Jason Lemkin
448 statements across 106 episodes · 159 bullish · 140 bearish · 11 people on the record · first statement Feb 26, 2015 by Jason Lemkin · said 131 times in 67 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Jason Lemkin's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Sam Blond (34), Nick Mehta (7), Andy Wilson (7), Amelia LeRutte (6), Christoph Janz (4), Brendon Cassidy (4), Hande Cilingir (3), Cliff Bockard (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 16 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- The Agents #011 - From 0 to 20 Agents and Back Again, Are Agents Finally Consolidating?
- How to Build Your Own AI VP of Marketing Step-by-Step
- How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & Follow-Up with Agentforce, Momentum, Mangomint + SaaStr
- CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina
- $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 10 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- 5 Ways AI Has Already Changed B2B Sales Forever with Perplexity's CBO Dmitry Shevelenko
- Why Only “WTF” Products Can Survive Today with Brett Queener Partner at Bonfire Ventures
- Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster
- From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 10 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Deep Dive: Easy Sales Concepts So Many Get Wrong with Sam Blond
- 6 Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves to Drive Value from Generative AI with Base10 Partners
- Bringing Product-Led and Sales-Led Growth Together For Go-To-Market Success with Zapier's CRO
- Deep Dive: AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with HyperGrowth Partners
- What It Really Takes to Be Successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales with Christian Smith, CRO of Splunk
- The 7 Biggest Mistakes CMOs Make (And How to Avoid Them) with the CMOs of Databricks, Zoom, and Okta
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 38 mentions in 16 episodes 2 per episode
- CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment and Hiring Managers With Ben Braverman
- CRO Confidential: 3 Secrets For Early-Stage Startups To Acquire Customers | CoSell.io Co-Founder
- Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: My Top 10 Failures as a SaaS CEO & What I've Learned
- How to Grow Revenue Faster in the Second Half of 2023 with Founders Fund
- How To Boost Your Net Retention Revenue (NRR) to Over 140% with Insider's CEO and CMO
- From Uncertainty to +$400M: How Braze Found Opportunity in Headwinds with Braze Co-Founder & CEO
- How The Biggest Product-Led Enterprise Company In The World Did It | Atlassian CRO Cameron Deatsch
- 10 Things Top CROs Wish They Knew Early in Our Careers with CRO Justworks
- 8 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 22 mentions in 15 episodes 1 per episode
- Big Numbers from Small Customers: How DigitalOcean Accelerated at Scale | DigitalOcean SVP, Revenue
- Balancing Growth and Efficiency in Tougher Times | Point Nine Managing Partner Christoph Janz
- Scaling From $10M-$100M ARR: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with Showpad Co-Founder Pieterjan Bouten
- 5 Scale-Up Mistakes for Startups with Dave Kellogg | SaaStr Software Community
- How to Set and Hit Revenue Targets with Sam Blond, CRO at Brex | SaaStr Software Community
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond + Rippling VP Sales Matt Plank
- How to Manage 100+ SDRs Across 4 Continents | Snowflake VP, Global Sales Development Lars Nilsson
- Growth vs. Efficiency: How to Weatherproof Your SaaS Startup for Tougher Times | Christoph Janz
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 11 mentions in 9 episodes 1 per episode
- Shifting to the Next Gear: Proven Strategies to Accelerate Growth with Intercom CEO Karen Peacock
- Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: 10 Things That Are Changing Now in Customer Success | SaaStr 2021
- Adding Outbound Sales & Marketing to a Product-Led Growth Engine Freshworks, Twilio, 1Password, Coda
- The Most Common SaaS Sales Potholes and How to Avoid Them with Mark Roberge, HubSpot's ex-CRO
- Beyond Product-led Growth: 7 Lessons Learned in Product-Led Scaling with Dropbox GM Rachel Wolan
- State of the Cloud 2021 with Bessemer Venture Partners | SaaStr Software Community
- How to Build a Unicorn in 8 Simple Charts with SafeGraph
- How to Build a Great Intern Program from Scratch | @shopify VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2019 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- "Land, Expand, Explode: How to Win the Long-Game in SaaS" Egnyte Co-Founder Rajesh Ram
- How to Build a CSM Team that Generates 130% Net Retention with Talkdesk
- Lessons from Gorgias: How to Close your First 1000 Customers Based Solely on Data
- How we did it: Gender Equality, Equal Pay, and Racial Equality with Salesforce
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2017 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Jason Lemkin, oldest first
Feb 26, 2015 neutral
Jul 7, 2017 neutral
Startup leadership fatigue and executive turnover peak at year five
“Year five is where it gets tough. You get tired. And the best CEOs and VPs and teams push through to that sixth year. And the other ones, it's tough. You see a lot of transition in five years. You see a lot of folks handing the reins to other folks.”
Jul 7, 2017 neutral
Jul 10, 2017 bearish
Mar 17, 2018 positive
Lemkin: Multi-million dollar SaaS accounts require dedicated project managers and specialists
“Big accounts today need someone that can whiteboard an account that can map business process change over multiple years. And in the early days, that's often the CEO or the founders, but that doesn't scale. So do I need a project manager? Yes. Do I need support…”
Mar 17, 2018 negative
Jun 6, 2018 positive
Jun 6, 2018
Jun 6, 2018 positive
Oct 5, 2018 negative
Mar 18, 2020 neutral
Lemkin: Do not confuse easy VC Zoom discovery calls with closable deals
“I'm personally not that interested in discovery, but folks that want to learn a lot, they'll take Zooms and meetings they might not always have time for, and that does not mean that that that deal has a high chance of closing. So there's almost strain, can be …”
Mar 18, 2020 positive
Lemkin: A 50% SaaS usage spike strongly predicts logo retention
“I strongly suspect that if you're seeing 50% increase in your customer's monthly act, daily, hourly users, if you have this, you may not be able to tomorrow get a whole bunch more seats, right? Not only because you may not be, you have utility pricing, but als…”
Mar 18, 2020 positive
Mar 18, 2020 bearish
Mar 18, 2020
Mar 27, 2020 negative
Mar 27, 2020 neutral
Lemkin: Failing to raise quickly out of top accelerators creates negative signaling
“I think if you are in a top tier accelerator and you don't get funded quickly, there is a bit of a black star, a scarlet mark. It's not huge, but if you're, it's not just YC, but if you're in a top program, there's an assumption that Bessemer has an army of an…”
May 20, 2020 neutral
Nov 5, 2020 negative
Lemkin: Hiring a sales VP two growth stages ahead almost always fails
“But my real point is, if you hire someone that's two stages above where you're at and bring them in, high, high chance of failure, right? You know, I think you can risk doing one stage above. So in other words, if you're doing one million, Right? I think you c…”
Nov 5, 2020 positive
Lemkin: Upgrading a sales director to VP works if they have hiring experience
“The other type of risk to take is someone that's more junior than you want, right? It's, you're gonna hire a director of sales masquerading as a VP of sales, right? And there's, the trade-offs there, I think that generally works as long as they've at least hir…”
Nov 5, 2020 negative
Lemkin: Product evangelist sales hires fail by $1.5M revenue 90% of the time
“Sometimes you do need to hire this person because you're burnt out and you need leverage, but this person will be gone by a million and a half in revenue. I can tell you nine times out of 10, the person that, that's totally smart, 160 IQ, loves your product, c…”
Nov 5, 2020 neutral
Nov 8, 2020 positive
Lemkin: Enterprise products need self-service to enforce product usability
“No matter how enterprise your app is, it should have a self-service component. Because if it does, you will be able to figure out how to get to the atomic element of this app without training, right? If you have no self-service, you can skip, you can have as m…”
Jan 9, 2021 negative
Lemkin: An Executive's Fear of Hitting Next Year's Target Is Incurable
“That fear, it's, I've never seen it cured. I've never seen that fear of the next year's number. You should have anxiety, but that's not fear. Anxiety is, I don't know if these five ideas will work, but I'm going to try it. They should work.”
Jan 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Add 25% to Your Most Conservative Cash Needs Estimate
“My rule or my advice is to founders is figure out how much money you need. Bootstrap, venture backed, whatever. Do it on a spreadsheet, do it carefully, then be conservative, then add 25%. If you raise that extra 25%, and then it's the right amount.”
