We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

Lenny Rachitsky:Used to have about 10 people full time now you have 1.2 humans 20 agents.

Jason Lemkin:We have 10 desks that used to be go to market people they're all just labeled with our agents Repli for Replit Quali for Qualified Arty for Artisan Agent Force needs a nickname agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on Christmas we're done with hiring humans in sales we're

Lenny Rachitsky:Done the business is doing very similarly to what it was when you had 10 humans.

Jason Lemkin:If I had two more great humans that wanted to join don't get me wrong I would hire them tomorrow but I'm not gonna hire someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what SaaStr does I just can't do that AI is replacing the jobs people don't wanna do today and it is displacing the mid pack and the mediocre.

Lenny Rachitsky:How do you see the future of the sales profession?

Jason Lemkin:We should have $250,000 a year SDRs but they'd be like at Vercel they'd be managing 10 agents not 10 people the classic SDR junior kid that is hired out of college to send emails we don't need them folks that qualify leads coming in the contact me's that we see we have no need for them today they should be extinct next year.

Lenny Rachitsky:Someone's listening to this like oh man my job is in trouble.

Jason Lemkin:If you can go do this you're hyper employable.

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Jason Lemkin founder and CEO of SaaStr the world's largest community for B2B founders and one of my absolute favorite sales and go to market minds on the planet Jason is not only deeply knowledgeable about everything sales he's also extremely articulate and direct and is also now personally going super deep on what AI can do for a sales org he's transformed his own SaaStr sales team from around 10 SDRs and AEs to one full time AE a part time chief of AI named Emilia and 20 AI agents he is seeing the same performance from his AI team as he saw with his former human team and he's just getting started these are my favorite kinds of conversations because the guest is living in the future and comes here to show us what the future is like where we're headed and how we can get there ourselves and also just how to avoid all the pitfalls that he had to deal with along the way we cover all of the things that he has learned about where sales and go to market is going in the AI age he gives a bunch of advice for salespeople and the future of their careers the future of the go to market org how to win as an AI startup right now what tools he's finding most useful what it took to shift a sales team and so much more this episode is going to get your mind spinning in the best way possible if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it helps tremendously and if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get 19 premium products for free for an entire year including a year free of Lovable Replen Bolt N8 N Gamma Linear Devon PostHawk Superhuman Descript Whisperflop Perplexity Warp Granolah Magic Patterns Raycast Chatbier D Mobbin and Stripe Atlas head on over to Lenny'snewsletter.com click product pass with that I'd bring you Jason Lemkin after a short word from our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by DX the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers to thrive in the AI era organizations need to adapt quickly but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like which tools are working how are they being used what's actually driving value DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift with DX companies like Dropbox Booking.com Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity to learn more visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny that's getdx.com/lenny this episode is brought to you by Vzero from First Sell Vzero is the web development assistant designed for professionals of all technical backgrounds whether you're a product manager designer or developer transform how you bring products to life with Vzero everybody can cook don't just show up to reviews with docs and ideas arrive with working prototypes that demonstrate real Vzero drafts project plans generates interactive interfaces and builds full stack applications without writing a single line of code and with features like AI and database integrations screenshot import and sync with GitHub Vzero helps reduce development bottlenecks and enhance collaboration between technical and nontechnical team members the result faster iteration and a shorter path from idea to implementation Vercel built Vzero for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration if you can dream it you can ship it visit vercel.com/lenny to get started that's vercel.com/lenny built Jason thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

Jason Lemkin:Lucky to be a super fan and then to get to join right it's it's it's terrific to to to be on the other side.

Lenny Rachitsky:So this is our second conversation we did our last conversation a year and a half ago I don't know if you know this but it became a pretty legendary episode it's something people continue to share and that conversation is around basically a deep dive into building your sales org and a lot has changed for you and the world since then cough AI and what's happened is you've gone extremely deep on what AI enables for sales for startups for go to market and what I love about conversations like this is you're basically living in the future and you're here to give us a glimpse of where things are heading and tell us how to avoid the wrong turns and just help us get there ourselves.

Jason Lemkin:That I think I can do.

Lenny Rachitsky:To start yes help us understand just the business you run this SaaStr yes what is it you sell what is the business what is it what is it you do Jason.

Jason Lemkin:You know I'm still trying to figure it out Lenny maybe you are too in some ways yeah that's true so you know I I I am a two time founder who started writing a blog my god in 2012 about all the mistakes I made after I sold my startup to Adobe we started doing a couple meetups you've done meetups before anyone did this stuff we did a big meetup in 2015 thousands of people came then we do 10,000 people a year at SaaStr annual I've actually also invested almost $200,000,000 almost 10x lifetime only into founders from the community but the reason I don't know is what I folks that do are connected to our content I'm just passionate about helping other founders see mistakes and make less of them Tonya we're we're a large community I do invest but it turned into a business there was no revenue in the beginning I'm sure there was no revenue for lending in the beginning ours was less intentional but we do do 8 figures of revenue a year and it's work that sounds great okay to do 8 figures but there's a lot of costs especially on the event side the media side has almost no cost and it's work we have a 100 sponsors and and as you know like you have sponsors but there's a certain level where it becomes a lot of work like getting two folks to sponsor your podcast with a couple emails no work right if you wanted to have like four Lenny podcast like it just it just scales so we have built our own go to market team over time and I've lived the frustrations folks have followed it and then maybe I'm rambling a little bit the interesting thing the moment that happened to us is going into May we had one AI agent in production called Delphi that we both use for digital Lenny and digital Jason really interesting learnings and we went into our 10,000 person event this year with with an eight you know a 7 figure budget and 8 figure top line and two folks on the sales team who were paid high end of market I have many flaws but paying well and being loyal are not one of them and two of them just quit at the event they just quit on-site okay and I this is like the third time I've done this like the eighth team I've built and I turned to Amelia our chief AI officer and I said we're done with hiring humans in sales we're done we are going to push the limits with agents we're going to push even if it doesn't quite work okay and I knew from this Delphi this general agent that it would sort of work because going into annual this general agent this digital Jason closed a 70 Ks sponsorship on its own so when I saw that a horizontal agent not trained for sales not trained for GTM could close one deal was like let's deploy a couple of these apps we have time and I just can't pay a junior SDR a $150,000 a year to quit I just can't like criticize me but I just couldn't do it one more time I just couldn't do it one more and I actually think this isn't an when I talk to CEOs at leading AI companies they kinda don't wanna do it either they wanna have the smallest sales teams they can as much for cultural reasons right even if even if Reply only goes from zero to 200 it could have been two twenty with a smaller sales team I think Omjad's okay with it right so it's an enduring thing but anyhow so we pushed the limits and now if you walk into SaaStr's office it's kinda funny we have 10 desks that used to be go to market people they're all just labeled with our agents Repli for Replit Quali for Qualified Arty for Artisan Agent Force needs a nickname maybe we can make one up with Salesforce there's Amelia's corner office at one end I'm in the I'm in the back of the office and it's just agents it's the quietest office and net net Lenny it's about here's the meta learning for when we when we're recording this the pro the net productivity is about the same it's not better it's not worse but it's so much more efficient and it scales because software scales so and we can talk about what we've learned I think it's important that it takes time to train these agents they don't work out of the box but when you dial them in when you take your best person or your best script and you train an agent with your best person and best script that agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson your best person and that's what we've learned and how to perfect it and I just think because and criticize me anybody you or anyone watching or listening maybe it's not cool I didn't wanna hire my twenty eighth rep that was gonna quit but I just couldn't do it one more time in the age of AI I'm like it's time to go to the bleeding edge and just see what we can push the limits here.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay I I I love all the directions we're already heading okay so just to help people totally understand what your business is basically these people are selling sponsors for your conferences.

Jason Lemkin:They're selling two things too because it's just relevant to the deep dive. They're selling sponsorships which average about $70 to $80k. Mhm. And then they're also selling tickets which is the high volume. For this is like the self-serve version. They're selling tickets that are anywhere from a couple $100 to if you're a VC that comes the night before could be $2. Okay no no gifts for VCs that decide the night before. Founders that decide early get about 20% of cost and it's work to sell these tickets, right? And so you can just post an email like you do and you probably fill up Lenny's summit but if you want to max it out you got to do work. You got to do drip campaigns. You got to reach out to people. You have to reactivate folks that came to Lenny's summit, you know, three years ago but you want them back because they're good people and that just requires work. And as your base scales, you know, you have how many people subscribe to Lenny's newsletter now? 1,200,000 or something.

Lenny Rachitsky:1,200,000 roughly.

Jason Lemkin:Okay how many as how many of those is a human willing to reach out to?

Jason Lemkin:Approaching none.

Lenny Rachitsky:2,000 yeah.

Jason Lemkin:Imagine you hired a 21 year old SDR fresh out of junior college and said here's my list 1,200,000 people start calling them. I want them to come to Lenny's summit anyhow. So we have this low end version which is tickets, right, which is $4 or $5,000,000 a year and then we have this higher end sales cycle and they're very different and actually they have different agents and then we have a different agent to get people to come back lapsed people so we have lapsed high end and low end agents and they have different workflows and we actually use different vendors for now for now we use different vendors.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay and so previously before this future world how many SDRs did you have how many salespeople?

Jason Lemkin:In this we would have two to three SDRs and up to five AEs.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so like eight nine people full time working on Saastr yes to bring in sponsors and to bring in tickets.

Jason Lemkin:Yes although yes a lot of it is inbound and renewals but not all but yes to manage that business to manage the sales side.

Lenny Rachitsky:Of business help them be successful.

Jason Lemkin:Market let's call it eight to nine and go to market now we have 1.2.

Lenny Rachitsky:1.2.

Jason Lemkin:Humans.

Lenny Rachitsky:Human 1.2 humans one.

Jason Lemkin:Point agents AI agents.

Lenny Rachitsky:One point what is a point two human?

Jason Lemkin:Amelia who's our chief AI officer who who runs everything she spends 20% of her time managing the agents orchestrating the agents.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay which.

Jason Lemkin:Is something I think.

Lenny Rachitsky:People don't let's get into that.

