High inference costs are OK—if they make your product so viral and so competitive it almost sells itself Here’s the counterintuitive insight that’s reshaping how the smartest AI founders think about unit economics: Your inference costs aren’t your...
Remember the narrative? ChatGPT was going to kill Google Search. Perplexity was the “Google killer.” AI was going to make the search box obsolete. Well, Google just reported Q4 2025 earnings, and the data tells a very different story. Google Search revenue...
Dear SaaStr: How Do We Close Bigger Deals? If you already have a few bigger deals under your belt, but most are smaller … a few higher-level suggestions: #1. Hire a Very Good VP of Sales that has sold at your “high end” price point. They will be much better at you...
SVB just released their latest 2026 State of the Markets report, and it’s a great data-rich snapshots of the venture and startup ecosystem I’ve seen in a while. We dug through all 39 pages so you don’t have to. Here are the 10 biggest takeaways — and...
The IPO window is open again — kind of. IPOs are back, but even Figma is down from its IPO price. And two very different companies just walked through it with two very different outcomes. Wealthfront (WLTH) priced at the top of its range in December 2025 at...
Dear SaaStr: How Can You Ensure a Smooth Transition When A New Team Member Takes Over a Customer Account? Add value in the first interaction. This is so rare. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a random email, “Hi, Tony is gone from the...
ICONIQ Capital just released their January 2026 “State of AI: Bi-Annual Snapshot” report, surveying approximately 300 executives at software companies building AI products. The respondents include CEOs, Heads of Engineering, Heads of AI, Heads of Product,...
Nebius is one of the most successful hyperscalers and it seemed to come out of nowhere. But it didn’t — it spun out of Yandex after the 2022 geopolitical chaos, started essentially from scratch with their brand, and built a GPU cloud business that’s...
Dear SaaStr: What’s the #1 Reason You See Sales Reps Fail These Days? The #1 reason I see sales execs struggling today in new roles: they are convinced their playbook is better. And refuse to run the one that is already working. They are convinced they know...
M&A hit record highs last year. But like so many things in the AI Age, the benefits were not evenly distributed. For Plain Vanilla SaaS? PE has checked out. There’s a tough topic that it’s time to be honest about in 2026: PE is no longer coming to the...