Jan 9, 2021 positive
Jan 9, 2021
Jan 29, 2021 positive
Mar 18, 2021 negative
Mar 18, 2021 positive
Lemkin: New sales hires should spend their first 30 days purely shadowing
“For the first 30 days, no employee has to do anything but shadow. There is no quota. There are no sales. You should not even do your own call. You will not get a lead. You are paired with Sam or Abigail or Jody in any role, but especially sales and marketing. …”
Apr 18, 2021
Sep 17, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Early-stage SaaS startups now possess sophisticated churn analytics in year one
“The instrumentation that I see early stage is shocking. The data, the metrics, their insight, Their cohort. I still don't even know how to do a cohort analysis myself. Their ability to do that in year one to segment churn by category, right? They get it.”
Sep 17, 2021 negative
Nov 17, 2021 bullish
Nov 17, 2021
Nov 17, 2021 bullish
Lemkin: All Top-Quartile Cloud Companies at $100M ARR Will Hit $1B
“The top quartile, not the top one or two, the top quartile is growing triple digits at a hundred million, and when you think about compounding, assuming those have ARRs approaching north of a hundred, that means they're all gonna hit a billion in revenue.”
Nov 17, 2021 bullish
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Investors should maximize share allocation in winning startups
“When you meet a winner, when you meet a winner, you buy all the shares. Now, if you can buy a quarter of the company, you buy a quarter of the company. If you can buy two percent of the company, you buy two percent of the company. But you either buy all of the…”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Nov 30, 2021 negative
Lemkin: Never invest in founders without a 20-year commitment to scale
“When you don't see that, my rule is, and I've made this mistake since, don't invest. No matter how much you love the founder, you can love them as humans. They can be doing very well. But if you don't have this crazy 20 year commitment to building something hu…”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Only hiring founder-like VPs can save founders from burnout
“What bails you out of tiredness again and again, if you get bailed out, if you do, Is that magical VP that you find that is more than a VP. That is almost like a founder. Almost like a founder, right? And that is the only thing that has saved me over time. And…”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Dec 9, 2021 negative
Lemkin: Never hire non-SaaS sales or marketing leaders when scaling
“For sales, marketing, product, and engineering, I would not take, I would not, if I'm scaling, hire someone that does not have a pure SaaS broker. There's too many folks that do. There's no point in hiring a salesperson that hasn't sold SaaS. I ain't gonna tak…”
Dec 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Accelerating deployment speed is the best cheat to improve SaaS retention
“The other one that I think is almost a call that the people don't talk enough about is as activation rates and time to deployment. Right. And that is one of your best cheats here to improve things is to get your customers to deploy as instantly as possible.”
Dec 9, 2021
Dec 9, 2021
Lemkin: Series A/B SaaS startups must have top-quartile NRR to get funded
“So look, if you go meet with a VC and let's say your enterprise, ok, and your NRR is only a hundred percent in the enterprise, not good enough. It's got to be north of a 120 in the enterprise, right? Let's say your SMB and you're below 95%, not good enough for…”
Dec 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Early SaaS startups can hire CS talent outside SaaS
“If you're below four or five million in revenue, so customer success is still hands-on. It's not all systems and process and tools, right? It's not all instrumentation. I can take more risk in CS. I can take someone that's smart. I could take someone that has …”
Dec 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: First enterprise customers must get a dedicated CS hire
“When you close your first enterprise customer, and maybe that's 50 K to start, maybe it's a hundred K later, it's a million or ten million or a hundred million if your Salesforce, that first 50 K to make, maybe it's 20 K if your product's 200 dollars a year an…”
Dec 9, 2021
Dec 9, 2021
Dec 13, 2021
Peacock: SaaS NRR Benchmarks: 120% Enterprise, 110% Mid-Market, 100% SMB
“Some of the things that we've seen in terms of benchmarks are for enterprise companies, so B to B SaaS companies selling to the enterprise. You want to have a net revenue retention of a 120% or above. Oftentimes the best companies are way, way above this. If y…”
Apr 1, 2022 negative
Lemkin: Blind deference to startup investors becomes toxic over time
“This deferential relationship to your investors, it is It can be subtly toxic if you let it go on for too long. It can be, they don't know, and they will even many of them will even encourage it. They're used to it. They're used to this slightly Imperial relat…”
Jun 24, 2022 positive
Jun 24, 2022 negative
Lemkin: SaaS companies cannot cut their way to growth
“You can't freeze hiring and hit the plan. You can't cut your way to growth. It doesn't work. Whatever your issues are, cutting, sometimes you have to cut if you have two months of burn, but you can never cut your way to growth, and it especially doesn't work i…”
Jun 24, 2022 negative
Jun 24, 2022 bullish
Jun 24, 2022 negative
Lemkin: Hiring Junior PMs from Big Tech Brands Is a Founder Mistake
“And 98% of you, 96% of you, I think, make the same mistake. You hire a junior person. Ok, I'm gonna go hire a product manager that worked on one pixel at Twilio, or worked on one little thing at some great company. They don't know how to ship products into pro…”
Jun 24, 2022 neutral
Jun 24, 2022 positive
Jun 24, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Hiring a VP of Product at $3M–$5M ARR Accelerates SaaS Growth
“If you hire a great VP of product at three, four, five million, and you have a sales driven motion, if you haven't done it, magic happens. A great VP of product immediately, her or his first two weeks will go meet with your top 20 customers, magically. They'll…”
Jul 6, 2022 negative
Jul 6, 2022 positive
Schuck: ZoomInfo Drives 10x LTV to CAC on $20k-$50k Lands
“It's a lot of science that goes into the way that we generate the leads, we route the leads, and then we close new business, and that drives a 10 X LTV to CAC, a sub-thirty day sales cycle, often deals are closed same day, and these are not like, you know, two…”
Jul 6, 2022
Lemkin: Boards give equal measures of best and worst advice
“I think your board gives you some of your best advice and some of your worst advice. And about, without knowing it, and about equal measure, and you gotta, it's your job to realize you have to decide, right? And the bad advice isn't wrong, but it's wrong for y…”
Jul 6, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Cross-Questioning Is the Most Valuable Part of Early Staff Meetings
“I actually think in, in the earliest days, this is the most valuable part of an e-staff meeting or a staff meeting is to get, it doesn't matter, everyone presents, but the cross questions, it's a format that forces people once a week to ask these questions, ri…”
Jul 6, 2022
Schuck: ZoomInfo Calls Inbound Leads Within 90 Seconds via Algorithmic Matching
“If you go fill out a form on the ZoomInfo website today, somebody will call you within 90 seconds. The person who's calling you has been algorithmically chosen as the SDR who's most likely to convert your type of company and your level of buyer into, ah, an op…”
Jul 20, 2022 negative
Kellogg: Enterprise SaaS startups should wait until $100M+ ARR for second product
“In terms of second product, I talked about Jason Lemkin's work before, but he's done a series of tweets and blogs, and from his research to me, for most companies, it's probably a hundred million plus in ARR, and maybe multiple, for the companies I work with, …”
Aug 25, 2022
Lemkin: Do not hire a VP of Sales before two reps hit quota
“Get two AEs that hit quota. One's not enough. If it's one, you don't know why. If it's one, the VP of sales doesn't know why. If it's two, the VP of sales is a hiring job mainly. If you have two hitting quota and the VP of sales is good, even if they're new, e…”
Aug 25, 2022 bearish
Lemkin: Low-margin software and fintech businesses will remain out of favor
“It's gonna be a long time until folks are comfortable with lower quality revenue again, and what I mean is fintechs with 20% margins companies, you know, folks with huge, with, even, even folks like Twilio, one of the best companies in the history of, Cloud an…”
Aug 25, 2022 neutral
Aug 25, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Go-to-market motions are dictated by ACV rather than product features
“If there is any genius in Sastra that's now 10 years old, it's abstracting product away from the fact that our go-to-market motions are pretty much the same at an ACV. Like, it sounds obviously, but 10 years ago, it's like, it was really disruptive that, hey, …”
Aug 25, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Crowded SaaS markets signal ample budget for single-feature products
“Crowded space means there's a lot of buyers and there's a lot of money. Crowded space means that, crowded space also means you don't have to do everything. You don't have to do every single function to still get a customer.”