Jason Lemkin:They talk about but they don't actually understand what that means.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah okay I definitely want to spend time there okay so you used to have about 10 people full time now you have 1.2 humans yeah and you said 20 agents.

Jason Lemkin:20 agents yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay and what you're describing is the business is doing very similarly to what it was when you had 10 humans now you have 20 agents the business is doing the same.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah now listen if I had two more great humans that wanted to join don't get me wrong and this is true of every fast4insurp I would hire them tomorrow okay and if you go to Vercel if you go to Replit if you go to they're all going to tell you the same I was literally in London we were just at our abundant event with Maggie who's in the leadership of OpenAI she said they just can't hire enough enterprise reps now okay but what it is replacing are the mid pack and below the ones that don't really understand what Linear does the ones that don't really know what a pull request is or exactly how Replit works the AI can do better not than the best right so I would love to have more humans but I'm not gonna hire someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what Saster does I just can't do that one more time and you don't need to I don't think you need to so we're not doing this is the thing AI is replacing the jobs people don't wanna do today and it is displacing the media the mid pack and the mediocre they are their jobs are at risk they are at risk the best humans it is true that they will get superpowers from AI but I'm not sure the rest will it's a it's a cautionary tale but I would love to have more than one but at the end of the day 1.2 humans is plus 20 agents is doing about what 10 human GTMs did.

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow okay I wanna spend time on the different agents you've built but first of all just kinda zooming out having gone through this experience how do you see the world of go to market changing next year in the coming years.

Jason Lemkin:All the plays work it's the playbooks that are kind of broken in the age of AI all the plays work outbound still works webinars still works podcasts still work okay events still work all this stuff works all this stuff works why is eleven labs out doing a roadshow right it works why do they go on Lenny's podcast it works so the plays all work it's just the playbooks are broken because at at for folks that aren't in the age of AI growth has decelerated so much that nothing seems to work okay it's working it just works so much worse than 2021 but the plays still work they just they don't have enough ROI there's not enough budget for old school SaaS from 2021 the ones that are blowing up right the Vercels the Replitz the eleven labs they have so much demand so much demand that you know that they're still running the plays but they're they're doing them differently they're doing them from a hyper PLG focus because there's so much demand and they're often picking and choosing which prospects to talk to to to contact so like for example Bolt is probably a a distant number three behind Replen and Lovable right but one of my old sales guys runs sales there and I talked to him when they went from 0 to 50,000,000 in six months he's like we honestly just have so many leads we just our half our job is picking which ones to respond to right and he's like and he also is like we closed a 7 figure deal we stole from Lovable because no one called them back at Lovable so your traditional B to B SaaS company even ones with billions of revenue even the Hubspots and all of them they don't have so many great leads they don't call them back so that is a different world not easy different world and then this world where nothing seems to be working is just because the demand has evaporated right so both ends have an incentive in 2026 to push the limits for AI for go to market the ones that are hyper growing can't touch everybody they can't do everything not everyone like Vercel will build their own internally we can talk about why most folks should not build they should buy for the same reasons it's always been true in software we can talk about it at the low end you still need humans but ruthless efficiency is going to be the name of the game for 2026 so anything where AI works the demand is inexhaustible so everyone's either looking for more efficiency or they just can't service the massive amount of inbound they have so maybe that doesn't totally answer your question or I got a little bit off track but that's how the world's changing like when we first did this which wasn't that long ago in a way pre the AI explosion all B2B companies were kind of the same like they grew at somewhat different rates some blew up faster like a Samsara some took longer like a UiPath but come on they all kind of grew the same way for the same ACV for the same deal size now just like in venture and everything else it's wildly bifurcated right you've got the low end which is all about price increases and forcing things onto the base and at the high end we have something we've never seen since 2020 which is everyone in the market at once everyone in the market at once this is something that people don't understand why are these companies doing so well why are they blowing up because they're it's not just that the software we love this stuff Lenny right all these new tools we love them but it's not one law firm looking at Harvey it's everyone it's everyone right it's not a few folks looking at video on the internet it's everyone trying to make video on the internet

Lenny Rachitsky:Because there's a lot of push from the top of like we need to adopt AI we need to be more productive

Jason Lemkin:Now not the traditional like the traditional metric was in most categories three to 5% of prospects would be in market a year so you'd send a trillion emails and you do cold calls and you'd hope maybe 2026 was the time they're willing to dump Salesforce for your new product so add all that up 5% in many categories we're up north of 50% in market so that just totally changes the play still work showing up in person actually knowing what the hell you're selling knowing how to get through procurement all of those will work but other than these weird windows artificial windows in 2020 we've never had so many people in market at once

Lenny Rachitsky:And this is for AI products specifically

Jason Lemkin:Or yeah that that have massive ROI yeah productivity I want I I need to bring a vibe code tool into my company Lenny okay go out and do the work compare Replit Lovable and whoever else and buy one okay like why Harvey and the others and the Gora doing so I mean they're great tools but everyone's like we need to automate how we review contracts and documents with AI now they want a leader and they're going do it and that will slow down like not everybody can be in market every year exhausts an enterprise so this is a version of the AI bubble that will end and we will revert in some ways to old school but when everybody's in market it just changes how you run the whole thing so the so the fastest growing ones and the slowest growing ones both have incentives to use AI here just for different reasons

Lenny Rachitsky:How about the sales profession specifically are SDRs gonna be replaced fully AEs how do you see the future of the sales profession

Jason Lemkin:The classic SDR junior kid that is hired out of college to send emails and respond to inbound emails and maybe get back to them later that day or the next day we don't need them we're not going to need most of them SDRs that knock on doors in a lot of industries aren't going to be displaced right the email based cadence SDR will be 90% displaced by AI next year the people have different nomenclature I call BDRs folks that qualify leads coming in the contact needs that we see we have no need for them today they should be extinct next year there is no reason in the age of AI I have to hit contact me wait a day or two for a 21 year old that doesn't know what Linear does to say hey what do you do how much are you willing to pay me maybe I'll set up a call with Lenny later this week there is no need to do that with AI our AI alone one of our agents fully qualifies everybody on the website so they don't even know they're being qualified it just sets up the meeting with the salesperson so this email based SDR and this human qualifying leads which is not good for the customer it doesn't feel good to be qualified does it they will be mostly extinct next year I'm guessing with your now the AE the classic human doing the sales most of the tools aren't there yet for the most part I think 70% of their jobs will be safe by the end of next year but I think it will decline to 40 or 50 I don't think there's any reason what we're seeing in other categories a great agent can't close a deal too if there's not a lot to negotiate on price and the agent knows the product better than a human at least for folks like you and me I mean you like to talk to a human in sales

Lenny Rachitsky:Sometimes I'd rather I'd rather just chat chat with a yeah a really smart AI

Jason Lemkin:Yeah so that's all in progress now but the classic and the tough part and a lot of folks ask this question Lenny they say okay Jason I I see that in in your data how are we going to build the sales profession if there's no entry level jobs in SDRs and AEs and that's a meta question across all of AI we're already seeing AI concentrate strength in sort of mid tier folks isn't it and we're already seeing lots of folks cut back on entry level hires you know Shopify's and others aside where they'd rather have the six or seven year old engineer that's a cursor machine rather than train some kid it's just more efficient today right I'm sure you see that across a lot of folks you talk to it's gonna happen in sales too so the folks that know how to manage an agent work with an agent the folks that know their product for real they're going to become more valuable and the rest are going to become less valuable

Lenny Rachitsky:It's interesting because I'm an investor in a bunch of startups as are you and I'm actually seeing a lot of asks for go to market people salespeople do you think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand they're like oh we need people to help then this will start to become more AI over time or are they just looking for these really senior people that you're talking about

Jason Lemkin:Well listen whether you're managing humans or orchestrating agents you need leadership we've yet to produce an autonomous CEO I know folks talk about how on Twitter that will AI will replace the CEO but I don't know that that's literal as much as figurative right so we're still going to need the C suite we're still going to need VPs I mean it's become so much work to manage a million leads right a half million leads so we we need these leaders whether the the question is and I've seen your call out there and I saw your tweet on it the question is how many of the folks that had the current playbooks are the right folks for the future I'm thinking maybe 20% of the folks I talk to 20 are still panicking about AI and I'll tell you how to not how to be in the 20% if you want to but I think very few like the Janine from Vercel are gonna make the jump so we'll see there will be huge organizations right like Denise just went from Slack and Salesforce after fourteen years to be CRO OpenAI she's working gonna be pretty high level right so she may not know how to need to know how to implement the agents but most of the folks your companies wanna hire I would just make sure they could they they really wanna roll up their sleeves and do the job of 2026 2027 right just because they worked at Slack does not necessarily mean they have the skills at your startup

Lenny Rachitsky:You said that you had some tips for folks to actually be this 20% what are some if someone's listening to this like oh man my job is in trouble what should I focus on

