by Jason Lemkin | May 23, 2026 | Blog Posts, Early, Marketing, Marketing, Q&A |
Dear SaaStr: A Big Tech Co Launched a Competitive Product. How Can I Tell How Serious They Are About It? In B2B at least, I’ll give you a few metrics that are fairly reliable. The classic one still works, but in 2026 you need to layer in some new signals too....
by Jason Lemkin | May 22, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai
For our entire careers in tech, the standard management test has been: “Given what you know now, would you hire this person again?” It’s a decent HR framework. It forces honesty. If the answer is no, you have your decision. But in 2026, the question...
by Jason Lemkin | May 22, 2026 | Blog Posts
With Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll Anthropic is closing $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation. That’s nearly triple the $380 billion price from February. Andre Karpathy joined Anthropic the same week. Cerebras priced its IPO at $185,...
by Jason Lemkin | May 22, 2026 | Blog Posts, Growth, Marketing, Marketing, Q&A |
Dear SaaStr: Should Your Ask a Prospect What Competitors They Are Looking At? Yes. And in 2026, more than ever. You’ll find 90% of the time you’ll want to not just tell a prospect who you are competing with, but do so aggressively. And box the competition...
by Jason Lemkin | May 21, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai
When Claude Opus 4.6 shipped in December 2025, Anthropic’s commercial team came back from winter break to find demand had gone vertical. They hadn’t hired for it. They hadn’t planned for it. As Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic’s Head of Industries...
by Jason Lemkin | May 21, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai
ICONIQ just released their latest 2026 GTM benchmark report, surveying 150+ B2B software companies in January. The findings line up with what we’re seeing in our portfolio, what we saw at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, and what we’re doing inside SaaStr itself....
by Jason Lemkin | May 21, 2026 | Blog Posts, Customer Success, Growth |
Having high net revenue / dollar retention is the magic of B2B. If you have 120% NRR, you double in less than 5 years, even with no new customers. Above that, you really get into magical compounding growth. But here’s the 2026 reality check: high NRR has gotten...
by Jason Lemkin | May 20, 2026 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai
Most of the discussion about AI agents in B2B right now treats the agent as a feature you ship: a chat box, a copilot, a magical button inside your product. That framing has been throwing people off, including me, for the past year. What’s actually working at...
by Jason Lemkin | May 20, 2026 | 5 Interesting Things, Blog Posts, Scale
On paper, this was a strong quarter for HubSpot. Maybe not epic, but strong. HubSpot reported Q1 ’26 with revenue of $881M, up 23% … as reported. Subscription revenue alone hit $862.3M, putting ARR run-rate around $3.45B. They beat consensus by $18M....
by Jason Lemkin | May 20, 2026 | Blog Posts, Customer Success, Growth, Marketing |
Recently I was catching up with a good friend who used to be CEO of an enterprise-y B2B social networking company. The usage and engagement numbers of his business were just awful. Customers bought because they thought their organizations needed this functionality,...