Aug 25, 2022
Lemkin: Hiring a sales head gives the founder zero time back
“When you hire a VP of sales or director or whatever, head of sales, this is how many minutes you get back in your day. Zero. Now. Now. What does happen is if they're any good, they re, they rework your calendar. Instead of the CEO being the opener, and the mid…”
Aug 25, 2022
Lemkin: EchoSign listed 20 fake integrations to gauge demand before building
“When we launched back in the, Adobe Sign, he put 20 integrations on our marketing site, of which we did none. Now other people do this. He's like, well, I'm not sure people want a Salesforce integration back then, but I'll make a page that says we have it, and…”
Aug 25, 2022 positive
Aug 25, 2022 bullish
Lemkin: Cloud startups should accelerate moving upmarket to enterprise
“So much of the money is going into bigger enterprises today in cloud that it's a good conservative bet to go to accelerate that six or nine months in your product roadmap. Go a little more enterprise now where there's less sensitivity, less volatility.”
Aug 25, 2022 negative
Aug 25, 2022 neutral
Aug 25, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Hiring is better today because experienced SaaS talent actually exists
“Cry me a river that a hundred people want to hire your VP, but at least she exists. Like it's actually better today because the people exist, okay? It is better than it has ever been. And of course it's competitive because there's more startups than ever, but …”
Aug 25, 2022 positive
Aug 25, 2022 negative
Lemkin: Single-digit tech layoffs do not solve SaaS hiring shortages
“The problem with small layoffs. Like if you lay off a small number of people, a lot of them are not the best people. So great. Like some company lays off four percent, like there are gems there and go find the gems and hire them. There really are gems in every…”
Aug 25, 2022 positive
Sep 15, 2022 neutral
Sep 16, 2022
Sep 16, 2022 positive
Sep 16, 2022 neutral
Sep 16, 2022 positive
Lemkin: First software sales hires must have sold at comparable ACVs
“When you hire your first couple reps, they do need to have sold a software product And I vaguely similar, something, at least at vaguely close to your ACV, like they can't have sold pool equipment or plastic. I sometimes people hire that. I all, it can work ou…”
Sep 16, 2022 negative
Sep 16, 2022
Sep 16, 2022
Sep 16, 2022 bearish
Lemkin: Hiring a sales leader before two reps hit quota is risky
“Like it's hyper risky to hire a head of sales, even a stretch one before you have two reps that hit quota because a head of sales job is to hire reps three through 300, not to create product market fit, not to create the playbook, but to take a really rough pl…”
Sep 16, 2022
Lemkin: Startups should set C-10, C-60, and C-90 operational plans
“The 60 is probably where your core plan should be. We have a 60% chance thinking we can do it. More likely than not, but barely. That's how you build your core model. Your core model's for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. And…”
Sep 16, 2022
Sep 16, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Undecided founders should always join Y Combinator for institutional signaling
“If you're not sure, I always tell founders, just do it. Even if you have the revenue, even if you have, if there's a missing slice, like, just go to Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, get it done, and it's worth it, right?”
Sep 16, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Upgrading support drives sales without shipping new features
“Even if you don't ship another feature this year, you can go back, and you can upgrade your support next week, and you can do some of it next week, and you can do over four to six weeks, and your MPS will go up, your sales will go up a little bit, Your NRR wil…”
Nov 1, 2022 negative
Dec 2, 2022
Dec 7, 2022
Lemkin: SaaS Downturn Performance Must Be Judged Strictly Against Direct Competitors
“You gotta know how your peer set is doing, because if you don't actually know how you're doing in these environments. If you're growing faster than your competitors and you've got 10 years of runway, everyone should get a Christmas bonus. If you have, if you a…”
Dec 7, 2022 positive
Jan 10, 2023 neutral
Jan 10, 2023 bearish
Jan 10, 2023 bullish
Jan 10, 2023 positive
Jan 10, 2023 positive
Jan 10, 2023 negative
Feb 3, 2023
Feb 3, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Talkdesk was the only SaaS unicorn he knew would hit $1B
“I had no idea that any of my cash unicorns, right, the ones that were exited for billions, I didn't, Think any of them would except for talk desk. I did. I, and it's not that I didn't love the founders. It's just so hard, right? It's just so hard to build thes…”
Feb 3, 2023 bullish
Feb 3, 2023 neutral
Feb 3, 2023 bullish
Lemkin: Public SaaS multiples will rebound 20% to 40% by late 2023
“And so I'm pretty bullish at the end of this year. I'm bullish that multiples will be up somewhere between 20 and 40%, and I believe that will lead to a rush to deploy capital, but for founders, you have to understand that will never lead to a return of 2021.”
Feb 3, 2023 bearish
Feb 3, 2023 positive
Lemkin: Near-Death Startup Fundraising Stories Will Return
“Almost every top founder I knew almost ran out of money, but they didn't. They almost all had that great story, right? You get them on stage outside of the last two years, you're getting on stage, you know, we were three weeks away. We only, We had to meet 700…”
Feb 3, 2023
Feb 3, 2023 bearish
Feb 3, 2023 bullish
Lemkin predicts startup recovery by late 2023 but severe pipeline shortages
“We're cutting too much in marketing. And I'll tell you what I think we should be doing. We're cutting too much and it's going to hurt everybody, not this week or even this quarter, but it's going to hurt everyone's going to not going to have enough pipeline at…”
Feb 3, 2023 negative
Lemkin: CAC is a flawed metric because acquisition is bimodal
“This is why CAC is such a flawed metric, because if your customer, let's say your average deal size is five K, a five K a year customer. You're actually not gonna have anything that's, where you can spend 5000 dollars to get a 5000 dollar customer. You're gonn…”
Feb 3, 2023
Lemkin: Startups that stay in strategic retreat for a year never recover
“If you do a brief strategic retreat as a startup, it's fine.
Take a quarter, get your house in order, right?
Get rid of that terrible VP, cut your burn rate.
But if you stay in strategic retreat for a year, you never pull out of it, right?”
Feb 3, 2023 neutral
Feb 3, 2023 bearish
Feb 3, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Early-stage CEOs are sales proxies, but the CTO is the product
“I view the CEO as the proxy for sales and marketing. Like if the CEO is great with some help, maybe you and I can, we're working on a search together day. We can help you find a sales and marketing leader. But I don't really care who you have at a hundred K in…”
Feb 3, 2023 bearish
Lemkin: Founders must assume they are unfundable absent proof
“There's still delusion across all of the markets, and I still anger founders when I bring it up. I still get Toxic comments, but you just have to assume absent evidence, you're unfundable. Like, go find, go get a term sheet, or just go get someone you trust to…”
Feb 3, 2023 bearish
Lemkin: Unfundable startups will not become fundable in a market recovery
“If you can't raise any money at all today, like if you're unfundable, I don't think you're going to be fundable at the end of the year. Ok, if you're fundable today, but you don't like the metrics, you don't like the valuation, you double the end of this year …”
Feb 3, 2023 negative
Feb 3, 2023
Feb 3, 2023 bearish
Lemkin: Tech Boom Employees Will Not Leave to Found Major Startups
“Startups sucked so many human beings into it. Thousands of SDRs, thousands of AEs, thousands of marketing managers and social media strategists that these became just or highly paid ordinary jobs. Highly paid ordinary jobs, and I don't think any of those peopl…”
Feb 3, 2023 positive
Feb 3, 2023
Lemkin: A startup's base plan is its trailing 3-4 month average
“First of all, you have to look at your trailing velocity. You have to look at your last three to four months, average the growth rate, average the burn rate. And that's who you are. Whoever, whatever you've been growing or burning last week, even if you want t…”
Feb 7, 2023 neutral
Blond: Current challenging sales environment is a return to normal
“Well, my personal perspective on this, which is relatively aligned with Jason Lemkin's is we've sort of returned to normal. Normal is, is still much more challenging selling environment than we've experienced over the last two to three years.”