Jason Lemkin:It's gonna sound simple it will work and almost nobody is doing this pick a tool an agent an agentic tool to solve one of your problems it doesn't almost just one that's the most painful or the one that's most acute it could be support it could be SDR it could be inbound qualification pick one pick a leading vendor I don't care which one it is okay we can talk about how to pick a vendor but pick a leading vendor that treats you well that you like and do it yourself train the agent ingest the data do the iterations understand how this damn thing works okay the folks that are lost today have never done it we literally we've turned into a consulting shop Lenny it's kinda crazy I I don't know what I think about it but we literally just did a job Amelia our chief AI officer and and Nia she she she drove it we did a call with a public B2B company worth well over 10,000,000,000 that you would think is an AI leader okay and we did a call with their team and they're like we want to figure out this AI SDR stuff like great we think we're just going to buy this tool and just give it to our SDRs to figure it out on their own okay one no chance two we asked them how much of this have you done yourself like have you done it yourself and it was just crickets on this call of 20 people no one had done it their self so they thought they could take an untrained agent with no training and just magically give it to a bunch of young 20 year old SDRs and this magically would sell on its own it doesn't work that way right so the way all these agents work is you there's a lot of jargon which is intimidating ingestion orchestration training it's not that hard guys it's just different it's the same B2B stuff we've been doing for over a decade you go to a website okay you give it a URL of your website you give it a URL of what your wiki is you give it a URL of your training docs maybe you upload your prospectus you upload a few documents it ingests the data and ingesting means it uploads it means it processes the data and it does some other stuff you don't really need to know some bragging some vectoring it really doesn't matter you upload some stuff and it kind of knows it and isn't great at it and then it will turn it into ideally it will turn it into questions and you answer these questions and they will be get the more you answer and train it training is just answering questions and getting better and better so first you upload a bunch of your stuff then you spend hours training it often with the help of a vendor someone called the forward deploy engineer which a scary term it means someone is going to help you do this you upload your stuff you try to get it right and then you basically have to make sure it's right QA testing and every day when that AISDR sends out emails and do practice emails they will say some dumb things maybe it's hallucinations it really doesn't matter what the technical term is and you correct it and each and if you do this for thirty days then every day you spend an hour or two correcting those mistakes by the thirtieth day it's gonna be pretty good and this is anyone can do this that has been in B2B or SaaS anyone can do what I just described it is not that different than other things we've done it's just sequenced differently but nobody does this everyone's panicked and if you if you can go do this pick any tool pick Agent Force pick Qualified pick Artisan pick whatever you want if you can go do this and get it live into production you're hyper employable all the companies you talked about that need a GTM person they will hire you you could magically be their chief agentic GTM officer because almost anyone can do this if they want to it's just going to take a month of your time and it might take you fifty or sixty hours plus qualifying the vendor right and in the old days like when we first did our podcast you'd hire an agency and disappear that's how you do this stuff it don't work that the agencies don't know how to do this you've got to do it yourself but if you do man you will rock you will just rock and you will learn right you will learn and you will learn the limits and you will learn the agent can what it can do and where it can't do and then you will learn how to do the next one right so like we're pretty far on AgentForce which is Salesforce's one which Mark talks a lot about but we're probably one of the only organizations of our size on it I will tell you a cheat code which is pretty interesting so we've got we had three of these agents working for sales after training it and learning it and spending months time to learn it we got it down to one prompt and prompt is another almost intimidating word a string of text that describes what you want this thing to do okay we took that prompt and gave it to Agent Force within a day it was pretty good so you will if you can do one of these it'll be really hard it'll be brutal then the second one will be easier and then you're going to be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it yourself but if you're waiting for people on your team to do it if you're waiting for an agency to do it I think you're going to be out of a job right so this is like everyone comes to us as an experts we're not we're only experts because we did it 20 times

Lenny Rachitsky:I think what might be helpful here actually is to do a tour a kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've built and what they do which ones have been most impactful and then as you do that what products you use what powers these agents that you like and maybe don't like

Jason Lemkin:If anyone goes to saastr.ai/agents you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out, you can copy us and I'll walk you through it. But two caveats or things: I built a lot of stuff in Replit, we can talk about it for fun. I'm like a top 1% user, I love it. None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it yourself, you're not Vercel, you don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same idea of building your own Notion. You could do it but don't do it. These products are expensive, they're not so expensive it's worth it, and then maintaining the pace of innovation is so fast even if you can hire someone to build it internally it will become obsolete if you're not careful in a couple months. So we've built a lot of stuff we could talk about. I built a calculator to do startup calculations to use 800,000 times in ninety days.

Lenny Rachitsky:For valuation.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah, for valuations. I built a pitch deck reviewer that's reviewed almost 3,000 pitch decks. Lots of fun stuff but none of the GTM stuff we built ourselves, none of it. So just a caveat, don't build it yourself unless you're Vercel unless you have a reason. That was a great pod, it was wonderful. Don't do it, don't do that.

Lenny Rachitsky:Basically if you unless you have a awesome go to market engineers.

Jason Lemkin:For and they really wanna do it, they really are chomping at the bit to do it. Don't do it. So I started and this is not where other folks would start but there's some learnings. I started there's an app called Delphi which makes digital clones and you used it for the Lenny bot a long time ago. I saw you do what's that? Yeah, lennybot.com.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah.

Jason Lemkin:Check it. I saw it a long time ago, it was interesting but I didn't it didn't click. And then Brian Halligan who's the founder chairman of HubSpot did one too. They're Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia so he helped them early on. And then I kinda had a magic moment and this is the way it works in AI when I saw the combination of the two. So yours was real like people should love Moneybot because it's got it's if folks haven't tried it tried it is ingested. I know a scary term for some. It is ingested every single interview you've ever done right every word of content you've written. So and it can combine them all together it can combine the Vercel story and the and and and and and what what you did with with Dylan at Figma and it can synthesize the knowledge and it's pretty good it's pretty good. What I liked about Brian's better than yours though was that it was Brian and Lenny bot is kinda Lenny but it's also kind of all your guests right I think that's the superpower of it right.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's the way I think about it. It's not just my intelligence it's the the lessons of every single person I've had on this podcast.

Jason Lemkin:So it's great but I thought hey maybe I could finally do one that's that's in between the two like I I've been a founder and I and I've written 10,000 pieces of content so that's a little bit like Brian but I have more than Brian and I'm not Lenny in terms of productivity but I've got a lot of voices so I'm like I'll try it. I used Delphi I instantly broke it because I had too much data to ingest it took about a week to get going and it worked and people and it's just like you people some people spend hours a day on digital Jason in another browser and they don't do what they do with Lenny but they'll they'll ask about their sales woes and what to do with their sales team and they'll and they'll upload LinkedIns and ask if they should hire people and then a curious thing happened which is that because we do these events people started to use it for questions for the events hey how do I get a refund hey can I get a discount hey where is the San Mateo County Fairgrounds so Jason Liza's really in the San Francisco Bay Area like who's speaking or and and like there's endless questions right and we used to use pre fin Intercom and we're so busy we would answer like two weeks later like I mean it was worst support ever and the the agent just started doing support on its own and then it did this thing where it sold sponsorship on its own right so so start you can start with so one place to start if you haven't started is in support okay and you don't have to buy Sierra and you don't have to buy Decacon necessarily and you don't have to buy Finn but one potential place to start is is your support like can you do great twenty four seven support can you most most apps can't in fact some of the worst offenders are AI leaders they they have no support at all on their website so that's one place to start and then the next place we started okay so for us the low hanging fruit the next place we started is hey we want to try outbound okay because we don't have 1,200,000 names like you have but we have like 400,000 okay and we have data on them so we wanted to say hey come come back to our SaaStr event so we didn't know what to use and I'll tell you something so we picked a YC company called Artisan they've gone from nothing to 10,000,000 this year we picked them but this is important why they were a sponsor at SaaStr we didn't know and they offered to help us the most this is the critical insight we didn't know if Artisan was the I have opinions now we hadn't deployed it but another vendor argued the CRO argued with us he said I need a 100 K upfront before I help you okay another one said they were scared of SaaStr they didn't want bad PR if it failed fair.

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh but yeah like certain company.

Jason Lemkin:We don't wanna be your.

Lenny Rachitsky:First okay.

Jason Lemkin:And Artisan said we'll do it and we had nothing and here's the interesting thing about Agentex stuff it's like support if you have nothing like it doesn't have to like change the world if you're literally doing nothing and you start to do something that's high ROI like you're gonna get return right so we did that one we trained it it's great we did about 60,000 emails saw pretty high rates then we said well we'll try inbound we like we don't want to have this depressing experience where a salesperson quits and it's two weeks later until they talk to it so we used this vendor called Qualified which was founded by the ex CMO of Salesforce that does a lot now but mostly focuses on qualified stuff that immediately worked like we had someone at 11pm on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor and they sponsored and it worked and it and it worked great but again they helped us.

Lenny Rachitsky:And this is an agent that is emailing with prospects selling them on a sponsorship.

Jason Lemkin:Literally if you go to saastrannual.com and anyone should buy a product like this it doesn't have to be qualified but but and they'll be the bubble the intercom like bubble okay

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it

Jason Lemkin:To to qualifying inbound prospects folks that say hey i want to sponsor lenny's podcast sorry we're sold out through 2028 but if you wanna be on the wait list sign up here or even better for us would qualify folks out that weren't a good fit right it would save so much time and it would do it twenty four hours then it would just set up the meeting so the reason that was a great second one was because no one was willing to do that no human was willing to pick up the phone and talk to these people so it was such low hanging fruit but the key to the first two and and if you're gonna pick an agent is they they offered to help the most you're i at the end of the day lenny these are all running on cloud four they're all basically using a bunch of apis mashed together that's not new to software right mashing a bunch of apis under the hood but deep down i don't want to get any but trigger anybody many of these leaders the leaders in ai gtm they're more similar than different they're more similar than different under the hood it doesn't mean the features are parody so because you have to train them because it takes a month the world's best software with no help training you is not 199% of people should buy so today in the old days we would qualify the best software we would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare features and do this you got to do another column which is your forward deployed engineer or solution architect or your se and talk to them and say who is going to help me and before you write a check get on the phone with lenny and see if lenny is really going to do deployment and if lenny rocks and the other vendor is better and won't help you don't do it and that's why we've had so much success is the first two we did yeah they were startups right so they worked harder but artisan and qualified just did the work with us and we're not stupid but it was work we needed help right and so that's what i learned is you have this partner the fd and the vendor and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think they can help you the best ones turn away a lot of business today which is interesting right interesting learning from this for folks is a lot of folks say and they would say to you if you use these lenny they say you have too much data saster is not like us we're a startup we're tiny you have 400,000 people in your database lenny has 1,200,000 it's not like that's i got i only have 300 customers okay 200 customers what i've learned is that's wrong if you have 300 customers how many folks have come to your website ever 30,000 how many leads do you have how many folks in your database how many folks have you tried to reach out before more than a human's doing they and all of a sudden they have a moment like how many folks do you have in your hubspot right how many folks do have in your crm they look it up 31,000 okay how many folks do have talking to them zero you don't need the scale of numbers that you and i have to make these agents work you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic but not as much as you think so all the learnings we have a lot of folks that honestly they don't wanna do the work they're like well sassner has a lot of scale they have a lot of years it's not true and it turns out to also be like true with the training i'm sure you've seen it with lenny bot like thought having twelve years of content made the difference nah it's having like a couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that but you don't need as deep training and as much as you think you just need a bit to be really good so anyone that has any skill whatsoever even a couple million of revenue and up can benefit from these products right so we did horror general bot got us to a certain place then we did str for outbound then we did inbound and then we did agentforce really early with salesforce and we didn't know what to do with agentforce at first right but we decided we would reactivate the folks that sales decide was not worth their time folks that reached out to sales and this is true at every startup we even just talked about some of the ai leaders where a human says you know what i don't think this is enough commission i'm kind of busy i got a $4,000,000 deal with meta going we just took asian force just on those okay and we trained it on very similar prompt it had 70% response rate those are people that were dying to interact with us 70% is so good and this is something humans were not willing to do it wasn't worth their time and i know this sounds critical and maybe i'm going trigger some sales folks but the reality is you know if if you're in a lead rich environment okay and there and i i i think that there's lead rich and lead poor environments for for even big companies besides like there's not enough but you eventually you become lead rich okay reps just don't follow-up with a lot of them it's just human nature it's even you i bet more folks wanna sponsor the newsletter than you can let in right do you do you pick up the phone with all of them

