The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 842: The 90/10 Rule for AI Agents: What to Build vs Buy with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO SaaStr's Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte, and SaaStr CEO & Founder Jason Lemkin break down SaaStr's evolving 90/10 rule for AI agents and apps: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% you can't find. In this episode, they walk through two recently built tools: an internal AI VP of Marketing and an external-faci...

SaaStr 841: Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales. Clay's Co-Founder Varun Anand takes the stage at SaaStr to break down how the company went from paying for claymation blobs before generating any revenue to powering growth workflows for companies like Cursor, Anthropic, and Figma. He explains why brand has always been core to Clay's id...

SaaStr 840: From 1 Agent to 20+: The Reality of Managing Multiple AI Agents Across Your GTM with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO Eight months and 20+ AI agents later, what does managing a multi-agent GTM stack actually look like day to day? SaaStr's CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, and SaaStr's Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte, get candid about what's working, and what's not. $4.8M in additional pipeline late...

SaaStr 839: Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO The Brutal Truth About Transforming a SaaS Company into an AI Company Intercom's Chief Product Officer, Paul Adams, shares the unfiltered story of how they transformed from a struggling SaaS company with 5 quarters of declining growth into an AI-first company with a breakthrough product (Fin) that now han...

SaaStr 838: The Present and Future of AI in Sales and GTM with SaaStr's CEO and Owner's CRO Jason Lemkin on Going All-In on AI Agents: 20 Agents, Zero SDRs, and the Death of Mid-Pack Sales Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, sits down with Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner, to share the raw story of how frustration with sales team turnover pushed him to deploy 20 AI agents in under a year, and why we...

SaaStr 837: 10 Things To Do Right Now  to Become AI Native with Filevine's CEO & Founder Ryan Anderson, Co-Founder and CEO of Filevine, shares the playbook for how his legal tech company successfully transitioned from a traditional SaaS business to an AI-native company, now generating more new revenue from AI products than their core SaaS platform. With 6,000 customers, 700 employees, and $200M+ A...

SaaStr 836: The Step-By-Step Playbook for Building AI-Powered GTM Teams with Personio's CRO Philip Lacor, CRO of Personio, shares his company's journey to building an AI-powered go-to-market motion, including 5 critical lessons learned and 4 real-world use cases delivering measurable results. In this podcast, Philip breaks down: ✅ The 5 lessons for AI transformation: top-down + bottom-up motion,...

SaaStr 835: AI + B2B in 2026: Find the Tailwinds or Get Left Behind with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Software spend is set to hit record levels in 2026, but you're not getting any of it unless you change. SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin breaks down the paradox facing B2B companies right now: It's never been easier to scale to $100M (for a select few), while everyone else struggles. Hal...

SaaStr 834: Why OpenAI Doesn't Pay Sales Commission (And Why It Works) with OpenAI GTM Leader Maggie Hott, and Harry Stebbings, Founder of 20VC Discover how OpenAI's unique approach to B2B sales compensation is changing the game. In this interview with Harry Stebbings, Founder of 20VC, Maggie Hott, OpenAI GTM leadership, shares her experience at OpenAI, including why they don't pay sales commissio...

SaaStr 833: AI and the Death of the 2021 Sales Playbook with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Join SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin from SaaStr London as we tackle pressing topics in AI and sales during an engaging AMA session. From discussing the evolution of inbound vs. outbound sales to detailing the transformative impact of AI on sales roles and outbound strategies, this session covers i...

SaaStr 832: How to Use AI to Hyper-Customize Go-To-Market at Scale with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer In this episode from SaaStr AI London 2025,  SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin and SaaStr's Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte discuss the implementation and optimization of AI SDRs within various business contexts. They focus on key AI agents used for sales processes, data aggregation, and th...

SaaStr 831: How We Use 20+ AI Agents for Marketing & Go-to-Market with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer and CEO & Founder Join us for part two of our series on leveraging AI tools for Go-To-Market in B2B/SaaS. In this episode, SaaStr's CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin, and SaaStr's Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte discuss the importance and current state of AI in marketing, highlighting their key tech stack...

SaaStr 830: 6 Months Later, How Our AI SDRs Actually Work as AI Runs GTM with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer In this episode, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin and SaaStr's Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte delve into their journey of integrating AI into our go-to-market strategy over the past six months. Starting with just one AI agent before SaaStr Annual in May, we've scaled to roughly 20 c...