Mar 10, 2023 positive
Mar 10, 2023 neutral
Mar 10, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: 30 of 32 founders I backed faced a 'year of hell'
“I've invested in about 32 founders. About four don't like me. Now I'm not cuddly. Ok, I'm not kumbaya, but I'm about the most honest and earnest person you're gonna find. Ok, I don't, I'm not trying to screw anybody over. I'm not trying, I'm just trying to hel…”
Mar 10, 2023 positive
Lemkin: Bootstrapped and venture SaaS models converge at $10M-$20M revenue
“Somewhere between 10 and twenty million in revenue, depending on your sales motion, the models converge. The models converge. So, if you have twenty million in revenue and you're bootstrapped, and you're willing to spend all 20, right, you can basically hire a…”
Mar 10, 2023
Lemkin: EchoSign Fully Localized Its Software at $3M to $4M ARR
“Back in the day when I was running Adobe Sign, Echo Sign, and we were competing with DocuSign, we fully, and it was a pain, right? It was fully, we fully localized a two-byte app all across the, every piece of it, in every language under the world and we did i…”
Mar 10, 2023 bearish
Lemkin: None of my unicorn portfolio companies plan to raise capital again
“I have several that, a couple that raised it north of a billion dollars in valuation with double digits, ah, millions in revenue, ok? And hooray, they have a lot of money in the bank. None of them are ever planning to ever raise another dollar of capital. It's…”
Mar 10, 2023
Apr 26, 2023
Apr 26, 2023 positive
Lemkin: Enterprise SaaS Needs a Second Act by 1,000 Customers
“By 500 to a thousand at the latest, if you're enterprise, you got to have a second act. And it turns out as you're approaching 5000 to 10,000 for SMB, you just start hitting, it's just kind of the next, once in a while there's exceptions, as you say, right? Bu…”
Apr 26, 2023 bullish
May 18, 2023 bullish
May 18, 2023 neutral
May 18, 2023 bearish
May 18, 2023 neutral
May 18, 2023 negative
May 18, 2023 bullish
May 18, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Bay Area post-seed startups cap at 10x to 15x current revenue
“Basically, seed valuations in the Bay Area have not changed that much and after that, basically everything's getting done at, 10 X-ish if you're really good, 10 X current revenues, and here's the important point. If you're on fire, well this is what I've learn…”
May 18, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: 3x SaaS fund returns require 10x public revenue multiples
“Once the top public companies are trading at about 10 X on average, 10 X or above, that's normalcy for venture. And you can make a spreadsheet and you can talk about why and how ownership works out to distributions and, but it's pretty hard to build a three X …”
Jun 16, 2023 bearish
Jun 16, 2023 neutral
Jun 16, 2023 bearish
Jul 12, 2023 positive
Lemkin: A startup's first 50 employees must be 'pirates or romantics'
“Your first 50 employees, your first 50, have to be pirates or romantics. They have to be pirates or romantics. You know what I'm talking about. These are folks on your team that for reasons that almost don't make sense, live in, lead startups.”
Jul 14, 2023 positive
Lemkin: Do Not Prematurely Cut Services If They Enable the Software Solution
“I would actually, and this is different advice from some, I would keep that mix as long as your funding allows it. Knowing almost nothing about your business, but pattern matching. Because when you make the solution worse, you lose some of your magic.”
Jul 14, 2023 neutral
Jul 14, 2023 negative
Lemkin: The number one reason SaaS startups fail is an inadequate CTO
“The number one reason I see these failures happen is when the CEO's like pretty good, they're committed, they'll do it for 10 years, they'll run up the hill, they'll, they'll hustle, they'll get the sales, but the CTO isn't that good.”
Jul 14, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Firing an okay sales VP without a replacement leads to spirals
“What you usually find is if you get rid of the good but not great VP of sales, And don't have a plan. Don't have someone to replace her or him. Don't have a strategy. I see companies go into a spiral they often struggle to recover from.”
Jul 14, 2023 positive
Lemkin: Founders should be 90% transparent when layering sales executives
“The answer is always be 90% transparent, and do what the business needs to be done, and be open about it. And sometimes they will quit, but it's ok. Like, it sucks, but it's ok. You, don't hide the ball, don't try to do a stealth search”
Jul 14, 2023 neutral
Jul 14, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Learning deep VC mechanics is wasteful until you are fundraising
“You want to learn just enough. To know how the world works. You want to learn how fundraising really works, why companies get funded, what the bar is to raise... You want to get that smart, but any smarter is not a good use of your time until you're raising mo…”
Jul 14, 2023
Lemkin: Founders over-index on sales over marketing due to lack of trust
“Almost all founders
over put more energy into sales and marketing for a variety of reasons. They don't know demand gen. Sometimes they don't trust it if they haven't done it. They think it's too soft. So that is an issue. Also, there's another reality that i…”
Jul 14, 2023 bullish
Lemkin: Zero percent of truly great, persistent founders with great CTOs fail
“I think that all the metrics on startups that fail, that 90% fail, I think these are Sony baloney metrics. I think, Truly great founders, truly great, that have a great CTO and CTO, or a CTO that can be both, that can build amazing software, that do not quit, …”
Jul 14, 2023 positive
Jul 14, 2023 neutral
Jul 14, 2023 neutral
Jul 14, 2023 negative
Jul 14, 2023
Lemkin: Most founders underestimate sales hiring capacity needed months ahead
“What most folks do wrong, almost all COs I remember I actually did it with Sam and Parker in the early days of Zenefits, and then they got it right, is they just don't calculate
Just the amount of human capital it will take to hit these numbers. And they usua…”
Jul 19, 2023 positive
Owner.com's growth bottleneck is customer onboarding, not demand generation
“Owner.com. Jason introduced me to the company. Jason's an investor. Their bottleneck is implementation. They have a lot of demand. They have a lot of customers that are signing up. And right now it's just taking too long to onboard those folks that are raising…”
Aug 3, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Adobe Sign lost 50% market share after removing viral free conversion
“And when we, almost a week after I left after acquisition, that got ripped out of the product, the whole free thing, the whole free conversion. And because it didn't help anyone there, But then over the next three years, there may be a variety of reasons, mark…”
Aug 3, 2023 positive
Lemkin: Founders should model operations on a rolling Last Four Months average
“This is my number one tip. It always works. It always works. You have to constantly every month do an L four M analysis. Okay. You do not need 20 people in finance or operations or planning to do this. Any founder can do this. Take your financials, and all you…”
Aug 3, 2023
Aug 3, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Founders should avoid relying on consultants for financial modeling
“The biggest danger I see with founders is they get a crap model from their finance team. I see this all the time. It's worst of all, the worst of all mistake is a lot of founders these days, wait to hire a VP of finance or director of finance, let alone a CFO.…”
Aug 3, 2023 bullish
Lemkin: Profitable SaaS startups at $30M ARR always get acquisition offers
“Every, every SAS company I know of that gets to 30, forty million that is profitable or cashflow neutral. Someone wants to buy it because they're going to miss the quarter. Someone out there, it may not be Monday, but some public company or company about to go…”
Aug 3, 2023 negative
Lemkin: My two worst venture investments falsely claimed non-recurring revenue was ARR
“The two worst investments I've made, I haven't made very many bad investments, but as time went on, I made more bad investments, not less because we kind of let, let the bar expanded the box. Those were folks that claim stuff was AR that wasn't.”
