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 908 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Anderson: Filevine refuses to sell to customers who reject AI products
“We no longer sell to customers who won't buy the AI products.”
DoNotPay aims to replace all lawyers and make the law free
“What we say is we want to replace all of the lawyers and make the law free, but it's not political.”
Reina: ElevenLabs set a 20x quota-to-base ratio with uncapped commissions
“The entire logic was very simple. It's like, look, if you want to have a base salary of a hundred K, you're going to need to bring two million dollars in revenues every single year, right? You have uncapped commissions. It's like OTE out of the gate is going t…”
Lemkin: SaaStr Is Dropping Adobe Marketo, Calling It Their Worst Vendor
“So our most expensive vendor gone, not renewing toxic threatened us, never helped us. Worst piece of software and the two by two worst and most expensive Adobe Marketo.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Replaced $500K in Staff With $257 in AI Agents
“We replaced 500,000 dollars worth of employees with 257 dollars worth of agents, but the productivity is higher.”
Lemkin: SaaStr wants to hire a human reporting to its AI agent
“We want to hire a human. To report to our AI VP of marketing.”
Lemkin: SaaStr no longer needs junior marketers due to AI agent
“Is it a partial replacement for junior marketers? Yeah, we don't need any.”
Mooney: Mangomint shuns Salesforce opportunities for account-level custom workflows
“You know, we could go into many paths here, but to the point where in Salesforce, I don't even use opportunities. I said that to a RevOps leader last night, and he just about keeled over. But you know, I realized for an organization like mine, our sales cycle …”
Adams: Intercom mandated all product designers ship code or leave the company
“We said every designer is now shipping code to production. It is now part of your job. If you don't like that, We had a great run, but we should part ways and you should go somewhere where designers don't have to ship code.”
Mooney: Mangomint eliminated its customer success team over three years ago
“It's never going to solve your problem to just plug in this new team and think that they can smooth out whatever that is. So I'm all about killing off the CS team. I'm happy to share how we did that. It's been over three years now and it's worked quite well.”
Michael Seibel: Angels write 10% of checks just to avoid saying no
“Category three that people don't talk about. If they ask me, it will be uncomfortable for me to say no, so I will write them a check. I'll tell you that in my experience, this is up to 10% of the time. I am hoping the founder doesn't ask me for money. Because …”
Lemkin: SaaStr pays Marketo $100k annually but gets no phone support
“We pay Marketo, like, a 100,000 dollars a year. I can't get anybody on the phone, right?”
Makani: Motive shut down a new marketplace business at a $100M run-rate
“We started a new marketplace business. And it was very high potential. It fit our founding narrative. It was the right story. And it actually scaled pretty rapidly to north of a hundred million dollar run rate. In something like 18 months. But we realized actu…”
Reina: ElevenLabs paid zero sales commissions on POCs, only recurring revenue
“For us, we established that like we would compensate, we pay commissions on recurrent revenue contracts, but not in one offs. So if you sign a POC and you pay for like two months or like three months or like two weeks, you would not Get any commission on that.…”
Rubrik CPO: Users will eventually operate Rubrik entirely without UI dashboards
“And our vision here is that eventually you can operate all of rubric through this interface, that you do not need the UI and dashboards at all, that it will be a fully agentic experience.”
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 …”
Bialecki: Klaviyo mandated all employees reach Level 3 agent proficiency by June
“We saw everybody's like, look, by the end of June, you need to be an L three, which is if you're not constantly running either end sessions or a team of agents, right? You're just not, you're not going to be skilled to survive in this next era.”
Lemkin: SaaStr churned from Notion after seven years due to AI agents
“So seven years together, no complaints, Notion. You're cheap. You did a good job. You're cool. You're extensible when no one was extensible. We had a teammate that loved you so much. You invited him to a user conference to present, and we still churned with a …”
Lemkin: SaaStr Connect will demote profiles that mention burnout
“Sastra connect, which is this new hiring platform. We're going to actively search for anyone that says burnout in their bio, and we're going to give them a quiet demotion, massive demotion.”
How Higgsfield Calculates Its $300M Annual Recurring Revenue Figure
“So like for us, we, like for us for three hundred million, we see the on-demand usage for specific lasts for weeks. We see, we take the monthly subscription revenue, annual subscription revenue divided by 12, sum it up all together, multiplied by 12, and that'…”
Persson: Snowflake is hiring GTM engineers over business analysts
“I think the GTM engineer function has clearly is that's the one we're hiring for business analysts, not so much anymore.”
Persson: Snowflake will not expand content marketing headcount due to AI productivity
“So there are certain kind of functions like let's say our content marketing team, they're able to do of course so significantly more than they did on their own. Exactly. So it won't be a function that we will sort of invest more in in terms of, you know, headc…”
Ibarra: SaaStr AI agent Tenke holds budget and decides vendor renewals
“Literally, Tenke is going to decide for you, and if it says no, I'm going to say no. Like, for this, he has the budget. Like, he can decide if he wants to use this or not.”