Lenny Rachitsky:I reply to all of them and then we just tell them we're we're full

Jason Lemkin:But yeah but you see the point right even your scale you see the point right

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah yeah it gets challenging

Jason Lemkin:And let's imagine all of a sudden you had six months of inventory available i bet if you spooled up an agent and emailed all those folks back automatically you'd fill up you'd fill up the docket right

Lenny Rachitsky:Mhmm

Jason Lemkin:So anyone can do these sorts of you think you can't unless you're so small that you have sufficient humans to talk with every potential lead every person that touches your website every person that clicks with anything you can benefit from ai so that was kind of our journey and then we've done a lot of other niche stuff i'll tell you at the end where we are today this is a maybe this is almost too much learning is we're at the point where maybe we can't do one more because right now when we when we did delphi in the beginning when i copied you with delphi even me i spent almost an hour a day training it in the beginning because when we started to use it for support it had an initial it started telling people the wrong dates okay and we could talk about why so i had to fix it and it made some mistakes and so when people started to use it i had to spend an hour each morning firing up delphi reviewing the issues and answering them i don't have to do it anymore it's well trained we have so many agents going and so many emails that amelia has to spend you know ten to fifteen hours a week reviewing the outputs and it's exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on christmas it's a big issue right this is not being the orchestrator or the chief ai person is not a good job for lazy people because the agents never sleep right so it is so much time now to manage these 20 this is interesting we can't i don't know when we're going do the twenty first we may be full and for folks that are startups this is a reason to go harder because everyone was in market this year okay everyone and it's going to keep happening but business process change remains an issue for business software business process change at the end of the day and so many founders get this wrong and 99% of sales folks don't care about business process change sales folks just want to get their commission doesn't really matter what you pay for an app for a customer as long as it's fair it's all the work to do to change the way you do your business right so we're we're at the point where we're overloaded right so just be aware if you're if you're a startup or even salesforce or hubspot maybe maybe close those deals in the next twelve months because the window may close where people say listen that's the coolest agent i've ever seen i'm exhausted from the last five i had to do five last year i just can't literally cannot bring one more app into my enterprise and so that's gonna be a headwind that today everything seems like it has tailwinds right everything's on fire but people are gonna get exhausted for having so many agents exhaust

Lenny Rachitsky:Man okay there's so much to learn from in what you just shared something i definitely wanna ask about as people hear this agents sending off emails agents talking to your clients we get i get a ton of emails that are terrible yes what have you learned about making these outbound emails good and not just you know noise how do you make these conversations high quality how do you

Jason Lemkin:It's a really really really good question so the two maybe the two biggest learnings take

Jason Lemkin:Your best person on your sales team the best marketer you have take their email copy and use that as the template for your ai if you the terrible mistake people make people everyone in 2024 said these products didn't work there were two reasons they didn't work it was before claude four right repla didn't work lovable didn't exist gamma didn't really work before 2025 right before claude like the lms reached this point where they would work for these use cases so that was one threshold the other thing that happened in 2024 is the vendors kind of lied and said just turn the product on it'll get you revenue no needing to train it no need to do anything we'll just do everything as this magic ai savant it's not the way it works this way what you do is an agent will be successful in go to market and sales today if you take what works for your best person train i know this seems like a scary term it's not upload that text okay train the agent on it and let it iterate an ab test from that agents are really good at ab testing they're really good at creating variants ai is like ask claude or check for a variant of your best email say give me three versions of my best email they'll be pretty good that's all the agent has to do is take your best email you ever sent and stick it through an api i'm making it sound simpler than it is not by too much so train it and then what it'll do is then give it some data sources and the data source could be as simple as salesforce okay and then if it has any data on lenny it can pull data and it can lightly personalize that email okay and even better a lot of these products track all the visitors to your website so they can see what's happened and they use other apis and so they can personalize your emails more and so what ends up happening is the emails that the ais write are pretty good okay if you're getting terrible emails it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor you should be getting emails when you get them and you're like this isn't as good as jason said on lenny's podcast but it's pretty good okay that's what ai can do today and the magic is if a human isn't even doing that or if your mediocre humans are worse and i'll tell you you know one of the first lessons i learned when my last startup was acquired by adobe sam blond was one of our sales leaders then he became ceo of brex and others and he we inherited a bunch of reps from adobe we didn't ask for them and he's like my god i never read everyone's emails before these are the worst emails i've ever read so the ai can do better than that the ai can do better than than that and so you just train it on your best and it'll be pretty good and so so you just haven't seen a well trained agent and then what i learned and then another question folks ask is okay jason that email was pretty good it wasn't as great as you said on stage but it was pretty good but do you do you tell people it's an ai or do you or do you hide it and what we learned from sending hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter people

Jason Lemkin:We're in an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they know they're gonna get instant response we've tried both we've tried to say hey it's digital amelia or digital jason we've tried to fake it and what we've learned is now we just send it we we just send it and no one cares and sometimes we'll get especially founders will get an email back they'll be like i can tell this is an ai but it's pretty good can i do a meeting that kind of says it all doesn't it

Lenny Rachitsky:Mhmm.

Jason Lemkin:So we're worrying about creating issues as excuses to not do the work.

Lenny Rachitsky:Your point about how sale human salespeople's emails are not great already is really powerful because all we're looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying okay but humans they're not actually that much better if you actually look.

Jason Lemkin:At them my god they're not the bet listen the best outbound emails you've ever gotten like for example I know you've done a bunch of investments a lot of them are inbound to you they want Lenny involved right.

Jason Lemkin:Some of them are just so good you can't believe it right a few yeah how many are that but but a lot of them aren't right.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's right.

Lenny Rachitsky:Right mhmm.

Jason Lemkin:So like the best founders and the best sales execs and the best SDRs will spend two hours researching an email okay who exactly did IBM should I reach out to what did IBM who else exactly is a competitor that's using them exactly what was the ROI they'll give you a perfect story like if you get the world's best story here's your competitor here's how they use it here's exactly when they bought here's the ROI here's the case study that's a great email right how many 21 year old SDRs do that no use an automation tool whether it's outreach or Gong or SalesLoft or Mixmax or an AI based but they do no work it's not going to be that great it's not going to be that great so that's why for people get a little confused the bar for good enough for AI GTM is not as high as we think it's just like you know a a facsimile of your best person reproduced as best we can it's gonna beat your mid pack person it's gonna beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is this is this an opportunity for humans to continue to thrive this layer of much better emails this came up when I had Jen Able on the podcast she I asked her like what tools do use what do you use she's like nothing I just write it out artisanally and it works really well because everyone's sending AI emails is this just like where go to market salespeople still can exist this much better email or is that all still.

Jason Lemkin:Getting for for if you have a high performing human team hunting high dollar value logos and when we're this is classic stuff Lenny and I and Jen are in a in a conference room we put a whiteboard of the 50 best folks that we want to sponsor Lenny's podcast there's only 50 okay and we write Notion and we write Linear and we write Replicas there's only 50 it's a three and we're all trying to sell them these new sponsorships they're they're they're half $1,000,000 for two years take it or leave it okay and I give we divide them up and we say Lenny's best at this Jason's best at Jen and we each take 15 or 17 dude no need for AI there is there agreed no need for AI today.

Lenny Rachitsky:Because ROI is really high.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah and we're gonna and we're great and and we know that the three of us are we're different three of us are really it's gonna crush and we don't need any maybe one of us will take our emails and run it through Claude real quick just to make it better right or or what I do is I do it for more research I write the world's best email and then I say Claude how could I make this better do a little research it will still be better so that's an AI boost Jen should be doing I love Jen but she should at least be making it better but for our 45 50 best ones we don't need it what if it's 5,000 her approach just doesn't work so yes a lot of the stuff we're talking about lends itself to higher volume sales but as everyone gets bigger it's all higher volume there's just so much volume as you scale right so yes if you're tiny and you have three prospects and you're just getting into Y Combinator maybe you don't need these tools but we graduate out of that more quickly and the bespoke thing for Jen I think will work for high dollar value enterprise but is outside of that I don't know man it's you just can't touch enough people humans can't touch enough people and humans don't want to do the work they don't want to talk to the mediocre leads they literally don't I'll tell you an example like when I was in London I wanted to buy a $10,000 product okay and I'm literally in London and we're doing SaaS for London I don't have any time right I get confused with the time zones Lenny I don't know if you do I don't even know what time it is in the Bay Area so I just emailed this rep it's end of the I'm like just send me the contract I want to buy but I have two questions I have two questions I want answered and I told him these two questions and they weren't even about price took him three days to get back to me and he introduced me to someone else on his team it wasn't worth his time $10 wasn't enough because there's not enough commission for him right so he introduced someone else to me and the other guy said I can't answer your questions unless you'll get on the phone and I said I'm in London I'm traveling if you ordinarily I would have ended this but I'm I'm it's a journey I'm like if you answer my two questions I will buy your product for 10 K he's like I need to get on the phone like AI is better than that this is not Jen's and the whiteboards thing of doing it so it will at least it will fill even if Jen's process is right AI can fill all the gaps what about all the sponsors we the leads we didn't follow-up with that we got to 70% response rate right I mean the gens are a diamond in a rough and a whatever the expression is a diamond there's not that many of them there's not that many of them so I I love her and I love what she says and I agree with 99% of it but here's a a a related point most of us don't have the hottest brands and we don't have the most elite CROs running them so we end up settling for not the best sales team that's the truth most 99% of the best sales reps want to work just at the hottest brands and the minute you're not the minute your star fades just a little bit they don't want to work they they immediately want to jump to the next one it's just there's a lot of reasons why so bear in mind 99% of all of the world cannot attract a team of gents or better it's just practice even I can't even you could Lenny you're so great but even a lot of folks that would wanna go work for you if you wanna hire someone they'd be like well I love the but what do I have to do I've gotta sell newsletter spot like no no no no no no I wanna be CRO at at Lovable I love Lenny but is that really gonna get me there right.