Aug 3, 2023 positive
Aug 3, 2023 positive
Aug 3, 2023 negative
Aug 3, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: No single-product SMB SaaS company has ever exceeded 100% NRR
“There may be an exception or two out there, but from my knowledge, for folks that sell to SMBs, I do not believe anyone got past a hundred that is single product, right? And HubSpot's the biggest example. HubSpot was stuck at 85% through 40 or fifty million, a…”
Aug 21, 2023 negative
Aug 21, 2023 negative
Aug 21, 2023 neutral
Aug 21, 2023 positive
Aug 21, 2023 positive
Aug 21, 2023 negative
Oct 10, 2023 positive
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Never hire a VP of Sales who cannot bring reps along
“A stretch VP doesn't have 80 people. But they better have two or one. And when you go to interview that stretch VP of sales, stretch head of sales, ask them who they're going to bring with you. It's one of my classic can interview questions on sasser.com and a…”
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Oct 25, 2023 positive
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Oct 25, 2023 bullish
Oct 25, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Hiring someone to magically implement PLG will fail
“PLG is like cloud. It's actually nothing. It is an amorphous term that properly used describes a set of actions and motions that is helpful. Improperly used makes no sense. There are no cloud magicians. If you don't, you can't hire someone to magically cloudif…”
Oct 25, 2023 bullish
Oct 25, 2023 neutral
Oct 27, 2023 neutral
Oct 27, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Launch a Second Product Before Hitting 100 Enterprise SaaS Customers
“In enterprise, it's often around a hundred customers in a group. In mid-market, it's a thousand. And in SMB, you're lucky to get to 10,000 customers without hitting significant headwinds, ok? So my rough, way too rough rules are enterprise, mid-market, SMB. Be…”
Oct 27, 2023 neutral
Oct 27, 2023
Lemkin: SaaS founders between $2M and $10M ARR fail by over-diversifying
“The biggest mistake I see from like, Two-ish million to ten million that founders make is they over-diversify. They cross a couple million in revenue. They finally have something. It's more than beer money. It's real. And they're like, okay, well, we're strong…”
Dec 6, 2023 negative
Dec 28, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Sales VPs Only Save Time If Previous Product Was Harder
“The only way you get time back when you hire a VP of sales is if the last product they sold was truly harder to sell. If it's truly, they go into an environment that in every way is easier, right? Then you get some time back because they already did it. They a…”
Dec 28, 2023 bearish
Dec 28, 2023 negative
Lemkin: 80% of 50+ VP of Sales Candidates Did Zero Pre-Interview Research
“I actually interviewed over 50 VPs of sales this year. Some of them actually for Saster itself. Cause we need one. If anyone really wants this and knows what we're doing, let me know. Other than for a bunch of portfolio companies. And I can't tell you, oh, tho…”
Dec 28, 2023 bearish
Dec 28, 2023 bearish
Lemkin: $200M+ Valuations Vanished Due to 10x Math and Public SaaS Multiples
“There basically are no rounds north of two hundred million dollar valuations because for an investor to make 10 X on a two hundred million dollar valuation with dilution, you have to have a two and a half billion dollar IPO. There just aren't very many. Most S…”
Dec 29, 2023
Lemkin: Companies and Departments Should Never Have Over Five Goals
“Compress it to three to five metrics that ideally should tie to their goals for next year. No one should have more than five goals in each department. So your company should have five goals for next year and each department should have five.”
Dec 29, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Fire Any Early-Stage VP Who Resists Metrics
“I would just fire anyone that isn't metrics oriented. Literally, you don't need anybody today. You have the wrong people. First of all, I don't think you should ever hire anyone that isn't metrics oriented, but it's usually a sign of someone that should either…”
Feb 2, 2024 bearish
Lemkin: No Enterprise Customer Needs Another SaaS Product
“No one on planet Earth needs another SaaS product. They don't. Every company out there, all the Fortune 500 and Global 2000, they seem to work just fine. With whatever CRM, or marketing automation, or ABM, or whatever tool, they work just fine. They don't need…”
Feb 2, 2024 negative
Feb 2, 2024 bearish
Lemkin: The era of SaaS customer success generalists is likely over
“I just don't think that there's any great generalist role. There's no great role for, hey, I'm a generalist. I'm going to go into CS or support and just make customers happy. I'm worried this is gone. I'm worried the era of this generalist making customers hap…”
Feb 2, 2024 neutral
Feb 2, 2024 negative
Feb 2, 2024 negative
Feb 2, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: SaaS companies aim to automate at least 50% of customer interactions
“The real number everyone's trying to get to in the industry, and you can see it on things like the homepage of Intercom, is folks are trying to automate at least half of customer interactions. That's the goal across, if you talk to folks that are in support or…”
Feb 2, 2024 bullish
Feb 2, 2024 negative
Mar 20, 2024 neutral
Mar 20, 2024 negative
Lemkin: Full-time sales and marketing leaders are always accretive over fractional hires
“A great head of sales that will actually carry a bag. A great head of marketers is actually willing to do a campaign themselves or to put together an event themselves. The great ones are always accretive. This is like a recurrent Sastra post for 12 years. A gr…”
Apr 30, 2024 negative
Norton: Inbound-trained sales leaders rarely succeed running outbound motions
“I wouldn't say hopeless, but I would say it's not very likely. If you want to run an out, if you want to run an outbound model and you've got a VP of sales who is being in 80% inbound models, it is Because for them to be to, for that person to really grok outb…”
May 3, 2024 negative
May 3, 2024
Jun 26, 2024 bearish
Jun 26, 2024 bullish
Jun 26, 2024 negative
Jun 26, 2024 bullish
Jun 26, 2024 positive
Jun 26, 2024 bullish
Jul 5, 2024 positive
Jul 5, 2024 neutral
Jul 5, 2024 bullish
Jul 5, 2024 negative
Jul 5, 2024 positive
Jul 5, 2024 negative
Lemkin: Founders Should Never Hire Fractional Or Burned-Out Startup Executives
“You can't hire folks with three jobs or want to be fractional or want to run two businesses on the side or want to see how it goes or think they can be a fractional CRO for seven companies at the same time. It's too hard out there. You can't hire the broken, t…”
Jul 5, 2024 neutral
Jul 10, 2024 positive
Jul 10, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: Founders must avoid artificial urgency and pitch twice as many VCs
“Just assume you have to talk to more VCs than you used to. Don't play any games. Don't artificially constrain the process. Don't tell people they have 37 minutes. Be a little more chill and talk to twice as many people as you planned.”
Jul 10, 2024 positive
Lemkin: Founders Hiring Unfamiliar Roles Should Have External Domain Experts Interview Candidates
“Two, if it's for a role you've never hired before, you don't know, find someone that's great at it, truly great and ask them to just interview your final candidate. Simple answers, but that sounds simple, but that always works.”
Jul 10, 2024 positive
Jul 10, 2024 bullish
Jul 10, 2024 bullish
Lemkin: Practical AI utility across SaaS will improve within a year
“Any area of SaaS where AI is even a smidge helpful today, and let's not be cynical. That's even a smidge helpful. I am just tactically bullish that in a year it will all be better. And we're all gonna benefit from these, as long as your CTO can take advantage …”
Jul 10, 2024 negative
Sep 6, 2024 neutral
Sep 6, 2024 bearish
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Lemkin: 90% of Startup VP Candidates Don't Know Basic Company Metrics
“I always ask them like a basic question. I'm like, Do you know how much revenue the company has? Do you know how fast they're growing? Do you know how many sales folks are on the sales team? Nine out of 10 of the executives have no idea.”
Sep 19, 2024
Lemkin: A leader's job is backfilling VPs, not micromanaging them
“Your job as leaders with your VPs is not to tell them what to do. It's to backfill them. This is where the founder mode comes in, not to do their job, but to back, not everyone can be great at everything. So you've got to backfill them.”
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Sep 19, 2024 positive
Lemkin: Do Not Let A VP Start Until They Master The Product
“I wouldn't let them start until they know the product folds. I wouldn't let them start. Now, best of all is literally give them the, if you really think they're so great, give them the offer, agree on the comp, agree on the equity and say, you know what? Now t…”
Sep 19, 2024 neutral
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Sep 19, 2024
Sep 19, 2024 negative
Oct 15, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: Startups lose deals to competitors making partially true AI promises
“I see folks losing deals again and again, when a competitor will come in and make a lot of AA promises that are 70% true, 50% true, 30% true, but you're not at parity or you won't make that commit. You just lose the deal.”
Oct 15, 2024
Oct 15, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: SaaS companies need roughly 700 employees at $200M ARR to survive
“You basically got to have 700 people when you get to two hundred million in ARR. And that may sound, hey, what does that mean for me? I'm not at two hundred million in ARR today. Roll it back to where you are. You can bridge some of the gap with capital, but a…”
Oct 15, 2024 bullish
Lemkin: Mangomint approaches $20M ARR with 100% growth and 110% NRR
“The most recent investment I made is a company called mangomint.com. They're coming up on twenty million in ARR, growing a hundred percent with a 110% NRR from SMBs in a very small space, actually, in a very small and crowded space for a salon spa software.”
