We get a lot of emails about this. A lot. Founders, VPs of Sales, CROs, RevOps leaders. They write in and say some version of: “We tried AI SDRs / AI agents / AI support. It didn’t work. We’re not getting the results you talk about at SaaStr. What are we doing wrong?” So let’s…
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SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1. OpenAI just closed the largest private funding round in Silicon Valley history at $122 billion. Anthropic is targeting a potential October listing. The Big 3. PitchBook put it in one line: these three listings would “create more value than all VC-backed IPOs since 2000 have collectively.”…
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Dear SaaStr: What’s the #1 Mistake New Sales Leaders Make? Let me just summarize my #1 observation here: the top mistake first-time sales managers make is recruiting. In that — they can’t do it. They can’t recruit great reps. They can recruit some mediocre ones, but that’s about it. It is incredibly hard to figure…
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With Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll Anthropic just hit $30 billion in annualized revenue. Up from $9 billion at the start of the year. That’s 3.3x growth in four months. It took Salesforce 25 years to get to $30 billion. Anthropic got there in five. Maybe three, depending on how you count. And…
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So HubSpot just made a big pricing change to its Breeze AI agents. Starting April 14, its AI Customer Agent pricing moves from $1.00 per conversation to $0.50 per resolved conversation. And its Prospecting Agent moves from a flat monthly charge per contact enrolled to $1.00 per lead recommended for outreach. On its face, this…
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The CRM market is being rebuilt from scratch. Not incrementally. Not with AI features bolted onto 20-year-old architecture. From scratch. And you can meet almost every company doing it at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, May 12-14 in SF Bay. I wrote recently about how we went from barely using Salesforce to making it the center…
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Dear SaaStr: What Qualities Make a CEO The Best In Their Industry? I’ve invested in 5 start-ups that had a $1,000,000,000+ cash exit or IPO. The CEOs were all quite different. Some extroverted, some introverted. Some wicked smart, some merely very smart. Some direct, some warm and friendly. But what made them great: Ability to…
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We’ve now deployed 20+ AI agents at SaaStr. We run an eight-figure business on 3 humans and a fleet of agents. We’ve sent 100,000+ hyper-personalized outbound emails, booked hundreds of meetings automatically, had 2.75 million conversations through our AI advisor, and generated real, closed-won millions of revenue from AI agents that work at 6:02pm on…
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So Samsara just closed out its fiscal year 2026, and while the vertical B2B leader has always been a rocketship, it’s now showing reacceleration to 30% growth as it crosses $2 Billion in ARR. There’s several reasons as we’ll dig into below, but AI is on the list. And in a time when the markets…
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Things you think are hard to recover from: – Losing a top customer– Not getting VC funding– Competitor winning key deal Things that are actually hard to recover from: – Wrong co-founder– Wrong key VP hire– Wrong largest VC — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) April 22, 2021 As a founder in the early days, and…
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What CRM should you use today? One of the classics, Salesforce or HubSpot? If so, which? Or one of the next generation, from Lightfield to Monaco to Aurasell? I was just asked this question by the CRO of a leading AI company that is planning to add 250 sellers this year. And is thinking of…
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Both OpenAI and Anthropic dropped major revenue disclosures within days of each other this week. OpenAI confirmed $2 billion in monthly revenue alongside a $122 billion raise at an $852 billion valuation. Anthropic confirmed $30 billion in annualized run-rate, up from $9 billion at year-end 2025. Then the WSJ published confidential financials from both companies…
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The “Industry Imperatives” Framework That Replaced Personas and ICP as Their Core GTM Strategy From a SaaStr AI Annual session with Madelyn Mullen (Sr. Industry Solutions Manager – Digital Natives, Databricks) and Samantha Sawyer (Principal Industry Marketing Manager, Databricks). Come see 200+ sessions like this at 2026 SaaStr AI Annual May 12-14 in SF Bay!!…
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Dear SaaStr: What would you do differently to succeed, if you were to start again? My top list: Don’t start a startup if the founders aren’t 100% aligned, especially on how committed you all are. I’ve done this, and it worked out OK, but not even close to as well as when we were all…
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I woke up Sunday morning morning, grabbed my coffee, and opened Slack. No one’s working. Except … well that’s not quite right anymore. Two highly detailed reports were already waiting for me. Posted at midnight and 9:00 AM, respectively. Our AI-powered 10K Daily Bot had already pulled together our full daily dashboard for SaaStr Annual…
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