The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

We ran a live edition of The Agents this week to walk through our agent-led growth stack as it stands today. We talked about “ask your agent instead of your developer” on last week’s episode, and this session goes into how that works in practice.At SaaStr, agent-led growth means two different things:* Using AI agents to run your own go-to-market. For us that’s mostly 10K, our main GTM agent.* Getting picked by other people’s agents. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or an app’s built-in agent “what are the best B2B e...

Adam Guild CEO of Owner.com gave one of the more useful operator talks at SaaStr AI 2026 this year: three years of rebuilding Owner.com around AI, from a website and online ordering product for independent restaurants into something where more than 83% of new customers now start their journey inside an AI product. They’ve rocketed past $100M ARR, growing at triple digits and faster than the year before I led the seed round at SaaStr Fund and am a board member, so I’ve watched most of this happen in real time.Owner wasn’t slowing down w...

Klaviyo co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki came to SaaStr AI to walk through how a 2,300-person public company builds AI products. Not the vision deck. The actual build system.Klaviyo won B2B for e-commerce with one insight: instead of showing merchants how many emails they sent and how many got opened, connect to the cart and to Shopify and show them the campaign made $18,372. Merchants still post those screenshots on LinkedIn years later. Changing what the dashboard reported took Klaviyo to roughly 80% share in the Shopify ecosystem, one of the only IPOs in the 2023 cohort, and...

Amelia and I just shipped Episode #010 of The Agents. Same setup as always: three humans, 21+ agents in production, an 8-figure B2B + AI business, revenue running 140% of last year and growing again. Every week we get into what’s actually working, what broke, and what you should do about it if you’re running agents at scale. Not the demos. What really happened.This might have been the craziest build week yet. We were each vibe coding 8 to 12 hours a day, often in two concurrent sessions. Call it 20 hours a day between the two of us. And the...

We use Higgsfield almost every day at SaaStr AI. If you’ve watched any of our short videos, the intro to The Agents with me and Amelia, the event promos, the sponsorship teasers, all of it is built on Higgsfield. We’re also a proud early investor through SaaStrAI Fund. So when Alex Mashrabov, the co-founder and CEO, came on stage with me, I wasn’t playing analyst. I’m a customer, an investor, and a heavy user.Higgsfield crossed a $500M annualized revenue run rate in June, up from $200M at the end of 2025, and it’s cash-flo...

Databricks is now running at a stunning $6.9B revenue run-rate, growing 80%+ year over year, with AI products alone past a $1.7B run-rate and net retention above 140%. That gives co-founder Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji better visibility into what enterprises are actually doing with AI budget than almost anyone. On stage at SaaStr AI, he laid out where that money is going, where it isn’t, and one claim that should change how every B2B exec thinks about competition:Any business with a monopoly today will not have a monopoly 12 to 24 months from now.It’s in some ways...

At SaaStr AI 2026, Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr’s Chief AI Officer, took five months of running 10K, SaaStr’s AI VP of Marketing, distilled what worked into a spec, and built a brand-new one from scratch on stage in about 15 minutes. The whole room built theirs at the same time.This is the playbook to do it yourself. First the mental model, then the build in ten steps, then each step in full with the data to feed it, the workflows to build first, and the guardrails that keep it from emailing your entire database at 2am.10...

We we fortunate enough to get Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, on stage live at SaaStr AI 2026 to react in real time to the agents we run SaaStrAI on. Not a demo deck. The actual AI agents doing the actual work: 10K (our AIVP of Marketing), QBee (our AI Customer Success rep), and a third one I’ll get to.Amjad started Replit back in 2016, when language models were a twinkle. He’s been studying AI since he was 16. So when the guy who built the platform reacts to what you built on the platform, you...

Denise Persson runs marketing for Snowflake. That’s a 700-person org, new-business pipeline she’s personally accountable for, and a level of compliance and data risk most of us never have to think about. She came back to SaaStr AI 2026 to talk about what actually changes when you deploy agents across a marketing team at that scale.The headline she gave us: she doesn’t log into a dashboard in the morning anymore. She interrogates her data in plain English. Nobody on her team gets Slack messages from her asking “why did pipeline move in US West?” because sh...

When Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, took the stage at SaaStr AI 2026, she’d just hit her one-year anniversary at the company. She also walked through the question many B2B leaders are wrestling with: when AI writes 80%+ of your code and anyone can vibe code your feature set in an afternoon, what’s actually left to compete on?1. Lovable Is at $400M ARR With Fewer Than 200 PeopleLovable shared in February that it crossed $400M in ARR. The team is still just shy of 200 people. That’s north of $2M in ARR per em...