Oct 18, 2024
Oct 18, 2024 negative
Lemkin: VCs give terrible hiring advice due to lack of operating experience
“Why your VCs give you terrible hiring advice. It's very short. You can go find it right now. And it's because most of them haven't been operators or were a long time ago or another category. And if you've never done something, you want the person from wherever…”
Oct 18, 2024
Oct 18, 2024
Oct 18, 2024
Lemkin: Founders must only hire sales reps they would personally buy from
“Founder led sales. You need to hire the type of sales reps that you would buy from that you believe in. That's it. That you would buy for real. This is the mistake. Every time when I talk to a founder where they hit a roadblock and founder led sales is the cla…”
Oct 22, 2024
Nov 4, 2024
Nov 4, 2024 positive
Nov 4, 2024 neutral
Nov 4, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: Enterprise SaaS customer churn can be a 36-month process
“It takes three years to really churn from a business process from one vendor to another. It takes a year to get upset, another year to qualify, and that third year to do change management. We think they're not churning, but it, sometimes it's a 36 month proces…”
Nov 4, 2024 bullish
Dec 13, 2024 bullish
Dec 13, 2024
Dec 13, 2024 negative
Dec 18, 2024 negative
Lemkin: Hire Hungry Up-and-Comers as Replacement CEOs, Not Repeat Veterans
“Find someone that's doing it for the right reasons to accelerate their career. Okay. Not someone that's a fuddy-duddy, not someone that's been a CEO 11 times. They're not going to have the energy you have, and it's not going to work out. They've got to have a …”
Dec 18, 2024 negative
Dec 18, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: VC-Backed SaaS Must Reach $200M ARR in 10 Years
“You, to be a venture backed company, you have to go from zero to two hundred million in 10 years. Do a spreadsheet. If you don't triple, triple, double from a million, you will never get to two hundred million in a decade. It just won't happen.”
Dec 18, 2024 negative
Dec 18, 2024 negative
Lemkin: Every Failed Startup He Backed Over-Relied on Design Partners
“All the investments I've since done that had good founders that went to zero, good founders that went to zero, they had a lot of design partners. They didn't hustle. They didn't go get real customers. They didn't get to product market fit.”
Dec 18, 2024 positive
Dec 18, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: Self-serve SaaS products require far higher quality than enterprise software
“This is the other mistake a lot of folks make that come from a sales background. They don't realize how great a self-serve product has to be like so much better than enterprise, any enterprise or even mid-market product in the world. Like the onboarding doesn'…”
Dec 18, 2024 negative
Dec 18, 2024 positive
Lemkin: Founders should accept good M&A offers if team has execution doubts
“If the money's okay and you and your co-founders are like, you know what? Competition is pretty good. And you know what? We are worried that our growth is good, but not great. And we are worried that we're not that good at the gen AI side. We're worried about …”
Dec 18, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: PLG Markets Must Be Large Enough to Support Millions of Users
“If you can get thousands of people using your product for 10 K a month or 10 K a year or more, go sell it. If you can get millions of people using your products so that a few percent can convert, go build Canva. But don't be in the middle. Don't be a small num…”
Dec 27, 2024 bearish
Dec 27, 2024 positive
Dec 27, 2024 negative
Jan 3, 2025 positive
Lemkin: AI Must Bail Startups Out of Declining Employee Work Intensity
“I think AI has to bail us out. I think AI isn't just, I think it's the solution. We have to get, especially on the, we have to get sales and marketing and support so good from AI that we're not reliant on the fifty-hour work person that spends two months learn…”
Jan 3, 2025
Jan 3, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: Startups Struggle to Find Even 10 High-Intensity Non-Founder Employees
“I think it's hard to find more than 10 people on your team that want to work at that intensity, right? And you can build this Elon thing, and there are cultures that do it. The owners and others have 50, a 102 hundred people doing this, but it's, I just don't …”
Jan 14, 2025 negative
Lemkin: Small Restaurant Owners Never Pick Up Outbound Phone Calls
“It's just when we've done a lot with Kyle from owner that, and they've got thousands of small restaurants, phone is zero there. The owner will never, the owner is working. You can text, like they do a lot. They do in person and text, but phones is zero, right?…”
Jan 22, 2025
Jan 22, 2025 positive
Lemkin: Give CRO candidates signed offers with time to validate plans
“Give them an unsigned off, give them a signed offer letter, but don't ask them to countersign until they're all in that way. The pressure's off, right? Here's your comp. Here's your title. Here's your equity. It's signed. If you need two weeks to make sure you…”
Jan 22, 2025 negative
Jan 22, 2025 negative
Jan 24, 2025 neutral
Jan 24, 2025
Jan 24, 2025 positive
Lemkin: Offering roadmap presentations consistently secures in-person meetings with enterprise clients
“You know, it always works a roadmap presentation. It always works. Tell your top customers, and this works for prospects too. Hey, I'm coming to Dallas. I'd love to just show you what we're building over this year. I'd love to show you and get your feedback. I…”
Jan 24, 2025 positive
Lemkin: Startups must hire dedicated staff once partnerships exist
“As soon as you have one or two big partners, one or two big channels, one or two big whatevers, you need a full-time person managing that. And ultimately, as it scales, a full-time team. You cannot do partnerships and business development on the side. You can …”
Jan 24, 2025
Jan 24, 2025
Lemkin: Hire an On-the-Ground Foreign Geo Lead at $1M, Not $10M+
“If you have even a million dollars in a geo outside your home geo or North America, and it's growing quickly, just hire a full-time person there you trust to get it to two million to four to eight to 16. People wait until 10, 20, thirty million in a geo to hir…”
Jan 24, 2025 positive
Lemkin: Top SaaS teams accelerate growth by continuously adding go-to-market layers
“Not only do you have to drive up NRR and drive down churn and solve those 82 feature gaps and build that integration, but you got to add a layer if you really want to do it. And the best teams, the most agile teams, the ones that are killing it are doing this.”
Jan 24, 2025
Jan 31, 2025 positive
Lemkin: Gorgias nears $100M ARR after optimizing $1M per month AI cost
“One I invested in the contact center, which is all about AI agents called gorgeous free commerce. They're at almost a hundred million. Okay. At first, the AI was a million bucks a month, right? To deploy these agents. Now it's fine. They've optimized it.”
Feb 14, 2025
Feb 14, 2025 negative
Feb 14, 2025 positive
Feb 19, 2025 bullish
Feb 19, 2025 bullish
Lemkin: Shopify's 31% growth at $11B run rate is fastest in 3 years
“Shopify yesterday announced they crossed eleven billion dollar run rate, eleven billion dollars from Shopify. And It's accelerating. It's growing to 31% at 11.2 billion. That's even better than it sounds because that means it's added over three billion of new …”
Feb 19, 2025 positive
Feb 19, 2025 bearish
Lemkin: SaaS Profitability Is Necessary but Ignored Without Growth
“Profitability efficiency is great. It may be necessary. It may be necessary. If you don't have capital, if you're bootstrapped, if you've spent all your money, the public markets are demanding that everybody be more efficient, but it's not enough. So profitabl…”
Feb 19, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: RTO mandates are about supervising mid performers, not collaboration
“It doesn't, you don't need to return to office for high performers. The best people will get it done. They'll get it done from Antarctica or they'll get it done in the office, but the mid performers just don't work from home, right? They barely work. And so th…”
Feb 19, 2025 neutral
Feb 19, 2025 bearish
Feb 19, 2025
Feb 19, 2025 negative
Lemkin: Upmarket pivots and price hikes sacrifice long-term growth for quarterly targets
“So what do you do? You raise prices again and again, and you push more and more enterprise and abandon your smaller customers, which may help you make the quarter, but oftentimes is abandoning the future to hit your present goals.”
