Google Cloud’s VP of Growth on Building an AI-Native Marketing Team: 8 Takeaways from SaaStr AI 2026
Google Cloud’s VP of Global Demand & Growth, Sarah Kennedy Ellis, joined us for a day-three session at SaaStr AI 2026. She ran marketing at Marketo (sold to Adobe for $4.75B) and led marketing for Adobe’s enterprise software division before Google, so...
Events Work. Events Are Back. But Are They Worth the Big Expense?
Just got an email from a CEO yesterday that they closed a $450,000 TCV deal from a buyer they met at SaaStr Annual in September Don’t say events don’t work Be where your customers are. Even in the age of AI. — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) December 21,...
Dear SaaStr: How Much Do B2B Sales People Make in Commission?
Dear SaaStr: How Much Do B2B Sales People Make in Commission? "How to Build a Successful Sales Team Where Everyone Makes Good Money" @lennysan + @jasonlk More here -> https://t.co/XTFG4gqi0v pic.twitter.com/yD3Ub0VROa — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin...
Outbound Isn’t Dead. AI Just Radically Changed How It Works.
On the latest episode of The Agents, we brought on Sam Blond, founder and CEO of Monaco, the AI-native revenue platform, and one of the agents we actually run in production. Sam has run outbound at Brex, Zenefits, and EchoSign, spent time as a partner at Founders...
If Nothing Else – Segment Churn. You’ll See Patterns and Learnings You Wouldn’t Otherwise
Churn is not a GAAP metric. It doesn’t have a universal definition. Public companies and startups all seem to define churn differently. And even hide it in part, by doing so. I learned this myself starting out as a B2B CEO. I compared us to the only public...
Dear SaaStr: When Should I Pay Commission on B2B Sales that Close Themselves?
Dear SaaStr: When should I pay the commission for SaaS sales? All of our trial signups will get an automatic email from an account executive. How do we decide if the AE was responsible for the sale versus the sale just happened organically? Every company with a...
5 Interesting Learnings from Toast at $6.5 Billion Run-Rate: 22%+ Growth, Profitable, No Deceleration. But AI Is Just Getting Started
AI Vertical SaaS is hot now. Toast is … a dominant vertical SaaS leader becoming AI-first. Toast is running at a ~$6.5 billion revenue run-rate. At its core Toast is a payments business, with a high-margin software business as a subset inside it, a fintech...
Got 100 Customers? Believe It Or Not, It’s Time for Your First User Conference
When I was figuring out B2B as a CEO for the first time, the last thing I wanted to do was a Customer / User Conference. I understood the importance of events like Dreamforce. Salesforce is a complex product, with (sometimes) long deployment cycles, professional...
Dear SaaStr: What’s The One Trait You Look for When Assessing an Inside Sales Candidate?
Dear SaaStr: What’s The One Trait You Look for When Assessing an Inside Sales Candidate? I break it into two stages: In the early days, when you as founder/CEO are recruiting and managing the salesperson yourself, then the #1 most important criterion is that you would...
20VC x SaaStr: The Token ROI Crisis Comes for Everyone, Anthropic Wants Chinese Open Source Banned, and Microsoft Has Its Worst Month Since 2000
With Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll We recorded this on the last day of June, and one theme ran through almost every story: Companies quintupled their token spend in the first half of the year. Almost nobody can point to the revenue lift that...
Vercel Took a 10-Person SDR Team Down to 1. The Whole Thing Costs $5,000 a Year. With Vercel’s COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser.
Vercel’s COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser ran go-to-market at Google and Stripe for roughly a decade each before joining Vercel. Six weeks into the job, in June 2025, she stood up a go-to-market engineering team with one mandate: bring agents to everything in GTM. That...
Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense to Have Post-Sales Functions Report into Sales?
Dear SaaStr: Does It Make Sense to Have Post-Sales Functions Report into Sales? In many ways, this is the question of the day. So many SaaS companies, faced with slower growth, are moving CS in particular in to the sales department, trying to get more growth from the...
The Agents Is Back. Outbound Isn’t Dead. Our Agents Are Collapsing Into Each Other. And Collections Just Went on Autopilot.
Everyone keeps telling you the future is 100 specialized agents. In our stack, the opposite is happening. On the latest episode of The Agents, Amelia and I walked through the newest addition to our stack: an AI VP of Finance that went into production this week. The...
Figma Grows 46% and Trades at 6x. Everyone Else Growing 30%+ Trades at 15-36x.
Figma went public on July 31, 2025 at $33 a share, popped 250% on day one to close at $115.50, and got valued near $68 billion. It peaked at $142.92. This week it trades around $19, with a market cap near $10 billion. That is down roughly 87% from the high. Down about...
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