters, and has given reps 16 hours back per month. All fully remote, all with lean headcount. In this session, Marchelle breaks down the exact three-layer AI Rigor Stack she built to get there: the Clarity Layer, the Cadence Layer, and the Co-Pilot Layer. She also walks through the full tool stack (Notion, Slack, Salesforce, Snowflake, Sigma, Momentum) and how data flows automatically to reps without them ever hunting for a dashboard. The core insight: the problem was never the tools. It was fragmentation. And the path to fixing it runs through subtraction, not addition. If you're running a remote or hybrid revenue org and feel like you're running fast but not getting anywhere, this one's for you. ------ Hey everybody - we are LESS THAN 60 DAYS out from the biggest B2B and AI event of the year. SaaStr Annual is coming back to the SF Bay Area this May, and if you're not registered yet, what are you waiting for? This is where the real deals get done. 68% VP-level and above. 36% CEOs and founders. 25% AI-first professionals. This isn't a conference, this is THE room where S-tier decision makers show up to figure out what's next. But here's the deal: ticket prices go up FAST. Like, actually hundreds. Don't be that person who waits and then pays full price. Lock in your spot TODAY. Go to and use my exclusive discount for SaaStr AI SF 2026. May is closer than you think. See you there.
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SaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
03/18/2026
SaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
SaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO If you're about to roll out your first AI SDR, or you're on your second or third deployment and still not getting the results you want, this one's for you. Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr Chief AI Officer, and Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder, walk through everything they've learned from running 20+ AI agents in production at SaaStr, including four AI SDRs spanning outbound, inbound, customer success, and sponsor engagement. After 10 months, 1.5 million inbound sessions, and over 200,000 outbound messages sent, they've made enough mistakes to save you a lot of time and money. In this session they cover: Why the tool doesn't matter as much as you think, and what actually does. The single biggest mistake both early-stage startups and billion-dollar companies make when deploying their first AI SDR. How to segment ruthlessly so your agent has the right context for every prospect instead of one big, generic brain. Why consistency beats brilliance, and what "pretty good at scale" actually looks like in practice. The minimum traffic and list size you need before an inbound or outbound AI SDR is worth deploying. How many humans you actually need to run this well, and what happens when you don't have them. What the first 30 days should look like, and why nothing is ever truly set and forget. The real story behind Amelia AI, SaaStr's multimodal video agent, including what they'd do differently if starting over. They also get into lookalike audiences as a list-building hack for early stage companies, when to build versus buy, and what it actually feels like when someone tries to prompt inject your agent at scale. If you've been on the fence about deploying an AI SDR, or you've deployed one and it's underperforming, this is the most practical breakdown of what it takes to make one work. Resources mentioned: SaaStr AI Agents directory: saastr.ai/agents SaaStr Annual 2026: May 12-14, SF Bay Area
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SaaStr 845: How SaaStr Built a $5 million Pipeline Machine with 1.5 Humans and 20 AI Agents with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer and Momentum from Salesforce's VP of GTM
03/11/2026
SaaStr 845: How SaaStr Built a $5 million Pipeline Machine with 1.5 Humans and 20 AI Agents with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer and Momentum from Salesforce's VP of GTM
SaaStr 845: How SaaStr Built a $5 million Pipeline Machine with 1.5 Humans and 20 AI Agents with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer and Momentum from Salesforce's VP of GTM Amelia LeRutte, SaaStr's Chief AI Officer (and the person Jason Lemkin calls "the AI Agent Whisperer"), breaks down exactly how she went from managing a 10-person team to running 20 AI agents that generated $4.8M in additional pipeline — and closed half of it. In this episode, Amelia walks Jonathan Kvarfordt, Momentum from Salesforce's VP of GTM through: — Her journey from social media manager to Chief AI Officer, including the three-month deep dive where she locked herself in a room to figure out AI agents — The full breakdown of SaaStr's 20-agent stack, including how they split work between tools like Salesforce AgentForce, Artisan, Qualified, Clay, Momentum, Gamma, and Zapier — A live demo of their multi-agent workflow: how a single form submission triggers a chain of agents that enrich data, build personalized Gamma decks, and draft follow-up emails, automatically — Real results: deal volume doubled, win rate doubled, and $2.4M closed from AI-sourced pipeline in just 8 months — The "90/10 rule" for deciding when to buy an agent vs. build one with vibe coding on Replit — Live demos of Digital Jason (Delphi), Amelia AI (Qualified), and a sponsor portal being vibe-coded in real time Whether you're running a lean startup or scaling a go-to-market team, this is one of the most tactical breakdowns of an AI agent stack you'll find. 🎟️ Heading to SaaStr Annual in May? Talk to Amelia AI on the event site for a promo code:
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SaaStr 844: The Top 5 Issues Managing Multiple AI Agents in Production with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer
03/04/2026
SaaStr 844: The Top 5 Issues Managing Multiple AI Agents in Production with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer
The Top 5 Issues Managing Multiple AI Agents in Production Managing 1-2 AI agents? Easy. Managing 20+? That's a different game entirely. After 9+ months running nearly 30 AI agents in production at SaaStr, we've learned what actually breaks at scale - and nobody's talking about it. This isn't about deployment tips or vendor selection. This is about the brutal realities that only emerge when you're juggling 20+ agents generating $1M+ in revenue. 🔥 THE 5 ISSUES WE COVER: 1. The Context Switching Tax (2:15) Managing 20 agents = managing 20 employees who all speak different languages. Each needs daily 1-on-1s. The math doesn't work: 20 agents × 20 min = 6.7 hours/day, but you only have 3-4 hours of capacity. 2. The New Agent Blackout Period (12:40) Every new agent costs you 2 weeks of chaos. While onboarding Monaco, Artisan's response rates dropped 3% because contacts went stale. You can only safely add 1.5 agents per month max - any faster and you're running in place. 3. The AI Agent Succession Planning Crisis (23:15) You're the single point of failure for $1M+ of AI-driven revenue. Only 2-5% of your team could manage these agents. What happens when you get hit by a bus? Go on vacation? Leave the company? 4. The Agent as Truth-Teller (32:50) "You're 56% behind target. Block 3 hours tomorrow or adjust your goal." Your agents don't sugarcoat. They have all the data and they'll roast you every day. Is that helpful or demoralizing? We still don't know. 5. The Compliance/Security Drift (41:20) You ran a security audit in January. It's now February. You've shipped 40 updates. Did you re-audit? Probably not. Your security posture is degrading in real-time while you iterate at AI speed. BONUS #6: You Lose Patience with Humans (48:30) After managing agents that respond instantly and work 24/7, humans feel painfully slow. "What do you mean you don't know the answer? My agent knows instantly." This makes you worse at managing actual people. ⚡ KEY TAKEAWAYS: → There is no orchestration layer yet - you're manually checking 20 different dashboards daily → Your agents can't talk to each other - Salesforce is the only place they meet → You need a "Chief Agent Officer" - someone technical enough to manage the stack → The math: Can only add ~1.5 agents/month max, need 10-15 hours/week for management → ROI calculation is simple: Which agent touched which lead? Did it close? That's it. 💰 THE NUMBERS: → 20+ agents in production → $1M+ in closed revenue from agents → 30% of Chief AI Officer time spent on agent management → 2 weeks minimum to onboard each new agent → 6.7 hours needed daily to properly manage 20 agents (impossible) 🛠️ AGENTS WE USE: Sales/Outbound: Artisan, Monaco, Agent Force Inbound: Qualified RevOps: Momentum, Attention Marketing: 10K (custom AI VPM), Gamma, Opus Pro Customer Support: HappyFox Internal: SaaStr Sponsors portal (custom vibe-coded) 🔗 RESOURCES: → SaaStr.ai/agents - Full agent directory and how we use each one → SaaStr Annual 2026 (May 12-14) - SaaStr Deploy day: Build your own agents hands-on → Previous episodes: Deep dives on 10K AI VPM, vibe coding, build vs buy 🎤 SPEAKERS: Amelia Lerutte - Chief AI Officer, SaaStr Jason Lemkin - Founder & CEO, SaaStr The uncomfortable truth: Managing 20+ agents makes you worse at managing humans. You get used to instant execution, no pushback, 24/7 availability, and perfect memory. Then humans feel... inefficient. Maybe the future isn't "how many agents can I add" but "how deep can I go with the ones I have." #AIAgents #SaaS #GoToMarket #AIAutomation #ProductivityTools #B2BSaaS #SalesAutomation #MarketingAutomation #AgenticAI #StartupTech Subscribe for weekly AI deployment content from the trenches. No theory. No vendor pitches. Just what actually works (and breaks) at scale. --------------------- Hey everybody - we are LESS THAN 90 DAYS out from the biggest B2B and AI event of the year. SaaStr Annual is coming back to the SF Bay Area this May, and if you're not registered yet, what are you waiting for? This is where the real deals get done. 68% VP-level and above. 36% CEOs and founders. 25% AI-first professionals. This isn't a conference, this is THE room where S-tier decision makers show up to figure out what's next. But here's the deal: ticket prices go up FAST. Like, actually hundreds. Don't be that person who waits and then pays full price. Lock in your spot TODAY. Go to and use my exclusive discount for SaaStr AI SF 2026. May is closer than you think. See you there. --------------------- This episode is Sponsored in part by HappyFox: Imagine having AI agents for every support task — one that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risks. That’d be pretty amazing, right? HappyFox just made it real with Autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as 2 cents per successful action. All of it sits inside the HappyFox omnichannel, AI-first support stack — Chatbot, Copilot, and Autopilot working as one. Check them out at
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SaaStr 843: Software Stocks Have Massively Crashed. Here's What Founders Need to Know.