Jason Lemkin:So we AI can AI can beat those but AI can't beat the enterprise thing AI I I have no idea how AI is gonna do in person sales someone smarter than me is going have to answer that but a lot of you you have such a huge audience Lenny but I still think most of your folks are in tech and doing tech sales tech is the largest segment of our economy and growing right so for the most part these tools will work for tech sales tech sales is over the Zoom over the phone over email we should knock on more doors we should do more in person all the data I've ever collected shows everything closes at a higher rate if you go in person but in tech it's basically as much automation as we can get away with in GTM.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:What I think might be helpful is just like let me zoom out for a second and describe what you've gone through here so you used to have I love this visual you had of the desks of the sales folks in your office where you had inbound SDRs you had outbound SDRs maybe a support person

Jason Lemkin:And three or four AEs accounting

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay and three or four AEs who kind of take these leads and then close the deal so now it's just like instead of humans there's an agent doing each of these jobs yes they have this inbound this outbound agent that's just sending emails trying to find potential leads an inbound agent that's talking to people that are interested trying to get them more excited and then is there an AE agent or I forget what

Jason Lemkin:That we have that's what I'm still learning we have one full time AE plus 20% of Emilia's time so it's 1.2 doing what five or six AEs do

Lenny Rachitsky:I see

Jason Lemkin:And basically so SDR BDRs

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it yeah so basically all the top of funnels is AI yes and there's one human now that takes all this all the great stuff and just closes the deals negotiates pricing things like that

Jason Lemkin:Yeah maybe 1.2 just to say it but but yeah one point yeah

Lenny Rachitsky:So that's where I wanted to go so Amelia so that feels really important just somebody not necessarily full time but just staying on top of these agents watching the emails making sure quality is high making sure they're running correctly talk about just like how important that part is to this whole operation

Jason Lemkin:It it's critical it's critical and you know people are posting on LinkedIn that they wanna hire these GTM engineers or I don't think that role exists today I I I worry when I see these roles I think today and listen if we get together in eighteen months we'll we'll update this because the world's changing so fast right I think today 95% of a 100 you've gotta promote someone internally it's gotta be a nerd someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant you know a lot of B2C people are frankly good at this stuff because in B2C sales and marketing are kind of the same thing you know but someone that's a nerd that loves to sit in front of data for a couple hours a day and and route data and manage these agents and they can come out of product they can come out of marketing but maybe they can come out of rev ops but they better be nerdy odds they come out of regular sales approach zero so I would find someone on my team that raises their hand and says I've already done this okay I I've already I've already written 10 apps in Replit and I and I and I love Vercel and I did this and I've already tried these ones on my own can I please manage these for you and then have them be your chief orchestration officer but it is a new skill set it it really is and and ultimately finding someone that's gonna spend an hour to two a day to manage these agents is the new new frontier for us to figure out they they do not they operate autonomously but not without constant oversight and iteration that's the confusing part if you just buy one of these products and disappear you will have zero ROI so maybe too long of an answer but that's critical and I just think unfortunately you have to grow this resource at home today you have to even with Virginia Vercel that basically grew the resource at home right we're not all Vercel but I just haven't seen it everyone's posting for this job but we need veterans we don't have veterans yet right and going back earlier in the conversation if that is you you're gonna be super employable next year you're gonna have so many job offers you're not gonna know what to you're gonna have to beat them off

Lenny Rachitsky:And when you think of is Amelia would you describe her as a go to market engineer or do you is that a different role she

Jason Lemkin:I would say now yeah okay but she knows the product's cold

Lenny Rachitsky:Cold

Jason Lemkin:She knows how the all the quirks work how all the agents work and and here's a this is this is a complicated issue but an interesting one if you're running multiple agents okay someone's got to segment which of the base the agents are working with or they're gonna have tons of conflict you need someone smart enough and any like really nerdy demand gen marketer that loves data can do this but you've got to segment your base otherwise it just becomes a mess there are no people on x and the internet talk about these master agents that can manage agents that can manage agents we're not there yet okay maybe like I'm excited for it but we're not there yet so just even figuring out how to segment your base so you can do inbound retargeting remarketing new marketing like so that is complicated but most badass marketers kinda understand that they're already doing ab testing segmenting their bases this is not new is it

Lenny Rachitsky:No no yeah but it's yeah.

Jason Lemkin:But turning it on with zero work is a f like there's just there's just no chance.

Lenny Rachitsky:This episode is brought to you by Datadog now home to EPO the leading experimentation and feature flagging platform product managers at the world's best companies use Datadog the same platform their engineers rely on every day to connect product insights to product issues like bugs UX friction and business impact it starts with product analytics where PMs can watch replays review funnels dive into retention and explore their growth metrics where other tools stop Datadog goes even further it helps you actually diagnose the impact of funnel drop offs and bugs and UX friction once you know where to focus experiments prove what works I saw this firsthand when I was Airbnb where our experimentation platform was critical for analyzing what worked and where things went wrong and the same team that built experimentation at Airbnb built EPO Datadog then lets you go beyond the numbers with session replay watch exactly how users interact with heat maps and scroll maps to truly understand their behavior and all of this is powered by feature flags that are tied to real time data so that you can roll out safely target precisely and learn continuously Datadog is more than engineering metrics it's where great product teams learn faster fix smarter and ship with confidence request a demo at datadoghq.com/leni that's datadoghq.com/leni I'm looking back at some notes I took as you were talking of just like advice for each function almost of how to be successful in this future that you're seeing so I'll try to summarize briefly so your advice for salespeople is use the agents build one yourself try to train it help it run run alongside you so that you understand these tools and be the person within the sales org that's

Jason Lemkin:For leadership I advise that for leaders I don't know that if your average SDR or junior salesperson is gonna get budget for their own agent if they do run with it the problem Lenny is that all these agents that work today they have forward deployed engineers they have training so they're all like $50 and up $50 $80 I mean people pay more don't get me wrong but kind of the entry level point for these is sort of like $50 plus 25 K for the FDE or 75 like they want even Clay I think starts at a 100 K a year so if you're a bigger organization that's cheaper than a human right it's it's a tall but but there are no $99 a month products which has a lot of it they're they're trying and and I think it's gonna come they don't auto train yet particularly well and so I don't know that junior folks are gonna have access to a 100 K budget unfortunately right so that advice is for the VPs the folks that are worried a lot of them are worried that I'm obsolete right that I'm obsolete that I'm not gonna get that role at Vercel or OpenAI so keep keep going my the advice for the junior folks is to embrace it

Jason Lemkin:You if you whatever tools your organization is using become the best person at working with that agent and you will automatically get more efficient yeah is it annoying that you walk into work and the agent set up four calls for you and maybe you only wanted to do two of them embrace it embrace it because you'll be twice as productive right I was literally talking yesterday there's a company I'm on the board of called owner.com which is kind of like AI for restaurants are crossing a 100,000,000 in revenue going really quickly it's got a 100 folks on the sales team Kyle does with AI he's trying he's targeting 3 to 5,000,000 in revenue per rep 3 to 5,000,000 honestly if this was three or four years ago for a similar company it would be 3 to 500 K that's an order of magnitude more efficiency still a 100 reps right a 100 reps he's going to need more to hit the number for next year but 3 to 5,000,000 per rep so if you're that guy that can work with those tools you become more valuable but if you fight it if you don't wanna do that extra meeting if you fight it there's a there's a there's a tool another tool we use for rev ops there's two we use one's called momentum one's called attention they're both great they're very similar and what it does is every single thing a human does is automatically tracked in your CRM instantly every commit real time there have been tools that have done some of this before but literally everything and and when we rolled it out and it happened with a few other folks I know one of the folks on that old team quit that day quit the day we rolled out the the AI rev ops you know why he hadn't done anything in thirty days the gig was up

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh wow.

Jason Lemkin:Every day he would show up to our stand up and he said yeah I'm doing outbound and I'm really working on that deal with Vercel and nothing would close and then we said oh we're and he quit that day so my point is he didn't lean into it right lean into it now you're gonna have total transparency on your day Granola's a side example for everything but AI is gonna track everything you do like if you wanna fight it if you wanna fight the future good luck to you but embrace it and will leap ahead of your peers that aren't embracing this embrace all the transparency all the leads all the work it makes you do because you can't close 10 times as much doing the same amount of work can you nope we do more work with AI I'm working the hardest I've ever worked worked that's with all these agents and all the output they create and Amelia does a lot of it but even I am working the hardest but it's better but it's not less work it's more work the agents are so productive you have to keep up sorry to interrupt for the for the for the managers buy an agent deploy it yourself don't have someone else do it do everything from training to ingestion to orchestration and those terms will be less scary to you for the junior folks be the guy the gal the person that loves these tools and that is the first person to embrace whatever it is don't fight it

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome okay for founders and startups what I'm hearing is the be that for deployed engineer have that person that sales engineer that's sitting there helping companies this is basically an opportunity to to compete with bigger players where you actually they're helping them set things up like all the companies you mentioned none of them are big companies they're all startups which is really interesting.

Jason Lemkin:It is true I will say it is working with Salesforce the way we are it's the way I haven't worked with Salesforce since it was the first product I bought I mean twenty years ago dude when I bought Salesforce twenty years ago I got everything that was hands on I bought two seats I remember back in the day talking to my rep I'm like don't talk to me you don't have time you work at Salesforce I'm buying two seats it's like no no no this is what we do I'm here for you I'm gonna help you get your app on the app exchange we're gonna do all of it and that went away it's kind of back right and Mark's got 2,000 folks doing this at Salesforce now so we have a forward deployed engineer I'm not even sure it makes economic sense and maybe in two years someone like you or I would not get an FTE the big companies are figuring it out but yes pick a vendor that will make you a success with an FTE right and people throw this term out but again it's just someone that's going to make sure you get trained and onboarded with your product for real but yeah so startups have a motivation to do this in a way that maybe some of the incumbents really are still figuring out.

