by Jason Lemkin | Jul 17, 2026 | 5 Interesting Things, Blog Posts, Scale
Almost everyone wrote Zoom off a few years back. The innovative app everyone loved before 2020, but then almost a COVID one-hit-wonder that peaked in 2021 after going from $1B to $4B in ARR in one year. That would slowly bleed out as people went back to the office...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 17, 2026 | Blog Posts, Q&A
Dear SaaStr: Do Any Top B2B Events Give You “The List”? No, no good ones do, and for good reason. Top tier B2B events, especially ones focused on quality over volume, deliberately don’t hand over attendee lists to sponsors as a blanket data asset. If...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 16, 2026 | Blog Posts
With Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll Apple sued OpenAI for trade secret theft this week, and the details are ugly: a six-year Apple employee allegedly walked physical prototypes out the door for show-and-tell, encouraged by a 24-year Apple...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 16, 2026 | Blog Posts, Exit Strategy, Scale
Three $3B B2B Acquisitions in 30 Days: Intercom/Fin, Cognite, and MaintainX In about a month, three B2B companies recently were acquired for right around $3 billion each. On the surface they have nothing to do with each other: Salesforce bought Fin (the company...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 16, 2026 | Blog Posts, Fundraising
We all know SF is back, and the center of AI and AI+B2B. Carta’s latest data reinforces it. Carta just released its Startup Ecosystem Leaderboard covering the $124 billion invested into startups on its platform from July 2025 through June 2026. The Bay Area took...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 15, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, Fundraising, SaaStr.Ai
You already know Rory O’Driscoll from our weekly 20VC x SaaStr podcast, where he, Harry, and I go back and forth on exactly this stuff. He’s also been investing in software for 30+ years. Long enough, as he put it on stage at SaaStr AI, to have stayed...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 15, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai
Amelia our Chief AI Officer pinged me this morning with a screenshot and three words: “10K making less than … minimum wage.” This is what she was looking at. 10K, our AI VP of Marketing, had just wrapped a focused work session. The summary read: Time...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 15, 2026 | Blog Posts, Q&A
Dear SaaStr.ai: At what point has a start up do you hire a recruiter internally versus paying recruiters 20% fees? Hire a full-time internal recruiter once you’re hiring 5+ people per quarter consistently. Here’s the math: If you’re paying 20%...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 14, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai
We use Higgsfield almost every day at SaaStr AI. If you’ve watched any of our short videos, the intro to The Agents with me and Amelia, the event promos, the sponsorship teasers, all of it is built on Higgsfield. We’re also a proud early investor through...
by Jason Lemkin | Jul 14, 2026 | Blog Posts, SaaS Product Pricing |
So recently we had a B2B buying experience that led to a No that is very common but many don’t realize is there, or at least is there that much: A B2B Pricing Gap We went to buy Riverside, a podcasting tool, after years of being on Zoom. We wanted to move to...