02/25/2026
SaaStr 843: Software Stocks Have Massively Crashed. Here's What Founders Need to Know.
SAASTR 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. --------------------- This episode is Sponsored in part by HappyFox: Imagine having AI agents for every support task — one that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risks. That’d be pretty amazing, right? HappyFox just made it real with Autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as 2 cents per successful action. All of it sits inside the HappyFox omnichannel, AI-first support stack — Chatbot, Copilot, and Autopilot working as one. Check them out at --------------------- 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 to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.
/episode/index/show/saastr/id/40225150
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SaaStr 842: The 90/10 Rule for AI Agents: What to Build vs Buy with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
02/18/2026
SaaStr 842: The 90/10 Rule for AI Agents: What to Build vs Buy with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
SaaStr 842: The 90/10 Rule for AI Agents: What to Build vs Buy with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO SaaStr's Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte, and SaaStr CEO & Founder Jason Lemkin break down SaaStr's evolving 90/10 rule for AI agents and apps: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% you can't find. In this episode, they walk through two recently built tools: an internal AI VP of Marketing and an external-facing customer portal, and share the real trade-offs of deploying vibe coding apps into production. Topics covered: Why we replaced a paid SaaS tool with a vibe-coded app (and what pushed us over the edge) How Claude Cowork changed the game for building more complex apps The role of writing a spec before vibe coding Tackling single sign-on as a non-engineer How we used Cowork to process 150+ customer contracts in hours instead of days Lovable's data on what people are actually vibe coding Maintenance costs and the hidden time suck of custom apps Why zero AI in your product should scare you The "jaw drop" test for SaaS products in 2026 -------------------------------------- Tools & resources mentioned: Replit, Claude Cowork, Clerk, Lovable, Zapier, Salesforce, Monaco 🔗 See all the AI agents and tools we use: saastr.ai/agents 🔗 SaaStr Annual 2026 (May 12-14): saastrannual.com 🎙️ 20VCwith Harry & Jason & Rory: Drops every Thursday #SaaStr #AI #VibeCoding #B2BSaaS #AIAgents #BuildvsBuy -------------------------------------- This episode is Sponsored in part by HappyFox: Imagine having AI agents for every support task — one that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risks. That’d be pretty amazing, right? HappyFox just made it real with Autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as 2 cents per successful action. All of it sits inside the HappyFox omnichannel, AI-first support stack — Chatbot, Copilot, and Autopilot working as one. Check them out at --------------------- 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 to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.
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SaaStr 841: Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales.
02/11/2026
SaaStr 841: Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales.
SaaStr 841: Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales. Clay's Co-Founder Varun Anand takes the stage at SaaStr to break down how the company went from paying for claymation blobs before generating any revenue to powering growth workflows for companies like Cursor, Anthropic, and Figma. He explains why brand has always been core to Clay's identity, how their CFO roast videos and creative campaigns are actually capturing mindshare in a world where B2B marketing is painfully boring, and why he pushes back on the "use AI for everything" mentality that's taken over the industry. Varun does a full live demo building an inbound qualification workflow from scratch using real audience volunteers, walking through everything from lead enrichment and waterfall data sourcing to AI-powered scoring, personalized meme generation, research brief creation, and CRM updates. He also brings audience members on stage to do live growth hacking for their actual business problems. Beyond the product, this session goes deep on hiring. Varun shares the origin story of the GTM Engineer role, how it went from an internal job title for Clay's non-traditional sales team to the most in-demand position in B2B SaaS, and what he actually looks for when evaluating candidates (hint: it's creativity, not a traditional sales background). He talks about Clay's take-home process, work trials, why they hire generalists who commit to specific roles, and the surprising backgrounds of some of their best hires. Whether you're building out your go-to-market motion, thinking about how to use AI without losing what makes your brand unique, or just trying to figure out what a GTM Engineer actually does, this session covers it all. --------------------- This episode is Sponsored in part by HappyFox: Imagine having AI agents for every support task — one that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risks. That’d be pretty amazing, right? HappyFox just made it real with Autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as 2 cents per successful action. All of it sits inside the HappyFox omnichannel, AI-first support stack — Chatbot, Copilot, and Autopilot working as one. Check them out at --------------------- 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 to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.
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