Feb 19, 2025 negative
Lemkin: Founders must replace jaded employees rather than attempt retraining
“The other thing you can't talk about is like people that are jaded or broken a little, Training isn't gonna help. Like, a team trip to Miami is not gonna help. You gotta gently move them out. Like, now. You're better with half the employees, as small as you ar…”
Feb 19, 2025 bearish
Lemkin: PagerDuty added only one net new customer over the past year
“PagerDuty is coming up on five hundred million in revenue a lot, but growth has slowed to 10%. But the toughest number, and there's more companies like this out there today than is discussed, zero percent net new customer growth. This last quarter, they announ…”
Mar 7, 2025 negative
Mar 7, 2025 positive
Mar 7, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: SaaStr Immediately Submits Cancellation Notices When Buying Software
“You know, a couple of years ago, we instituted a policy at little tiny Saster that as soon as we buy an app at Saster, we have to immediately send a termination notice and people made fun of me four or five years ago, but now this has become a common practice.…”
Mar 7, 2025 negative
Mar 12, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: EchoSign reached $250M revenue after acquisition despite neglect
“I sold the business at a million a month growing up to a hundred percent with a 110% in our, that was cashflow positive. You would never sell a business like that today, right? And I saw it even while its market share decline still grow to two hundred fifty mi…”
Mar 12, 2025
Mar 12, 2025 positive
Lemkin: Hiring a banker for a $100M exit always pays for itself
“For any deal, even approaching a hundred million, you should hire a banker, right? You, it always pays for itself. I think. Always, I found, and I don't want to do it out of order. It was one of my top 10 mistakes. As a founder, if you don't hire a banker, eve…”
May 21, 2025 bullish
May 21, 2025 bullish
May 21, 2025 positive
May 21, 2025 neutral
May 28, 2025 bullish
Lemkin: Digital AI sales engineers will soon join live sales calls
“I think A digital SE like this is Brian Halligan's digital one on Delphi is going to come to the zooms. The human it's a person is going to be there. And I brought this up and Dara said, give me another release and this will be full duplex. Like my AI and Bria…”
May 28, 2025 bullish
Lemkin: CROs must manage 50/50 AI and human teams by year-end
“I think this year, To be a RevOps professional imminently in a CRO by the end of this year, you will have to know how to manage a fifty-fifty team. 50% AI, 50% human. Not just tools, but you will have to learn how to manage agents, agents, AIs, whether that's …”
May 28, 2025 bearish
May 28, 2025 neutral
Jun 4, 2025 neutral
Jul 16, 2025 neutral
Jul 16, 2025 bullish
Jul 16, 2025 negative
Jul 23, 2025 neutral
Jul 23, 2025 neutral
Jul 23, 2025 positive
Jul 23, 2025 positive
Jul 23, 2025 negative
Jul 23, 2025 negative
Lemkin: Sales reps cannot yet be trusted with unmanaged AI collateral generation
“In our experience, I don't think in July of 20, 25, we're at the point where if you want to have super controlled, high quality communication with prospects, you can just let sales reps go free and wild here. I don't believe that exists today.”
Jul 23, 2025 neutral
Aug 25, 2025 bearish
Aug 27, 2025 positive
Aug 27, 2025 bullish
Sep 12, 2025 positive
Sep 12, 2025 negative
Sep 12, 2025 negative
Sep 12, 2025 negative
Lemkin: None of the five vibe-coded apps he built handle email scheduling reliably
“I have built five apps now. None of them get email or scheduling, right? None of them get it right. They all stop sending emails that are supposed to be sent every hour, every day, once a week, they all stop sending them.”
Sep 12, 2025 bullish
Sep 12, 2025
Lemkin: Vibe coders should build multi-page apps rather than single-page architectures
“Force, if you're going to vibe code it, break it up into its components and then have more pages than you would think. You're almost going back in time in some ways to have a lot of pages, but it will save your sanity. I built a massively complicated app that …”
Sep 12, 2025
Lemkin: SaaStr AI Crashes Every Few Days Requiring Manual Replit Restarts
“Even with our new Saster AI, once every couple of days, it's just down and no one knows why. It's not just like, it literally just has some like database, not working error in the upper left. Now I go into replet. I restarted. It works.”
Sep 23, 2025 positive
Sep 23, 2025 positive
Sep 23, 2025 neutral
Sep 23, 2025 positive
Lemkin: SaaStr generates eight figures in revenue with single-digit headcount
“You know, our organization is tiny, but you know, Sasser does do eight figures in revenue with a tiny team. So it's interesting to track us because we have a single digit amount of headcount doing eight figures of revenue.”
Sep 23, 2025 negative
Sep 23, 2025
Lemkin: AI agent success depends on daily deep training, not vendor choice
“None of these names are as important as putting in the reps and the work. And Amelia will show you the actual date in a second. These are all great apps. We stand behind them. We recommend them for sure. But you could pick another two. The most important thing…”
Oct 5, 2025 positive
Oct 22, 2025 neutral
Oct 22, 2025 neutral
Oct 22, 2025 positive
Nov 21, 2025 bearish
Ibarra: Most companies adopting AI agents fail to see impact
“So I think we're in this right now sort of paradoxical world in November of 2025, where a lot of folks have adopted at least one sort of AI or agent, but maybe to Jason's point that he just made, a lot of them aren't seeing the impact because either they're ex…”
Nov 21, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: AI GTM and SDR tools are priced around $100k annually
“Basically all the vendors that we're describing for this. For GTM sales type motions or marketing BDR, whatever you want to call it. They all require training. They all have a fair amount of data and really they're mostly optimized kind of around a hundred K p…”
Nov 21, 2025 neutral
Nov 26, 2025 bullish
Dec 10, 2025 bullish
Lemkin: Great AI often adds more value than a mediocre human
“And I really think, especially in 20, 26, we're all going to work in these heterogeneous worlds where we mix AIs and humans and imagining that I somehow mind talking to a great AI is backwards. A great AI is often going to add more value than a mediocre human.”
Dec 10, 2025
Dec 10, 2025 negative
Lemkin: Never buy AI software without dedicated vendor deployment support
“If you can't get that help. Don't buy the vendor. Don't buy the vendor, no matter how slick the salesperson is AI or human. If you're not going to get the help to train and deploy. I'd rather have a worse vendor that will give me the help day and night.”
Dec 10, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: Zendesk automates 60-80% of enterprise support versus 20% for self-serve
“With our top Customers at Zendesk, we can automate 60 to 80% of support and related interactions. Okay. Makes sense. They train them for months, sometimes for months at Zendesk for their big customers. For our Self Survey AI, it's 20%.”
Dec 17, 2025 neutral
Dec 17, 2025
Dec 17, 2025 negative
Dec 17, 2025
Lemkin: Junior VPs at Adobe had $500K discretionary slush budgets
“I was just a VP at Adobe for a little more than a year, but basically there were, you know, there were, there was unbudgeted discretionary and budgeted... But even I had a 500 K slush budget. Okay. And this was a while ago. So today it might be a million bucks…”
Dec 17, 2025 bullish
Dec 17, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: Enterprise software growth is half price hikes, quarter AI budgets
“Gartner said overall enterprise software is going to grow the fastest it ever has at 15% a year at this scale, right? I mean 400 billion. It's hasn't grown this fast ever, but of that 15%, almost half is taken up by price increases from existing investors. Eve…”
Dec 17, 2025 bullish
Lemkin: Outbound AI delivered human-equivalent conversion at geometrically higher volume
“I can tell you one thing that we learned from our outbound AI is. Geometrically more volume and the same results. So our results have not gone down in the age of AI by training the AI with the best scripts and ideas that humans did. We basically saw this same,…”
Dec 17, 2025 positive
Dec 17, 2025 bullish
Jan 2, 2026 positive
Lemkin: AI SDR startups succeed because replacing human labor expands pricing and TAM
“These guys are blowing up because the products unlock huge TAM expansion by replacing a lot of humans, a lot of SDR. And none of these guys would be remotely as successful if they had to charge like traditional SaaS companies.”
Jan 2, 2026 positive
Jan 2, 2026 bearish
Jan 2, 2026 bullish
Lemkin: AI Expands TAM by Enabling Cursor to Charge Thousands Per Seat
“Atlassian got incredibly successful selling JIRA and other products for five bucks a month with discounts to folks at companies. Now folks will spend 400 dollars, in some cases, 5000 dollars on cursor. That's why it goes to a billion.”