The Agents is our weekly podcast on how we deploy and run AI agents at SaaStr, and how to do it yourself.We run SaaStr AI on 3 humans and 21+ AI agents. At SaaStr AI 2026 we did something we’d never done before: we pulled up the back ends of our top agents live, in front of the room, and went through how they really work. Not the demo version. The real version, including the parts that break.This is that walkthrough, agent by agent, with the numbers and the stack behind each one. A few of...

At SaaStr AI 2026, Kyle Norton, CRO of vertical AI leader for restaurants Owner.com, walked through how his team is generating outcomes that look almost impossible on paper for traditional B2B. Owner sells vertical AI to independent mom-and-pop restaurants (think HubSpot plus Shopify for the corner takeout spot) and they’re at ~$100M ARR growing triple digits. Kyle joined when they were at $2M.The headline numbers from the talk:* 20x close-won to OTE. A $150K rep brings in $2M+ in ARR per year. That’s the average, not the top performer.* 4x th...

Amelia and I just recorded Episode 005 of The Agents. We both got the cost number completely wrong.Our AI VP of Marketing (10K) and our AI VP of Customer Success (QBee) cost a combined $257 a month to run.I thought it was a daily number when I first saw the alert from Replit. Amelia thought it was a daily number too when I sent it to her on Slack. It’s monthly.For context: those two agents now do work that previously required real humans. 10K refreshes ticket sales, updates dashboards, compares year-over-year, dr...

When Claude Opus 4.6 shipped in December 2025, Anthropic’s commercial team came back from winter break to find demand had gone vertical. They hadn’t hired for it. They hadn’t planned for it.As Eleanor Dorfman, Anthropic’s Head of Industries who runs the commercial and industries sales team, put it on the SaaStr AI 2026 stage last week: even if they’d been ready to 3x or 4x or 5x the sales team, you can’t absorb that many bodies fast enough to deliver a positive customer experience.So in January 2026, they rebuilt the entire sales org ar...

Amelia and I just shipped Episode #004 of The Agents. Same setup: three humans, 20+ agents, revenue went from -19% to +47% YoY, and every week we get into what’s actually working, what’s breaking, and what you should do about it if you’re running agents in production.This is the last episode before SaaStr AI Annual 2026, which is now less than a week away. Attendance is tracking 140%+ of last year, the sponsor base is fully AI-native, and Amelia and I are doing three live build sessions on the main campus where you’ll deploy your own agents alongsid...

Amelia and I just released Episode #002 of The Agents. Same deal as always: three humans, 20+ agents, revenue went from -19% to +47% YoY, and every week we talk about what’s actually working, what’s breaking, and what you should do about it if you’re deploying agents at scale.Episode #001 became the fastest-growing show in the SaaStr network. So we went deeper in #002. More specifics, more failures, more things that surprised us.Here are the top 10 learnings from Episode #002.1. Lazy AI Agents Are a New Failure Mode. Check Yours Every Day.Amelia...

We get asked about our agents probably 50 times a week.CEOs of public companies. Founders just deploying their first AI SDR. RevOps leaders trying to figure out if they should build or buy. Everyone wants to know what’s actually happening behind the scenes when you run 20+ AI agents in production with a team of 3 humans.We can’t do 50 consulting calls a week. But we can do something better.Welcome to The Agents, Episode #001.This is a new weekly show with me and Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr’s Chief AI Officer, where...

We’ve now been running AI SDR agents for 10+ months at SaaStr:* We use four different vendors in daily rotation (Artisan, Salesforce AgentForce, Qualified, and Monaco)* We’ve sent hundreds of thousands of outbound messages* Processed 1.5 million inbound sessions on a single website, and …* We’ve made every mistake you can make along the way.Someone asked us the other day to break down what they should know before rolling out their very first AI SDR. So here are the 10 biggest lessons, drawn from real deployment data, real failures, and real...

We’ve been running AI agents in production at SaaStr for about 10 months now. What started as a couple of experiments has turned into almost 30 agents and vibe-coded apps running across our GTM stack — from outbound sales to inbound qualification to internal operations.And managing 30 agents is harder than managing the 12 humans we had at peak headcount. Not harder in every way. But harder in ways I didn’t expect.Here are the top 5 issues we’ve hit — plus a bonus one that might be the most uncomfortable of all.#1: The Context Switching Tax Is Bru...

We did a deep dive on 20VC x SaaStr this week with Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian. Atlassian just put up an incredible quarter of accelerating growth (23% at $6.4B ARR, with RPO growing to 44%). And yet the markets aren’t showing anyone much love. Mike was honest and reflective on just what’s happening to B2B and SaaS in the Age of AI.There’s so much noise about “software is dead” and “agents replace everything” that founders are losing the plot. Mike’s running a $6B+ revenue business that’s accelerating — 26% cloud growth, 44% RPO growth — in the...