Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 4/5

Lemkin: Unemployed tech workers rejected jobs under $200k requiring direct individual work

Jason Lemkin · How the smartest founders are winning in AI · Jun 4, 2025 · at 1:10:54

SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin shares findings from a personal recruiting experiment reaching out to job seekers on LinkedIn.

0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Enough that I had like a micro connection that had been out of work for six months and I gave them jobs. All of them in the end basically said, I want to make 200 K or more only to do meetings or manage teams. None of them were willing to do any work themselves. None of them. The people with the circle.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Jason Lemkin

Opinion
Lemkin: Jony Ive's $6B AI device valuation is a great bet
“And then, you know, people think this Johnny Ive thing for six billion is crazy. It's a great bet because we're going to go from 20 minutes a day, 22 minutes a day in ChatGPT to 24 hours a day in ChatGPT.”
Jason Lemkin Jun 4, 2025 ▶ 16:13 How the smartest founders are winning in AI
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Traditional B2B SaaS interfaces and CRMs are going to die
“And when we're in ChatGPT 24 hours a day, we're not going to like pull up a CRM. We're not going to use the interfaces. Like these interfaces are all Already dying. You can see it, Sam. And then the amount of time you spend in GPT, like then go to like a B to …”
Jason Lemkin Jun 4, 2025 ▶ 16:26 How the smartest founders are winning in AI
Opinion
Lemkin: AI means software products are no longer durable
“I used to think all these products were durable. That they were durable. Now. I don't think any of them are durable.”
Jason Lemkin Jun 4, 2025 ▶ 20:29 How the smartest founders are winning in AI
Opinion
Lemkin: Founders without AI clarity should cash out $5M to $10M now
“The smartest play, if you can possibly pull it off today, is to go make five or ten million, cash out, and just chill. Because you can't predict where it's gonna go. Like, this is, the world's gonna, like, whatever you could do to liquidate your assets now, th…”
Jason Lemkin Jun 4, 2025 ▶ 1:02:45 How the smartest founders are winning in AI
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Lemkin: There will be no BDRs in one year
“There will be no BDRs in a year.”
Jason Lemkin Jun 4, 2025 ▶ 1:03:39 How the smartest founders are winning in AI
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Enterprise AI software will shock users within 24 months
“This is why your jaw is going to drop over the next 24 months, because just mediocre engineers cannot, like the engineers at OpenAI are so good. They're just so good. And so, but the average engineer working at a struggling CRM, right, it's just not that, that…”
Jason Lemkin Jun 4, 2025 ▶ 6:19 How the smartest founders are winning in AI
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.