Jan 2, 2026 bearish
Jan 2, 2026 bearish
Jan 2, 2026 bullish
Jan 21, 2026 bullish
Lemkin: Elite 10x sales reps will earn two to three times more
“I do think that the elite folks, the truly elite folks, not the ones that think they're elite on LinkedIn, the ones that really are five times, 10 times more productive for real, they should be paid compensation that is two to three times higher than it used t…”
Jan 21, 2026 bullish
Jan 21, 2026 positive
Jan 21, 2026 neutral
Jan 21, 2026 negative
Lemkin: The 20-30 Hour Work-From-Home Middle Ground in Sales Is Gone
“You could have it all. You could have lifestyle, quality of life, work from home, work for 20 or 30 hours a week, exceed quota for a lot of structural reasons. That doesn't exist anywhere today. Even the fastest growing startups they're either lean or they're …”
Feb 4, 2026 positive
Lemkin: Deploy AI Agents on Neglected Workflows, Not Working Ones
“If I had to advise people that are earlier on their journey, find something in your go to market motion that just isn't getting done or is getting done very at a very mediocre level. Then put an agent, don't try to replace what's working well. Do that as your …”
Feb 15, 2026
Feb 15, 2026
Feb 15, 2026
Lemkin: SaaStr shrank to three employees due to founder hiring burnout
“Well, that's why we shrunk to three. I couldn't do it anymore. You criticize me, like take your shot at me. Right. But I have been doing it a little longer than you guys. I just couldn't take one more person paying them six figures quitting and for a worse job…”
Feb 18, 2026 negative
Feb 18, 2026 bearish
Feb 18, 2026 negative
Mar 4, 2026 bearish
Mar 4, 2026 negative
Lemkin: Running AI agents with one operator is an existential risk
“You need to recruit somebody else on their team and divide and conquer and make sure you have two. You gotta have two, right? I mean, one's hard enough. There's a lot of, in the early days of AI agents, when we talk to folks, there's very few people at a lot o…”
Mar 4, 2026 neutral
Apr 22, 2026 negative
Apr 22, 2026 negative
Apr 22, 2026
May 6, 2026 bearish
Lemkin: HubSpot API Is Too Rate-Limited for High-Volume AI Agents
“If you go to HubSpot, it will say it has pretty good APIs, but they're rate limited and have other issues. And so not only will it give a grade, but if you scroll down a little bit, it will tell you why and when it's a good choice for an agentic product, right…”
May 6, 2026 positive
Lemkin: Hire a VP of AI instead of running change management
“What's better is if your team is Lagging or resistant, just go hire one reasonably senior person that is all in here. One. And folks will start quitting when they don't want to work at that pace anyway. You got to hire them ideally at the VP level above, and t…”
May 6, 2026
Lemkin: AI agents evaluate SaaS on rate limits, not UI/UX
“The agents are going to ask for different features. Than humans. The agents care about rate limiting. The agents care about how often they can interact with the product. The agents care they don't care about the UX and the UI, right? So they're gonna grade a l…”
May 6, 2026 negative
May 12, 2026 negative
Lemkin: Buy off-the-shelf software rather than building custom AI agents
“The biggest takeaway is don't, still don't build it if you can buy it. We love Tenk and QB, they're part of our families, and I hate to say this, but we would dump both of them if there was an off the shelf tool. We wouldn't turn them off. This is the strange …”
May 12, 2026 bearish
May 12, 2026 bullish
Jun 11, 2026 bullish
Jun 11, 2026 bullish
Lemkin: Customers Prefer High-Performing AI to Mediocre Human Account Managers
“Customers will prefer, prefer a great eye to a mediocre human. They'll prefer a great eye that solves their problem today, that knows the answer, to someone that has to get an engineer and an appointment to you next week, that doesn't know, that says I'm just …”
Jun 11, 2026 positive
Jun 16, 2026 bearish
Lemkin: Commercial AI SDR Tools Cannot Match Custom Internal Agents
“There's no way any AISDR tool is going to have that level of context. That's it. In theory, they could, you know, here's an interesting thing. In theory, of course they could, right? This is just LLMs and some data. But in practice, they're never going to be a…”
Jun 16, 2026 bearish
Jun 16, 2026 positive
Lemkin: AI support, sales, and marketing functions are converging into one agent
“If you talk to folks like at Finn or Intercom or Gorgias or Sierra and others, they're all saying that there's convergence that support sales and marketing are all converging because once you can AI-ify them, you don't want to have three different agents, righ…”
Jun 16, 2026 negative
Lemkin: Stacking 14 Exception Guardrails Broke SaaStr's AI Prompt
“By the time we'd added the 14th guardrail, the 14th exception, everything was an exception. Everything got bounced. And so everything started to break and we had to rebuild it from scratch and get rid of almost all of those rules, like throw away all these rul…”
Jun 26, 2026 positive
SaaStr built its AI agent over five months of daily work
“We've been building with Tenk literally every day between myself and Jason for the last five months, and so it might take you some time after this session, if you leave with a basic one, to build it to the full feature and functionality that we have at Saster.”
Jul 1, 2026
Jul 1, 2026 neutral
Jul 1, 2026 bullish
Jul 1, 2026 negative
Lemkin: SaaStr fell six figures behind on collections with human staff
“Our human team got worse that they stopped doing it.
They went on a vacation, but never caught up.
We got six figures behind on collections and it creates a lot of stress because it's sometimes you have to write off collections if people don't get it.”
Jul 1, 2026
Jul 1, 2026 negative
Jul 8, 2026 neutral
Jul 8, 2026 bullish
Jul 8, 2026
Jul 8, 2026 positive
Jul 8, 2026 negative
Jul 8, 2026 negative
Jul 8, 2026 bullish
Jul 8, 2026 positive
Jul 8, 2026 positive
Jul 8, 2026 positive
Jul 8, 2026 bearish
Jul 8, 2026 negative
Jul 8, 2026 bearish
Jul 8, 2026 bullish
Jul 10, 2026 bullish
Jul 10, 2026 positive
Jul 17, 2026 bullish
Lemkin: SaaStr is building the first agentic B2B executive recruiting app
“We're trying to build an app called Saster Connect that will connect you folks to the best opportunities. If you're looking to network, if you're looking for a new job, more importantly, if you're hiring, if you're a founder, how do you find VPs you don't know…”
Jul 17, 2026 bearish
Lemkin: Competitors' AI agents will steal customers from incumbent SaaS vendors
“Agents will steal your customers. Not your humans, not the great sales rep, not a moment in time, not your competitor going down at the end of the month or for a weekend. Your competitor's agents will steal you, steal your customers.”
Jul 17, 2026 bearish
Jul 17, 2026 positive
Jul 17, 2026 negative
Jul 17, 2026 neutral
Aug 5, 2026 positive
Lemkin: Context-rich AI agents act as proactive team members, not tools
“What's changed is the agents have so much context. They're aware of so much that every single day when you log in, especially with you, when you log in with 10 K now our AI VP of revenue, it has new things that wants to build and do. It's not a software tool. …”
Aug 5, 2026 bearish
Lemkin: Custom AI tools outperform $50k to $80k commercial SaaS solutions
“Is that listen, you could buy this functionality exists in other products, or you could buy it for 50 grand or 80 grand a year today, right? But because it is a well-known body of software, Claude knows it. So Claude can just build it for you. Buy, don't build…”
Aug 5, 2026
Lemkin: SaaStr hits eight-figure revenue with three humans and 21 agents
“We're three humans and 21 agents and a dog, right? We can take some risk that you can't take. We can take a lot of risk. People trust Saster. We have 450,000 people in our community, eight figures of revenue, 10, 15,000 people a year that come to our events wh…”
Aug 28, 2026 positive
Lemkin: AI SDR emails beat 99% of humans but lack deep context
“The artisan Monaco agent force emails. They're all better than a human, which is all that really matters today as we record this, right? They're better than 99% of humans. But they're not great like that RepliDeck. None of them are great.”
Aug 28, 2026
Lemkin: SaaStr banned small sub-$20k sponsors in 2022 to avoid stress
“For a while, when things were crazy, like in 20, 22, we like banned small sponsors because we didn't want the stress. We just didn't, we just like you, if that's so much, if 20,000 dollars is so much money to you, like you're betting your entire startup. Come …”