Lenny Rachitsky:Right which is a big opportunity for start ups to actually do this and this actually resonates very closely to what Jen suggested for start ups which is sell services initially just like you work for them solve their problem not with software to get things started to grow that into a massive contract with them that is software.

Jason Lemkin:You mean the mean land and expand start with a smaller deal and grow it.

Lenny Rachitsky:Start no like like afford like a person sitting there doing this work with them essentially what you're describing don't just like we have software go try using it it's like we will have someone on our team helping you figure this out and maybe there's not even software yet to do all these things but we'll have them do it for you and then the software will take on more and more of that work over time.

Jason Lemkin:I think that's always been great advice and startups have always been great at this like in the early days you the CEO does it it's it's doing support the CEO's onboarding you I think what's different today is the agent will fail without training and onboarding this product it it it will fail like it will never it will never work so it it becomes an imperative if you wanna win like you need I I you this term has been bandied about too much but you need a team of humans we can call them forward deployed engineers that make a 100% sure that when the agent is turned on it's awesome that's your job as a founder make sure it's awesome versus in the old days that even when I built one of the first eSignature services that was so easy to use we'd have some customers take them two years to go live big customers that's just not okay in the age of AI mhmm right.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah and these four deploy engineers is that just another name for sales engineer is that a different sort of background?

Jason Lemkin:It can be and I think all this nomenclature is confusing man all this orchestration and ingestion I think we're we're we're like Palantir is obviously the single most successful public B to B company at the moment right maybe maybe Databricks and a few others will beat them in the next wave of IPOs but their idea for forward deployed engineers is similar but these are 9 figure deals most of us aren't doing $100,000,000 deals so the idea that you'll have Gary Tan and an army of folks out in the office for six months getting the software to work that that that sort of inspires the idea but it's really sure it could be a sales engineer or a solution architect but the difference is the SEs that a lot of us worked with in the days were resources and often like there was also a classic resource of like eight sales reps to one SE so the eight reps would there'd be a pod and one SE would be responsible and you'd kinda have to fight to get Jason or Lenny's time to help the eight reps this is inverted the FTE's number one job is to make the customer a success okay I was literally the other day doing a presentation in AI leader that closed a $3,000,000 deal the FDE did it all himself sales wasn't even involved in the deal they went on-site they got the deployment going they tuned it everything all sales did was manage it through the procurement process okay that's pretty different than a guy answering some questions for the humans right so it is a combination of customer success and SEO or whatever but it is it is really mean frankly it's just being a a classic consultant that gets the product done on day one that's the difference is that when you go live it works when you go live it works and it's a fancy name for a bunch of folks on your team that when it goes live the AI agent actually works so you have a 100% success rate instead of the 5% rate of twenty twenty four so those people but they do need to be technical I don't know if they need to be engineers it can really vary based on you know I love it when they're kind of like mediocre engineers that are like in love with the product that's my favorite type of FD like they're own they don't really wanna code much anymore but they did code and they like just love your product but I don't think it can be someone with no product chops but it could different folks can work but they've they've gotta know the product hold but yeah I would startups like I mean the term is thrown around you need four folks that will just make sure that on go live the product works your agentic product works that's what you need

Lenny Rachitsky:I think what might be useful to close out this conversation is to kind of go through what are the things that are changing like maybe a handful of things that are changed that are now going be different in the world of sales go to market and what are a few things that are just going to stay the same

Jason Lemkin:Yeah let's go through it obviously support is the first one to have changed it's obviously permanently changed with AI right whatever vendor you look at 50 to 80% of support is done by AI and we don't always think about support as GTM it is it's the start of a customer journey it's very important to the customer journey if you're skeptical go look at you know support has changed permanently so that train's left the station really as we record this not much has changed in sales I mean I do think the stuff we've talked about is the bleeding edge I do think the classic cadence based SDR running campaigns through a through a tool him or herself will be mostly extinct with twelve months there is no reason AI can't do a better job than that role the classic qualifier qualifying inbound leads which is a crappy experience for customers should be similarly extinct within twelve mostly extinct in twelve months the rest we're we're going to wait and see I think what we do know for reps for sales reps everyone wants to be even more efficient in the next twelve months there's a lot of reasons people want to be again at the bottom end it's it's it's cost it's profitability pressures at the high end it's cultural we just don't want 200 reps running around Vercel a rep that don't know what the product does just the company owner 3 to 5,000,000 per rep is a lot different than 3 to 500,000 so you have to adjust as a rep you still have to there's still every AI leader can't hire enough reps like we talked about but you're going have to adjust to being geometrically if not exponentially more productive with help from AI so you have to embrace these tools for real and a lot of folks a lot of old school GTM leaders are like you know AI isn't going to hurt sales reps it's just going to make them give them superpowers the best ones yes the mediocre are just going to be like more mediocre right so I think the AE is what we will always have salespeople but being a people person is not enough anymore you know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson Lenny you ask them what they're really good at I'm a people person Lenny you know how you can you know how you know how you you know how good I am Lenny I I I'm on text with 10 of my best customers I'm a people person what are the toughest technical objections you have at your product what what they don't they don't know they're a people person know this is like golf three point o it just it's not enough like it's it's insufficient so people people people are becoming obsolete in sales field sales no idea how AI is going to impact that if you're out in the field I mean you know the enterprise leaders are hiring more field salespeople than ever Salesforce is hiring more than ever and knocking on doors still works so don't know the answers there but the office worker and the work from home worker AI is gonna take as much of your job or make you as much better as it can and you gotta embrace it so that that's a I would say from support to knocking on doors you know we're gonna go from 80% to 0% from that

Lenny Rachitsky:Phone calls

Jason Lemkin:You know it's a great question and we should have hit it obviously there's there's plenty of robocall and regulatory issues around it certainly a lot of startups are breaking the rules anyway I would say this listen there there's phone calls and there's even SMS there's limits to how much SMS you can automate right a lot of old school businesses don't even check emails right I mean you're working in the shop floor so those are unanswered questions people are breaking the rules OpenAI still breaks the rules right now it's licensing Disney content it used to just borrow Disney content we will see so I don't know the answers to that I think in Europe it'll certainly be much lower than in the US but startups are going to push the limits they're going to push the limits on what we can do with AI calls AI enhanced whether a human's kind of on the line but AI is doing all the work maybe that's legal right getting more consent for SMS than we typically get so to think that the typical barriers to robocalling in SMS is gonna that startups aren't gonna bend the rules in the age of AI I'm dubious but it's a good question it's harder to do the one thing I will add is and it's a good objection to all of this and I'd love to get Jen's thoughts too if you talk to the startups you'd invest in Lenny fewer of them are good at outbound phone calls than you'd think right we had many of the heads of revenue at Rippling speak at SaaStr the old CRO worked on my team and others they were late to develop cold calling because we never did it back in the day the CRO was on my team so we bring had in someone that had worked with Sam Blond at Brex who had done it it is a real art to pick up the phone and close business it is a specialized skill and so if that's your specialized skill and there's no way for AI to benefit so be it but I don't think for most tech calls that that is as impactful as we pretend it is I don't think most of the startups you and I work with and most of the folks listen to this do not close the majority of their revenue with cold human cold calls it's it is a it is a craft that works but man it you've got to be good at it

Lenny Rachitsky:You know this line somewhere that if you can close on a text message AI can close it

Jason Lemkin:Yeah yes it is I'm being facetious in the sense that people say that I think have weaker relationships with customers this is why AI is disrupted people have weaker relationships with their customers than they think yeah and if it's so easy to close the deal on a text message and we've done hundreds of thousands of these and found it folks don't mind if it's an AI if it's a good message right AI can be people people too it really can't you don't believe me folks go to Lennybot is that the URL lennybot.com if you don't think AI can be people people go people spend hours on Lennybot don't they yeah and the best part is you could talk to talk Lennybot with voice there's a voice feature that sounds exactly like me it's unbelievable yeah so and and a meta reason to go use Lennybot go in with a learning a learning mind don't go in bias you will find that AI can be people people people spend hours who are our best therapists today as we record this ChatGPT is our best therapist on planet earth it's a people person I mean sounds silly but if that is your best defense in sales that you're a people person the sands are sinking beneath you right now it's not enough of a skill people person is great when people buy enterprise software that's gonna take two years to roll out and they have no idea how it works and it's a hope and a prayer when you expect the agent to work during the pilot before the big check comes people person is insufficient terrific talk tell me the person that's going to launch my agent train it and get into production for me before I even pay you you know this is the dream Lenny maybe this is one of the biggest changes of all when I talk with Marc Benioff and Salesforce is the biggest right it's 44,000,000,000 it's the biggest ship to turn right he's like the number one thing I envy in Palantir one is their high deal sizes he made that joke in all the media and all the press but the other thing is I he said I wish I could I can't today I wish every Salesforce customer now could go live before they pay that is so different from how we've been trained in many ways to almost rip off the customer to get them to buy the product first try to avoid a pilot then have the smallest pilot we can then roll it out over years to different people AI has upped the bar in terms of what customers expect and that's why the best ones are blowing up because the ROI is so high and so you've got to deliver the ROI before the document is e signed today that will people that haven't fully embraced that are at public companies growing 8% they're still trying to play games

Lenny Rachitsky:What are some other things that you think are gonna change that people may not be thinking about that's gonna change the way we do sales in the next couple years

