San Francisco
also referred to as: sf
23 statements across 15 episodes · 11 bullish · 7 bearish · 8 people on the record · first statement Aug 21, 2017 by Alex Fala · said 242 times in 90 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Jason Lemkin (81), Sam Blond (30), Pat Poels (21), Justin Bedecarre (7), Keri Gohman (5), Mikkel Svane (4), Justin Betakure (4), Henrique Dubugras (4)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team
- The Agents #12 - Our AI Agent Rewrote Our App Without Telling Us
- Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll
- The Agents #008: Agents Are Merging, Not Multiplying. Plus, Sam Blond on Why Outbound Isn't Dead.
- How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & Follow-Up with Agentforce, Momentum, Mangomint + SaaStr
- Software Stocks Have Massively Crashed. Here's What Founders Need to Know.
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 26 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- The State of AI + Software: Where It’s Going - Fast
- What Happens When AI Kills Your SaaS Growth? Live Q&A with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship
- Snowflake's AI Revolution in Sales, Marketing and GTM with Snowflake‘s CMO and Founding CRO
- From Startup to $11B: ServiceTitan's CRO Breaks Down Their Sales Playbook
- SaaS + AI: It’s Time to Move Much Faster with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- AI, M&A, and the Future of SaaS: Lessons from Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, Co-Founder and Chair
- 10 Ways Sales is Different in Vertical SaaS with Mangomint's VP of Sales
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 16 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- Top 10 Go To Market Mistakes Founders Make Again … and Again with SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin
- Deep Dive: Easy Sales Concepts So Many Get Wrong with Sam Blond
- The Ultimate Attendee Guide to SaaStr Annual 2024
- From Zero to Hero: How to Dominate Outbound SaaS Sales with Rippling and Sam Blond
- State of the Cloud: The Cloud AI Era with Bessemer Venture Partners
- 10 Cheat Codes I Learned While Scaling to $400M with Yext and Roam Founder Howard Lerman
- Ben Chestnut: The Top 10 Learnings Scaling Mailchimp to $1B ARR
- Klaviyo's CEO Founder on the Journey to an $800,000,000 ARR Leader in Marketing
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 41 mentions in 13 episodes 3 per episode
- SaaStr APAC AMA with Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO
- The Proven Customer Acquisition Strategies Behind Toast's Record Breaking Growth with Toast's CRO
- How to Grow Revenue Faster in the Second Half of 2023 with Founders Fund
- CRO Confidential: 3 Secrets For Early-Stage Startups To Acquire Customers | CoSell.io Co-Founder
- Being a Rebel to Build a Movement: Non-Traditional Approaches to Scale | DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder
- CRO Confidential: The Hangover's Over: 5 Ways to Get Your SaaS Revenue Back On Track with Gong's SVP
- The Cold, Hard Truths About SaaS In 2023: Part 1 AMA with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: Sam Blond + Omni Founder Colin Zima on the Power of Leveraging Your Network
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 57 mentions in 19 episodes 3 per episode
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: How to Raise in Late 2022 with Jason Lemkin and Sam Blond of Founders Fund
- The Office is Back!! But What Will It Be Like? Jason Lemkin & Justin Bedecarre of Raise.Work
- How Hybrid is Working in Practice: What the Data Shows | Raise Comm. Real Estate CEO + President
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond + Rippling VP Sales Matt Plank
- The Answers To Scaling, Hiring, And Everything Else: An AMA With Saastr Founder & Ceo Jason Lemkin
- 3 Lessons from Building a Marketing Engine to Grow Pipeline from Millions to Billions | Samsara CMO
- Big Numbers from Small Customers: How DigitalOcean Accelerated at Scale | DigitalOcean SVP, Revenue
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond + Gong VPS Jameson Yung + Jason Lemkin
- 11 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 32 mentions in 9 episodes 4 per episode
- The Future of Sales Post-Covid with Brex's CRO, Sam Blond
- How To Collaborate, Manage & Work With Developers With Jeff Lawson, CEO Twilio
- Nick Mehta CEO Gainsight + Jason Lemkin CEO SaaStr on "The Latest in Leveling Up Customer Success"
- Building a Second Unicorn: A Deep Dive with Harness and AppDynamics Founder Jyoti Bansal
- Ask Me Anything About Customer Success with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and ChurnZero CEO You Mon Tsang
- Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: 10 Things That Are Changing Now in Customer Success | SaaStr 2021
- How to Build a Unicorn in 8 Simple Charts with SafeGraph
- The State of the Cloud: 2021 with Bessemer Venture Partners | SaaStr Software Community
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 7 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Going Upmarket, And How Things Have Changed in a Decade, at Trello, with Founder Michael Pryor
- Founder Confidential: The Top Things No One Really Tells You About Scaling
- Where Product Development is Going in 2021 with Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight
- Taking Care Of Your Team and Your Customers with Slack | SaaStr Software Community
- The Playbook to Scaling High-Performance Teams with Gusto COO Lexi Reese | SaaStr Software Community
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 36 mentions in 8 episodes 5 per episode
- Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
- Lessons From a Second-Time Founder: How Brex Went From 0 - $1B in Under 2 Years
- Crushing the Pivot: Lessons Learned from a Product Reboot with TaskRabbit
- Founder's Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks
- How to Hire a Great VP of Sales with SaaStr + Duo Security
- Lessons from New Relic: Five Critical Steps to Scaling Enterprise
- Using Product Led Growth as an Indicator for Investment w/OpenView Venture Partner, Ashley Smith
- Lessons from Gorgias: How to Close your First 1000 Customers Based Solely on Data
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
2017 10 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
Everything said about San Francisco, oldest first
Aug 21, 2017 negative
Mar 17, 2018 neutral
Apr 22, 2019
Jun 25, 2019 positive
Jun 25, 2019 positive
Eventbrite retained 21 of 40 engineers over seven years in San Francisco
“I'm proud to say that when I started at Eventbrite with 40 engineers in the company at that .21 of those engineers are still there. I've been there seven years and two months and we still have 21 out of 40, which is terrific for San Francisco, but we still had…”
Jun 25, 2019 positive
Mar 18, 2021
Blond: Brex pegs sales compensation to local cost of living
“We work with our people team and they have different cities and they peg them based off of a It's all cost of living related. And so you mentioned if there is an AE in San Francisco with a 250,000 dollar comp band, what we do is if we're hiring them in Denver,…”
Mar 18, 2021 neutral
Blond: Brex scales accelerators by percentage, paying higher nominal dollars in SF
“When people overperform, an extra 10% is 10% on each of those. So if somebody gets an accelerator at the 250,000, they may make two 75, and in Denver they make two two 20. So it's 10% of what your salary is and not necessarily the hard dollar value. So the per…”
Mar 18, 2021 negative
Feb 27, 2022 bearish
Feb 27, 2022 bullish
Mar 11, 2022 positive
Betakure: Raise shifted to a 3:1 hot desking ratio in SF
“Every single person had a desk pre-pandemic. Now we're three-to-one hot desking, and so there's a lot less desk and a lot more room to have, Couches and high, high tables and, you know, ways for our team to come together that's not just sitting heads with thei…”
Aug 25, 2022 bearish
Lemkin: Classic SF SaaS Companies Will Never Get Workers Back into Offices
“We're never not going to be distributed, right? We have learned these skills the hard way, And we're all global, and it's never going back, and there may be segments that go back fully to the office, and certainly in places like London and Europe, it's more co…”
Nov 1, 2022 positive
Blond: Five Senior Founders Fund Personnel Relocated from SF to Miami
“At the beginning of 2020 everyone in Founders Fund was in San Francisco. There may have been an exception or two. And today in this office there's Keith Matias, Delian myself as the investors. Mike Solano's a VP here not on the investing side, but five fairly …”
Nov 1, 2022 bullish
Nov 1, 2022 bearish
Lemkin: Startups Will Never Bring Massive In-Office Sales Teams Back to SF
“We will never have floor after floor after floor of AEs and SDRs. So there's an element of all this that is just, it's never, no matter what happens, the floor of floor of AEs and SF, they can't afford to live there. They don't want to live there. They don't g…”
Mar 10, 2023 bearish
Lemkin: B2B Tech Companies Will Never Bring Large Sales Teams Back to SF
“The other thing that's never coming back is that every B to B company had 500 sales reps in the Bay Area. They're never coming back. We're never renting a hunt, 20 floors of Soma. Soma, if you go, Soma, south of Market, where we had, everyone had 20 floors. It…”
Mar 10, 2023 bullish
Lemkin: No Tech Hub Can Match San Francisco's Founder Density
“You will never find the density of founders you find in the San Francisco. You'll never be challenged. You will never go to events and parties like you see there. You will never see that and you don't need it to win, but it's powerful when you have it.”
Jul 19, 2023 positive
Brex's SF billboards significantly boosted outbound email reply rates
“That was really effective, and it was also really helpful with our outbound, because when we sent an outbound email to somebody whose headquarters was in downtown San Francisco, the probability of them replying was significantly greater, because they had seen …”
Nov 3, 2023 positive
Blond: Early Brex close rates were significantly higher in SF than NYC
“And by really targeting a specific geo where you talked about this flywheel of customers that can start to engage with other customers the likelihood that we were gonna close a deal when we created an opportunity in San Francisco compared to even New York, whi…”
Nov 23, 2023 positive
Sam Blond: Brex paired SF billboards with champagne to drive outbound
“The outbound one Brex sort of famously did a champagne campaign where we were sending bottles of champagne as part of outbound crazy high reply rates with that. When most folks were going paid online advertising, Brex did paid offline advertising. We had a geo…”
Oct 22, 2025 bearish