Masad: Replit uses an autonomous agent to self-improve prompts via nightly PRs
“We have an agent internally at Replit that is constantly evolving Replit agent. What it does every night, it will look at all the traces of everyone that's interacting with Replit, analyzes them, finds, you know, things that are broken, sentiment issues, error…”
Lovable Has Zero Titles and Requires All Leaders to Do IC Work
“That's why we're completely flat. We don't have titles internally for a reason. Everybody is expected to do some sort of IC work. We don't have just leaders that are just sitting on top navigating things. Everybody's just expected to build”
Lemkin: SaaStr is hiring a marketing director who reports to AI
“You do report to? Tenk, our AI VP of marketing. It's a six-figure salary. We'd like you to come into our Palo Alto office one or two days a week. Other than that, we have a lot of flexibility. Good or bad news, you report to an AI agent. This is not a joke.”
Lemkin: SaaStr will churn from Marketo over unusable agent APIs
“We're not going to stay in Marketo, even though it's 90 years old, because we can't even, our agents can't even talk to its A, even all the other issues, even we might even forgive them can spam all these terrible things. If we, our agents could talk to it and…”
Lemkin: Artisan, Monaco, and Qualified AI agents each replaced two human roles
“Or take over all of like two people did for like each of Artisan and Monaco and qualified. They replaced like two, two people each, right? That's high ROI.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Uses 20 AI Agents That Replaced Eight People
“Literally at Sastra we have 20 agents that replaced eight people, ok? We're running it all the time. We're at the bleeding edge.”
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…”
Adams: Intercom abandoned its long-standing SaaS product principles for AI
“We had these principles at Intercom that evolved over years and they made us really good at building SaaS product... But, these principles were designed for the SaaS era. They were designed to build a SaaS product. We had to abandon all this shit.”
Lemkin: SaaStr operates 20 AI agents after eliminating sales reps
“The reason we pushed the envelope and have 20 agents running now was because, and listen, criticize me. I was just exasperated with turnover. I was exasperated with overpaying, not helping, not working. And I just couldn't do it one more time in my career.”
Lemkin: SaaStr pays more for AI agents than for Salesforce itself
“The tough part is we pay more for those agents than we pay for Salesforce, which is an existential question that Mark and his team are thinking about because yes, Salesforce is more valuable, but the agents are even more valuable than Salesforce. So Salesforce…”
Anderson: Filevine killed open APIs to gate AI competitors from data
“We have moved from open API access To personal access tokens, we know exactly who's accessing our API. We know exactly what they're doing. We know how they're using the API. We know how often they're using the API. They can't get at it without our express perm…”
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,…”
Ibarra: SaaStr now employs more AI agents than human staff
“We do also have more agents than humans. So I literally just saw someone we know yesterday. I was like, oh, SAS for London looks so great. This is my first time here. How many SAS for employees did this? I was like, well, there's two on this stage there. One m…”
Ibarra: Managing 20 AI agents takes the majority of our time
“Right now it does take literally the majority, I would say, of both mine and Jason's time to run all these agents and use them successfully”
Lemkin: SaaStr Replaced Human SDR Team With an AI Agent
“We replaced our human SDR team with an AI. Yes. We had to train it for a month. Yes. We have to train it for every day, but once we do it works. 1206 leads to Sastra from this from 505,216 messages. That's pretty good. 136 responses. So that's a pretty high di…”
Anthropic Uses Shadow Targets Instead of Traditional Sales Quotas
“No quotas at Anthropic today. That might change. Everything in this space, I feel like as soon as you say it, it's already outdated, but just shadow targets today.”
Biestman: ServiceTitan distributes sales leads dynamically by AE merit, not round-robin
“We have this really, I think, unique way in which we think about customer acquisition, which is if a lead comes in that looks like a particular type of lead. It gets distributed to the account executive that has the highest propensity to close that type of bus…”
Norton: Leadership Hires Must Be Hands-On and AI Native
“In any leadership role, there's a component of the interview that's now, what are you doing with AI? What do you know about it? How are you using it today? And I really want to unpack it. And it's been a mandate. I don't care how good this person is if they're…”
GitHub CPO: Next-Gen Copilot Aims to Turn Non-Programmers Into Creators
“What I'm really excited about the next generation of Copaldo is transforming into this product that Your grandmother, your child, or you yourself, even if you're not a programmer, can actually interact and create something overall.”
Halligan: HubSpot Avoids Hiring Executives From Google and Microsoft
“The other hack that helped us is we just don't hire anyone from Google or Microsoft or a giant company that it's like a different level of abstraction from where we're at. It was used to having, you know, a lot of staff and a lot of help around that maybe we'r…”
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.”
Lemkin: HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah alone offered to fund SaaStr's inclusion program
“I asked about 20 CEOs and founders and CTOs in tech to help us with the inclusion program this year. Okay. You know how many offered to help one Dharmesh Shah. From HubSpot said he would fund the entire thing next year.”
Lang: Mangomint incentivizes sales reps to keep initial deal sizes smaller
“We don't actually want you to buy payroll on day one. Like we will actively discourage you. We incentivize our sales reps to keep the deal sizes lower at the time it closes because the chance of success is that much higher. And we know that, hey, once they are…”