Jason Lemkin:Net net we're gonna need more sales and go to market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so quickly that even if they're more efficient they will need more human beings than ever I I we'd have to put together a spreadsheet to see the crossover point obviously many folks are shrinking headcount Microsoft's already said they're past peak employee they will never they'll never gonna be bigger we're seeing this all across the companies we work with they don't want to be they wanna be as lean as they can but AI is such a huge part of our economy already right and it's such a force of nature and everyone is you know everyone eventually goes enterprise everyone eventually has a sales team everyone eventually does it it's happening faster you know 11 labs 50% of their sales is through enterprise now right I mean I don't know everybody the fact that Vercel just added Janine means they're going more enterprise by definition right I think Replit just added a sales team couple months ago for real and now they've added another CRO so they got to a 100 with no traditional sales team but at a billion it's gonna be flooded with salespeople so if you get great at this stuff if you go buy an agent today when you listen to this and deploy it yourself and do the hard work and train it and ingest it and iterate it every day and get ahead of it and then get two agents and then three and then four you may become more valuable have a better experience in DTM and I believe I hope actually be better paid like I've talked about that we should have $250,000 a year SDRs but they'd be like at Vercel they'd be managing 10 agents not 10 people then they're worth $250 instead of $80 or $90 it's not that much is it so there is a great world coming these are the best of times aren't they Lenny for product and business right just it's not evenly distributed so want to be if you have those skills even though we're not going to need these SDRs and even though we're not going need BDRs even though we can get rid of half of AEs there's so the amount of revenue and growth in AI leaders is so phenomenal right not not just at the startups at the Google clouds at everywhere the the they're hiring so many humans that net net it's a positive for the profession but not for the way we've done it in the past you're at risk

Lenny Rachitsky:That is really interesting that we're still hiring and this is what I've seen too just like everyone's hiring salespeople go to market people do you think there's like going to be this peak in the next couple of years of just okay now that AI is doing more and more of this or is it just hard to predict because who knows how big AI gets how big these companies get

Jason Lemkin:I mean it's over a trillion dollars I don't see any reason and it's accelerating is increasing the amount Gartner says next year will be the fastest acceleration of money deployed into IT and software in a decade it's reaccelerated can that last forever no eventually we consume 100% of the global GDP there's no money left to buy are some limits but I don't think you and I and any of the millions of people that follow you I think we got to think too much more than three to forty years out here it's too much there's too much change if you become a master of the universe in AI you will be hyper employable the next two to three years and if you stay with a learner's mind that will just compound and so you will have a job that I think is far more interesting even if more tiring than we used to have but the days of working twenty hours a week and kind of phoning it in and getting a few deals you know I I think those are forever behind that that was a great time even you had a little bit of that you're I think you're working harder than you used to aren't you

Lenny Rachitsky:I am I am

Jason Lemkin:I mean the classic Lenny vibe at a 100,000 subscribers was kinda leave me alone I take a lot of vacations I do some good work I mean it's still part of your vibe I I think you're working harder

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm working incredibly hard I yeah the original idea was create this like like chill newsletter life I'm just gonna write a newsletter once a week life's gonna be good and it's just it's just hard to pass up on really cool opportunities and and do more help it grow bigger like it's just I couldn't resist so yeah I'm working

Jason Lemkin:And that should be all of us though like we should you should be if you're not feeling what you said or even a version of what I said then then you're not you're not living you're not on the right you're not living the AI dream today it is more work it should be tired it should be like if nothing even if it's better in some ways it is just more work but but this is the most exciting time of our lifetimes to be in software I mean good god I can't even code Letty and I've built 12 apps on Repla in the last one hundred and fifty days used by a million times I've been waiting ten years for some of these folks to build some of these apps I just did it myself right I literally just when I was in London I built a whole app where you can sell you can practice selling Harvey Cursor Replit and ChatGPT Enterprise and it works like we couldn't this wasn't even possible at the start of the year was it these are magical times and we the fact that we can we can run an 8 figure business with three people and 20 agents it's like you know get get excited or like go join one of these really slow growing beat like I my advice is pick one of two paths today either be working harder like even you and I are right we don't have to or honestly I will say the truth is the the there there were a thousand unicorns born in 2021 right 800 of them are growing pretty slowly will never IPO may not have an exit but they're okay with 8% or 15% growth if you don't wanna be on the journey we talked about I'm not judging I get it we're humans right we have families not all of us are obsessed I'm kind of obsessed I think you've become more obsessed if that's not you join join something more slow growing they still need people not as many they still need people but I would pick I would pick a lane for next year don't pretend that there's this middle path going to start because it don't exist in GTM I don't think it exists in product or engineering either

Lenny Rachitsky:I love just how excited you are about this just like you could tell on Twitter just how fun this is for you learning and sharing and I love that you're sharing it but I think it's just a symptom of you're just so excited about what's happening and what you're learning and it's just like you can't help but share it I'm in the same way I'm just like oh shit I just vibe good at this really cool thing I got a tweet about it

Jason Lemkin:It's just it is just magical that our ability to build things that we couldn't build before or build in ways and paces it it's just it it's and it's accelerating it's so I mean we could talk about it forever but even for me for like I I just picked Rep I picked Replit because Twitter told me to I could have picked another tool like I'm not an investor and I'm not I'm not even biased but I'm in the top 1%

Lenny Rachitsky:Just to double down what you said you're one top 1% user of Replit

Jason Lemkin:Yeah wow yeah so it really didn't work well when I started about a hundred and seventy days ago then a V two came out and it got better the hallucinations went away and then this is just like you got to get excited about it folks may not know this and other tools when V three came out I don't know forty five days ago now it has agents talking to agents so what happens is when you and again I can't really code so when I have an issue and I'm trying to figure out how to do something the agent calls in an architect or another agent and they debate and argue with it and they come up with the right answer the first time this happened I just fell out of my chair it's just so not only is it magical I mean great can do a prompt and build a crappy app that doesn't work now like a hundred and fifty days later have agents debating how to build better code with each other and you don't even need to know how to code I mean this is the greatest the only greater time is going to be next year right I've been waiting I've been waiting right and you know and just that the things that you can build today and the other I mean you know this but other folks I mean that's me building without being able to code the other captain obvious thing you know if you're building any why are folks so productive on all these tools I mean every bit of open source software in the world is in these tools if you want to build something that's been built before it's so easy the novel stuff is really hard right it's not any easier but man it's just these are great and so for GTM for sales it's a couple beats behind and there's probably a bunch of reasons for it some of it is I think ironically just where founders are interested so marketing is behind sales for AI AI SGR has exploded I don't really know why I invested in a couple of pre AI tools I invested in Salesoff which was sold for 2 and a half billion it was like the last deal of the twenty twenty ones like the seed investment no one wanted to be in that category now everyone in the world wants to build an AI SGR AR CRM but marketing is slower just because they're really people don't really want to build the cursor for marketing people say they do but it's just not but it will get there but the innovation will just accelerate it's just going to accelerate so don't be a skeptic on this stuff like if you're not as excited as me then here's my last bit of advice on this for folks if you don't feel what I feel here's my advice over the holidays when you have a quiet moment when you're having your mulled wine or your hot chocolate or whatever fire up your browser do it in incognito go to your app and do everything with a fresh Gmail address try support see how your support is try to contact sales sign up for the newsletter do everything try your product if you do this quietly your heart you're gonna cry about some of the things you've seen you're gonna cry how bad your support is you're gonna cry how long it takes sales to get back to you you're gonna cry about a couple things pick the thing that makes you cry the most over your mulled wine and go buy that agent and fix it and and then you will have the passion that we have this I always counsel people to do this it just wasn't as actionable before AI but so many fa you just get lost you forget about what these things you forget about the onboarding workflow you forget about support and you forget how bad contact me and you're so lost in the strategic so you got it once a year ideally once a quarter just do this incognito mode test even for Letty's newsletter I bet we can find some part you forgot to touch

Lenny Rachitsky:Nope no you just not gonna happen

Jason Lemkin:I'm just I'm just joking you're like oh my god I can't believe I I didn't touch that since I launched the Substack it doesn't even go to the right that place is it's a four zero four

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm gonna do this over the holidays and I love that this like usually the advice would have been okay email your product manager and tell him you found all these bugs what you're saying here is no find an agent to take care of this in the future like make this a much better experience for everyone always

Jason Lemkin:Yeah yeah and if it's the one that makes you cry it may motivate you to do it

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah and you don't it's not like you have to publish it to production it's not like you have to have your you know CEO approve this thing it's just like show them what you might be able to do here's what I did over the weekend maybe we should explore doing this thing with our site.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah their job is just my job.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah yeah oh man Jason I feel like I could chat with you for hours but I think it's this is a good point to to wrap things up is there anything that you wanted to share or is there anything you wanna leave listeners with.

Jason Lemkin:One last thing maybe that comes up what what what I've learned that that are on people's minds that we can break is a lot of folks are concerned hey this will impact people's jobs what do I do like okay I want I I did what you said I did the incognito mode I'm gonna bring in this this agent this sales agent or this support agent I've tried I've even did it but I'm worried I'm gonna get pushed back and people are gonna lose their jobs I don't have the perfect answer to this one but I think be honest about it be honest that for the best people it will make them more productive for the best people it it it will be even fun for the best people they will be better at their job and if it is a threat to some of the folks on the team the future is coming anyway we might as well embrace it so it's just when I hear I I I wouldn't I would be positive about it I would explain it helps the best people but I I don't think dancing around it is the right answer in your organization it it will result in change and if it if some jobs change from one role to another that that's life in the age of AI don't don't hide it don't I think it helps.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that in your case and in Gene's case at Vercel it's not like you let anyone go in your case the SDRs quit and in her case she moved them from I believe from inbound to outbound or outbound to inbound she just kind of reshuffled them to do to have higher impact somewhere else.

Jason Lemkin:I think that's an important a really important point this is another thing that I think the media creates too much drama on I don't think AI is not I mean AI has led to some layoffs but even though most of the ones we read it's just a justification to do layoffs it's just it's just a reason to to blame it on it what's a much bigger issue is that people just won't be backfilled with humans we will use AI to backfill that's what we did right we didn't fire I've never fired anyone in my whole career other than for inappropriate conduct a few times right that's that you fired today for that stuff but pretty much I've never fired anyone that didn't do something inappropriate I just when they go this time we just said now it's the agents right and so that's a much bigger force of nature than some random layoffs which probably aren't really new to AI it's probably not because you brought in 20 agents in 2025 it's probably because you just want to downsize anyway and this is the excuse so it's probably less of a threat to you than you think AI but what it does mean is if you're not don't want to embrace it Lenny maybe don't leave your current job.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I was just.

