Dear SaaStr: The CEO of Our Competitor Wants to Meet – What Should I Do?
Dear SaaStr: Suppose the CEO of my competitor contacts me, interested in acquiring my app (privately owned). What steps would I take to avoid giving away proprietary information before the sale closes, if ever? Just meet. Meet all your competitors. You never know...
Gamma’s CEO: Why Getting to $100M ARR Without A Sales Team Worked. And Why It Was a Mistake.
Gamma crossed $100M ARR with 50 employees. Profitably. 50 million users. 600,000 paying subscribers. For most of that run, no sales team at all. That works out to $2M in ARR per employee, at a price point where the average paying customer is worth about $167 a year....
Dear SaaStr: What’s Your #1 Opener in Sales?
Dear SaaStr: What’s Your #1 Opener in Sales? The best opener is sharing how a very similar company or a competitor uses your product — and the exact specific ROI that customer gets. Everyone wants to know the playbooks of similar companies and competitors. How...
Klaviyo’s CEO on Building at $1.5B With Agents: “Dark Factory,” Composer, and Why Every Single Employee Had to Hit L3 by June
Klaviyo co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki came to SaaStr AI to walk through how a 2,300-person public company builds AI products. Not the vision deck. The actual build system. Klaviyo won B2B for e-commerce with one insight: instead of showing merchants how many...
Databricks Just Crossed $7B ARR Growing 80% (!): A 30-Point Acceleration, a $190B Valuation, and the Margin Bill for Agents
This is almost unprecedented in B2B software Databricks just announced it crossed a $7 billion revenue run-rate in Q2, growing more than 80% year over year, and closed a $5 billion strategic round at a $190 billion valuation led by Coatue. Today, we announced that we...
Canva Cuts 2026 Growth by a Third, Jeff Dean Walks Out of Google, and Elon Builds His Own Fab: 20VC x SaaStr
The week the “AI is just a feature we’ll add” argument stopped working, and three pay bands replaced two. This week on 20VC x SaaStr with Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll, we started somewhere other than OpenAI and Anthropic...
B2B For Physical Products Is Crushing It: Shopify +34%, Toast +23%, Samsara +30%
AI is beating down many public software companies. But not many of the leaders servicing the physical world. Some is that they don’t tie pricing models primarily to seats. But it isn’t only the pricing model. Their customers’ end products aren’t the...
Dear SaaStr: At What ACV Size Do I Need an Account Manager in B2B?
Dear SaaStr: At What ACV Size Do I Need an Account Manager in B2B? There’s no hard rule, but here’s what the data shows: Below $8K-$10K ACV: You can’t afford dedicated account managers. You need to systematize onboarding and support...
Beware the “Mediocre Recycled.” The Zombie Executives of B2B + AI.
So I wrote a version of this post a while back, and it struck a chord. A lot of founders reached out and said some version of “I just hired one of these.” Or worse, “I’ve hired three.” But I’m updating it now because I’m...
A Checklist: 10 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire a Sales Rep
Never hire anyone in sales that doesn't care about money You'll see — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) June 24, 2025 So you’re hiring your first few sales reps in the early days? Before you have a great VP of Sales? It’s an interesting...
5 Interesting Learnings from Palo Alto Networks at $11.4 Billion in Revenue: 60% ARR Growth, 120% NRR, and a $25B Acquisition That Doubled the Stock
Palo Alto Networks is now a ~$265B market cap company. The stock is up roughly 100% over the past twelve months and hit an all-time high of $368.80 in July. What makes it interesting isn’t the run. It’s how they got it. They spent about $29B on...
90%-95% of Salespeople Won’t Make It At Your Startup. A 6 Part Test to Help You Get It Right.
Most salespeople will succeed somewhere … but fail at >your< specific startup Earlier stage startups: – Have no brand – Have no/little training– Have very few resources Most important is making sure they will thrive at your startup Not...
Pylon’s Founders at SaaStr AI Day: How Its Support Team Deflected 50% of Tickets Without Increasing Headcount
Marty Kausas and Advith Chelikani on why deflection rate is the wrong numberin CX. And what they’re replacing it with, and what you should, too. Pylon closed out the latest SaaStr AI Day with the two co-founders walking through the launch they shipped the week...
How Mailchimp Went From $1B+ ARR to … Shrinking Inside Intuit. A Death Spiral in the Age of AI?
A product that won by doing one thing perfectly spent seven years becoming several. Now its parent publishes growth figures with it removed, and the platforms where new apps get built don’t list it at all. Prompted by a read of Doug Dennison’s “The...
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