SaaStr 829: A Hands-On Guide to SaaStr's New AI Tools with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin We delve into the functionalities of our SaaStr AI tools, including the AI Mentor, which has been engaged over 100,000 times, providing answers to various startup-related queries.   You'll see a demonstration of how our AI VC tools, including a startup valuation calculator, pitch deck analyzer, and bench...

SaaStr 828: The AI Revolution in B2B: Insights from SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and SaaStr Chief AI Officer Amelia Lerutte, and Qualified's CEO Kraig Swensrud Join Kraig Swensrud, founder and CEO of Qualified, as he sits down with Jason Lemkin, CEO & Founder SaaStr, and Amelia LeRutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr. In this insightful discussion, they explore the current landscape of AI in business, incl...

Brett Queener is Partner at Bonfire Ventures , a $1B AUM seed-stage fund writing $3-4M checks into application software companies. He was employee #70 at Salesforce.com, where he built go-to-market, launched the AppExchange, and helped scale the company from its earliest days. Previously, he worked at Siebel Systems (the fastest-growing software company of its era) and ran a B2B startup (SmartRecr...

In this comprehensive session, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin dives into the latest trends and developments in AI, particularly in the go-to-market (GTM) sector. The session outlines how innovative AI tools are transforming businesses, from AI SDRs and BDRs to forward-deployed engineers. Leaders in the industry are pushing the boundaries, showing higher growth rates and superior marketing eff...

SaaStr 825: How the AI Era Has Directly Impacted Marketing and Sales with Snowflake's CMO and Founding CRO Join us for an insightful episode discussing the impact of AI on marketing and sales at Snowflake. Hosts Chris Degnan, founding CRO of Snowflake, and Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, delve into how AI has revolutionized their operations. They share key learnings from Snowflake's data cloud m...

SaaStr 824: VC in the AI Era - Exactly What's Getting Funded, Why & When with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin In this episode, SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin delves into the current state of venture capital (VC) funding, informed by data from over a thousand reviewed pitch decks and approximately 400,000 startup valuations on SaaStr AI. Learn about the latest trends, what VCs are looking...

SaaStr 823: Is GTM Really Dead?! with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin In this episode, Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder, addresses common misconceptions about traditional go-to-market strategies in the age of AI. Despite claims that outbound marketing, SEO, and old-school tactics are dead, the speaker highlights how leading AI companies are successfully employing these methods with minor tweaks. Drawi...

SaaStr 822: SaaStr's Top 10+ AI Agents: AI SDR, AI BDR, AI RevOps + More: The How, The Who, The Why with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin Join us in this comprehensive deep dive into the use of AI agents within SaaStr's operations, as requested by many of our followers.  Led by SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin, and SaaStr Chief AI Officer, Amelia Lerutte, we'll detail our journey from having no AI at t...

SaaStr 821: Swapping Stories - Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier's CEO and Co-Founder Wade Foster Join us for an in-depth conversation with Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, on the SaaStr AI Swapping Stories Podcast! Wade shares how Zapier is leading the way in AI-powered automation, the evolution from simple workflows to agentic systems, and why AI fluency is now a must-h...

SaaStr 820: The Complete Guide  to Vibe Coding  Without a Developer with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin Join us in this episode as we dive into the world of vibe coding with a prosumer approach. SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin shares his extensive journey of building production-ready applications without a developer, using platforms like Replit and Lovable. From initial excitement to hard...

SaaStr 819: Swapping Notes on the AI Revolution in Marketing with G2's CMO Sydney Sloan Welcome to Swapping Notes, a new SaaStr podcast series where we cut through the AI hype and get real about who's doing what with AI in B2B.  Amelia LeRutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and co-host Guillaume Cabane, Co-Founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners, sit down with AI leaders from the compani...

SaaStr 818: Anthropic, Cursor, Fal & Bessemer: The Realities of Scaling AI Join Talia Goldberg (Bessemer Venture Partners), Kelly Loftus (Anthropic), Jacob Jackson (Cursor), and Gorkem Yurtseven (FaL - Feautres and Labels) as they discuss the evolving landscape of AI, business models, metrics, and the future of generative media.  00:00 - Introduction & Panelist Bios 01:19 - How AI Companies Are Ch...