Jason Lemkin:Gonna maybe don't leave your current job.

Lenny Rachitsky:Because the new place might not be hiring for this role.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah I have a god I have I have a a sales exec who I love I worked I'd known for many years and he went from a 100 K job then almost an 800 K job then down to a 200 K job then left that one because he didn't like it and now he can't get a job at all he's back in school so maybe stay we all there we go maybe stay no shame in staying is there.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I like that well with that Jason we have reached our very exciting lightning round this is your second time going through lightning round so I'll make it I'll make it quick first question what are a couple of books you often find yourself recommending to other people.

Jason Lemkin:I was recently asked to write a forward for a book from one of the revenue leaders I have the most respect for in the world read a little bit of it I couldn't do it because as good as it was it was dated it wasn't current enough in AI and there's just I don't know what we said at this it might have been before we started the pod the plays all work but the playbooks don't really work as well so so many of these GTM books are playbooks especially folks selling courses and stuff but they're playbooks run from the playbooks embrace the plays and so read all these go to market and sales books and take take great items from them which was always the goal from a book right pick three two or three things out of it but I'm I I think I'm waiting for the next level of books in GTM in 2026 because everything I've read it's it's just too backwards looking so just be a skeptic grab the plays but don't adopt the playbook.

Lenny Rachitsky:I just had the I had a growth from Lovable Elena Verner on the podcast she had the same advice that all these playbooks that she's used over the last twenty years in growth just don't work anymore in any the companies next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed.

Jason Lemkin:What's this one called what's it called Pluribus is that what it's called Pluribus.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah k I've been watching that.

Jason Lemkin:It's and and this is so it's a good show this is what I realized is why you should be excited about AI and GTM is Pluribus because in Pluribus there's like a hive mind right all the people except 11 people or 13 people they're all connected people don't get this this is why right now the whole point when we're doing this maybe we'll do a third one if I'm lucky the whole point is just get your AI agents to be almost as good as humans but working 24/7 and at scale that's pretty damn good if it can do 10 or a 100 times more work 24/7 as pretty good as your human that's a resource you don't even have today it's not that complicated when AI really is the hive mind when it can share all of the data across all of your agents and knows everything that happens then humans are at risk in GTM they're gonna be so much better when they're the hive mind right now our hive and and there's a bit of a renaissance for Salesforce as a CRM there's a bunch of reasons even though it's old right it's founded in the nineties it has become the hub for these AIGTM agents they all plug in so Salesforce has become the database for all these so that's a little hint of the Pluribus hive mind but when all these agents can talk with each other for real and share all their GTM data and all the customer data and everything on the one point next time we do it the 3,800,000 people that read Lenny's and all the agents can share data together no hue that that's I don't mean to turn turn Pluribus into an AI GTM show but there's my connection but but it's it's pretty good right.

Lenny Rachitsky:I get it I get it oh man that show's so good I feel like every episode I get these pushes from Apple TV of like there's new episode of Pluribus I'm like I can't wait to go watch that they were they just leave the each episode ends in oh I can't wait to see what happens next okay is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love like an app or a gadget or clothing.

Jason Lemkin:Maybe not in the last two weeks I'll just give a small one just just for GTM one there is because everyone's about sort of this and all of this and video and I love it I get it but there is an app called Reeve it used to be Reef Art it's for imaging and it is the folks that build it built their own image LLMs on their own and the reason I bring this up I use it every single day is because it can do a lot of cool things with a prompt right but if you want to do cool stuff for marketing if you wanna create a great image I have a CMO buying my product doing this I don't know a tool that is better for that kind of stuff that stuff that we used to torture we used to fire up Canva and try to create things or even worse wait four days for someone to do it for you I just use this is one of my cheat sheets I have a couple tools that I use that people don't get but now it's app.reeb.ai it changed its name but it's just a simple prompt go to it type in whatever image you wanna make and for a lot of the boring B2B stuff we like to do I find it's the best.

Lenny Rachitsky:And it's ree.com.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah rev.com.

Lenny Rachitsky:Right now Copybara delivering matcha through a quiet moss garden.

Jason Lemkin:App.reve.com.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah sweet.

Jason Lemkin:Oh you're oh you're making the image you said.

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm just like they're giving me examples here I'm on the website here.

Lenny Rachitsky:This is great and you're saying this is better than like Nano Banana and all these other.

Jason Lemkin:Yeah yeah.

Jason Lemkin:For this use case.

Lenny Rachitsky:And you

Lenny Rachitsky:Do images

Jason Lemkin:You and I we just

Jason Lemkin:I wanna do a thumb I want an image for my article I want it I just did I just my niche thing content just wanna do I've gotta do it I just don't think there's anything better for for this use case so I use it two or three times a day and I use all this stuff

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay the alpha more alpha to to share with the audience okay two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to in work or in life that you often maybe even share with other people

Jason Lemkin:I'll just tell you one in the weird time we're at this this is probably your best startup just talking yesterday with a friend of mine startup just raised 20,000,000 from a top two or three VC founder just quit the next day just on the call the other day yesterday CEO of a company of $250,000,000 just quit no success or no anyone to join a hot AI startup maybe maybe most of the time there are times and places to just quit when you have customers when you have a million or 2,000,000 or 5 or 10,000,000 in revenue but we we often think it's easier to get back to get back to that 10,000,000 of revenue to get back to a 100 happy customers or 200 happy it might seem easier to quit in the age of AI but I'd rather take those 500 happy customers build that badass AI product and sell it to 500 happy customers and go out to find them from scratch go out to find that ten or twenty million so that's I I literally had a third conversation with the founder just crossing a 100,000,000 that wanted to leave and do a robotic start up after ten years I'm like I get it man but like this is you know you have 9 figures of equity in this company maybe go to the next level so there's so much going on they're decelerating accelerating I just usually think the best startup as for founders not necessarily for everybody else is the one you're already working at and if you're not happy turn that into your a hot AI startup it's not here's the thing it's not too late Lenny sometimes it feels like it's too late on social media maybe it's too late to build the next chat GBT on the cheap okay but for most stuff it's it's it's not too late it's so it's still so early we don't even have great AI marketing tools we're really early on these AI SDRs the markets have not hardened the LLMs are getting so much better it is dude if you want it it's not too late so the best startup you're ever gonna have probably is the one you're working at today don't quit don't quit if you have happy customers maybe that's how it is don't quit if you have happy customers they'll buy more from you

Lenny Rachitsky:I love advice like that that's empowering and optimistic and de stresses people I think in a lot of ways that is great final question how many how many sastres have you done at this point like how many years of sastres have there been

Jason Lemkin:Good god we've done the first big we did some meetups you know that right and then we did the first bigger one in 2015 so 2016 we did take a break in 2020 but we did in 2021 we're the only event in the bay area in 2021 so is that 12 of them twelve years it's a long time man and we've done seven in Europe so 12 in the US and seven in Europe 20 bigger events yeah I don't know the annual one probably if you count the smaller ones 300 that 3,000 4,000 over the years

Lenny Rachitsky:So then here's the question is there a talk that you think is the one that you like what's your favorite talk across all those events is it the one you're like oh this wouldn't really stood out this is one I always share with people one that you think people might you'd want people to check out if they were to check out one talk across all sester

Jason Lemkin:It it's interesting it's like a lot of things in B2B everything was pretty much the same for ten years and then all of a sudden everything's out of date right if you wanted to watch an older one not that old but old in internet AI time that I think will change the way you think watch the one I did with Ben Chestnut right after they got acquired because that's a magical time it's called everything that breaks on the way to 1,000,000,000 it's only got 23,000 views that's nothing for Lenny but for me that's pretty good okay and it's a moment in time right after he sold a billion dollar company where he talks about how the deal almost fell apart where he challenges almost every B to B metric we know how did what you know running a profitable business at that scale not really caring about CLTV and CAC or any of these things what really matters for customers is Mailchimp as cutting edge as it was today right maybe not but that's one when I look at it because everything everything's kinda the same we don't we don't really get challenged in the way we think everyone's talking their book right you're so good at getting people to not talk their book but but that one I think is a great one and then if people wanted to watch a GTM one just some favorite ones we did this one it's a recent one Matt Plant because these guys were on my team Matt Plant who's Sierra of Rippling did one with Sam Blond who was NCR of Brex it's called Rippling secrets to hyper growth it sounds like a commercial for Rippling which is okay right but because Sam was they work together and now Sam's on the board and all like they have a fluency of two CROs who are honest and have a learner a Lenny style learner's mindset this one on the the revenue playbook from Rippling it's it's a it's a 14 for for GTM

Lenny Rachitsky:I just had Ben McGinniss on the podcast okay former COO now CPO

Jason Lemkin:Yep

Lenny Rachitsky:At Rippling so that would be a good combo of those two Jason I don't know if you know this but you're you're the perfect podcast guest because you have such deep experience in the space that you just have answers to everything I ask plus you're now just living in this future that we're all heading towards and you're like hands on telling us here's how the future will be and here's how it works and here's how you can get there and here's what you shouldn't do and here's what will so I'm just so thankful that you're here sharing all this advice with us I'm excited for many more podcast conversations so so thanks for doing this

Jason Lemkin:Alright Lenny you're the best I'm I'm I'm just a super fan I'm lucky to be here so thank you

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me just ask you how can listeners be useful to you as a closing question

Jason Lemkin:The fun thing for me we have two websites Saastr.com and Saastr just go to Saastr.ai and just play with the tools we built play with the valuation calculator we talked about play with the AIVC play with any of our tools and just have fun and share any feedback because I've waited ten years to build tools for the SaaS community now I want to build like twenty so on the side we've talked about tools you should go buy but building your own stuff is pretty fun too so try our tools and give me kind but critical feedback but but with some kindness

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay and that's Saastr.ai dot AI

Jason Lemkin:Yeah we're still trying to figure out the AI versus the comm we got a SEO issue so I can't really move it over but

Lenny Rachitsky:It looks great it works it works it's shorter too

Jason Lemkin:It is shorter

Lenny Rachitsky:Jason thank you so much for being here

Jason Lemkin:Alright Lenny you're the best

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode