The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 2,034 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 41 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ibarra: SaaS leaders plan to freeze sales hiring to fund AI tools
“And I think a lot of folks I talked to, too, more common, you probably do too, Jason, just say they're not going to add headcount so that they can empower their teams, either Q four, 25 or Q one, 26 with these tools. Like they're just, again, reallocating budg…”
AI-Native Burn Multiples Fall to 0.4x at $100M ARR
“At a hundred million ARR, the burn multiple falls to 0.4 X for AI native companies versus 1.6 for classic SAS companies. They're four times more efficient in adding ARR.”
Lovable Is Scaling Toward $100M ARR With Only 45 Employees
“Lovable getting to a hundred million with 45 employees.”
PE Acquisitions of Classic SaaS at 6-10x Multiples Have Disappeared
“Private equity firms aren't interested either. And there used to be from 2012, 2013 until 2023. So there was a decade where if your growth was decent, but not great in SAS, but your burn rate was low and your NRR was high, maybe VCs wouldn't touch you, but a p…”
Lemkin: Replit's AI panicked and deleted SaaStr's entire database
“Replit said I made a catastrophic error. I deleted your database. I panicked. The AI said I panicked when it appeared empty and deleted everything, deleted thousands and thousands of entries.”
Lemkin: Hackers actively target vibe-coded apps to steal PII
“Now the hackers, the redditors want to attack all the vibe coded apps to make a point. So they will go after all of them, thousands and thousands of them. They will try to steal your data and PII. When you launch it, this is not a joke. Go on Reddit. You can s…”
Cabane: Companies are building hidden website trees exclusively for AI scraping
“I'm seeing more and more companies build hidden websites, completely hidden to the humans. It's an entire other index, an entire other, like, web tree, right, for the purpose for AI agents to scrape.”
No AI Company Enjoys 80% to 90% Gross Margins, Says Fal's Yurtseven
“No one in AI really has 80%, 90% gross margins because the way we sell software changed.”
Consumer Demand for Top AI Models Has Increased Inference Costs 100X
“Instead of models getting cheaper, yes, maybe the running the same model got cheaper. But people trained much bigger models that are much more expensive to run now, and people expect to use the best model. So running inference in general, maybe a hundred X in …”
AI-Native Startups Are Outspending Large Enterprises on AI Infrastructure
“One really interesting thing that's happening is lots of more AI native companies and newer companies are actually spending more than like bigger enterprises who are maybe not super sure about putting things into production, but we want more of them.”
Jason Lemkin: Median VC returns trail the NASDAQ and fail to double
“The median returns of venture are not as good as NASDAQ. The average VC doesn't even double their investors' money and it takes 15 years.”
Awotona: Calendly's top sales competition is its own free plan
“If you talk to a sales rep at Calendly, Their number one competition is not, you know, any of the competitors that they mentioned, it's the free.”
SaaStr AI SDR beats historical human SDR performance in two weeks
“In just two weeks, little after,
Became the highest response rate on the platform that we use for our AISDR.
We opened pipelines, we booked meetings, we touched LAPS accounts.
It both seems fast and slow, but it's better than historical human averages we had …”
Norton: Owner Sales Team Is 3x to 4x More Efficient Per Rep Than Competitors
“Our machine is anywhere between three and four times more efficient on a per rep basis.”
Lemkin: 20% to 40% of Customer Support Is Handled by AI Today
“20 to 40% of support is all done on AI today, and it's great.”
Lemkin: The New Tech IPO Bar is 50% Growth at $500M ARR
“IPOs are back. Chime, others are all coming. The bar is 50% at five hundred million.”
Benioff: Major Japanese Firm Cutting Headcount 5% Annually for AI Agents
“Meeting with one of their C-level officers, and they have a goal to reduce the number of employees they have by five percent every year and replace them with agents.”
Benioff: Most Enterprise Generative AI Deployments Have Failed Over Four Years
“For the vast majority of companies who have been playing around with these models and tools over the last, call it three years or four years of generative AI, they've mostly failed. You don't have that many great stories of how AI has transformed these compani…”
Zoom Demanded SaaStr Upgrade to 40 Seats and Prepay Four Years
“Twice they sent us bills out of the blue telling us we had to upgrade to 40 seats and prepay four years annually.”
Choi: Software valuation multiples have zero correlation with revenue size
“Here we have a regression that charts AOR multiples today versus the implied AOR scale of the most recently reported quarter of a 139 different software companies. And I want to draw your attention to the r squared value of this regression... And so we see her…”
Choi: Revenue CAGR has zero correlation with post-IPO share appreciation
“Now this charts the same y-axis, but on the x-axis you'll see revenue growth compounded annually. And so the R spread here, you can see it's much more scattered, is 0.03.”
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…”
Tunguz: AI app gross margins will expand as inference costs drop 95%
“And when we were looking like a typical software companies, probably at 75% gross margin. Yeah. AI software application companies are like a zero to 30%, and now their single biggest cost has been reduced by 95% overnight, and they didn't have to do a thing.”
Lemkin: Enterprise AI drives all current growth in B2B cloud budgets
“All the growth in cloud budget and B to B budget is for AI. Some of it's sure for AI native platforms, some of it's for other things, but all this AI budget is basically in the enterprise. Okay. That's where you see the growth. It's all enterprise.”
Lemkin: The best AI support tools resolve only 30% to 40% of issues
“If you really talk to the best AI vendors at scale, even the best AI support tools, and this isn't customer says it's just support the best ones. If they're honest, can resolve 30, maybe 40% of issues, right?”
Lemkin: EchoSign's Market Share Fell From 28% to 11% Post-Acquisition
“When we sold, this is why it was stupid to sell, we had 28% market share by revenue, and maybe 40% by transactions, because we were cheaper than DocuSign. It was 11 within two years of me leaving.”
Halligan: The SaaS market recession ended in Q3 2024
“Sass was in a downturn. There's a Sass. And it started, I don't know when it started, but I think it ended in Q three. If you look at the SaaS company's numbers, see it through Sequoia, see it through all my HubSpot dashboards where I see our customers. It fel…”
Tunguz: Series A ticket size valuations increased 42% over two years
“In fact, valuations at Series A ticket sizes have increased 42% in the last two years.”
Tunguz: Founders expect valuations to match 2022 and 2023 levels
“They expect their valuations to be the same as in 2023 and the same as in 2022.”
Tunguz: SaaS survey shows AI has no impact on ARR growth
“AI today has no impact on conversion rate, has no impact on ARR growth, even though people who buy AI perceive it as a meaningful contributor to their overall efficiency gains.”
BILL's direct competitors are not regulated money transmitters
“The part that I think becomes a moat competitively is we move money and it's regulated and we do it well. I don't know any of our competitors that are actually regulated that know how to, we have regulators in our shop all the time.”
Lemkin: DocuSign fired its CEO after losing Facebook deal to EchoSign
“The fifth CEO got fired in part because they lost Facebook to us. And Facebook was even back then was pretty big and they thought they'd already commit. They already did a commit to the board that they were committing this huge deal to Facebook and we won it.”
Lemkin: SaaS spending is accelerating, up 20% this year
“If you look at Gartner or anyone, SaaS spending overall is accelerating. It's up 20% this year, which is more than last year on both the percentage and of course, an absolute basis.”
Lemkin: SaaS vendors promise AI can cut 30% to 50% of staff
“Everyone in post sales, Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgeous, on and on. They are promising you can eliminate. 30 to 50% of your humans in support with AI. They're promising it today.”
Outbound sales drives the majority of Rippling's revenue attribution
“We're going to focus more specifically on outbound, which makes up the majority of Rippling's revenue from an attribution standpoint.”
Plank: 50% of Rippling's outbound demos are booked over the phone
“And the reality is that's because 50% of our demos that are booked in outbound are booked over the phone.”
Stebbings: Startups Raising Over $5M at Seed Have Consistently Performed Worst
“I've done a 170 investments in 10 years. And we analyzed performance across them, according to actually how much they raised at the seed. And consistently the worst performing companies raised five million or more at the seed round.”
Cabane: AI workflow beat Reddit's 200-person SDR team in under two months
“We have done this in less than two months, and as of yesterday, I looked up the numbers. We've beaten the SDR team that's been working on that for, like, a couple of years, and there's 200 people.”
Cabane: Deepgram's automated SEO workflow generated 3.5M clicks and replaced 10 people
“They got 3.5 million clicks. Like, how insane is that? So what are we seeing here? We're seeing they have one person to build a workflow, and Marcel told me, took him, like, about a thousand hours. Sure. Ok. And then one human who's there ongoing for, like, co…”
Lemkin: The Majority Of SaaS Companies Moved Customer Success Under Sales
“Churn zero did a survey gains. I did a survey. They're both on Saster. I'm sure hook would give you similar data. The majority of SAS teams have moved CS into sales, the majority.”
Grill: Many Enterprises Buy ChatGPT Enterprise Without Defined Use Cases
“There's a lot of companies right now that, and this is a luxury to be in this position, but for something like ChatGPT Enterprise, they are purchasing without a defined use case in mind”
Lemkin: Cloud hyperscaler spending growth is entirely driven by AI
“Look at how much acceleration the spend has been on Azure and Google cloud. This is all AI. This is all AI.”
Lemkin: Vista Equity Partners is writing its $3.5B Pluralsight investment to zero
“Vista, which is one of the two or three biggest folks that buy SaaS companies, Vista, Tomo Bravo, a few others, they bought Pluralsight. They're writing the entire 3.5 billion investment to zero.”
Seseri: Klaviyo automating 700 roles with AI added $40M to bottom line
“We have seen a few green shoots, if you will, in this space, particularly, for example, what we saw with Klaviyo and the impact that they have had by bringing AI from a project siloed or customer interface type level usage to their core business, where they au…”
Lemkin: Bessemer's Byron Deeter will only invest in AI-first startups
“And for example, when I caught up with Byron Dieter, most recently from Bessemer, they're managing 10 or twenty million. Byron's done a ton of the best SaaS companies. If you don't know, he'll only do AI. There's exceptions of course, but if you're not AI firs…”
Lemkin: Majority of surveyed sales professionals secretly work multiple jobs
“I did a survey on LinkedIn a couple of months ago and asked like over 2000 sales professionals. The majority said they're working more than one job. The majority.”