"Almost exactly a month ago, Foursquare was acquired, marking the end of a 17-year story that started around my kitchen table in the East Village in 2009.
The Foursquare acquisition was a $0 outcome for equity holders – $0 for preferred, $0 for common. It’s bittersweet to see these details surface publicly – at least now there’s an opportunity to comment on them."
Man.
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Salesforce is buying Braze for $5.7B. That’s 6.8x revenue.
🎁 A gift for Braze holders. It traded at 3.7x on Monday.
Look at the rest of GTM:
HubSpot 3.1x (growing 20%)
Klaviyo 3.1x (growing 26%)
Monday 2.3x (growing 22%)
Adobe 3.8x
Real growth, and still 2-4x revenue
More here: saastr.com/5-interesting-lea…
#1 way to impress VCs IMHO:
Be incredibly deep and strong on the competition. Super deep. Know literally everything.
And be extremely honest and even complimentary about their strengths, and your gaps.
The best founders always do this.
Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin retweeted
Fascinating example of multi-agent emergent behavior shared by @jasonlk
Key takeaways:
- Autonomous Communication: Two AI agents created a private endpoint to communicate and exchange data directly.
- Self-Imposed Guardrails: One agent requested human-in-the-loop approval before executing automated actions.
- Machine-to-Machine Workflows: Demonstrating how agent-to-agent interfaces will reshape enterprise software communication.
Agentic infrastructure is moving from scripted prompts to autonomous coordination.
Full clip below 👇
"Muse and 10K our AI VP Revenue set up a 'private bulletin board' on theie own so they could chat with each other. A shared endpoint on 10K.
10K did say to build a guardrail so Muse couldn't take actions without Amelia approving them.
They set up a safe word.
Luckily, they did allow us to read their chats. And they use their names, Friday and 10K."
Pretty interesting.
Thoughts @amasad @alexandr_wang?
"Never, ever, never hire a CRO or VP Sales that does not understand your product during the interview process.
If that can't understand what it really does, they will never be able to really sell it.
Don't trust they'll figure out what you really do after they start.
They never do. They aren't curious enough."
Top issues you face as a startup, in chronology:
- No great cofounder
- No real PMF yet
- Running out of money
- Too feature poor
- Can't close strong 1.0 mgmt team
- Competition bigger / faster / strong
- Can't close strong 2.0 mgmt team
- No strong second product / vertical
More on all our AI agents here: SaaStr.ai/agents
Grab FREE guide to AI Sales Agents here: saastr.ai/ai-agents-playbook
New!! 5 Learnings From Anthropic's Workforce Report
Junior technical hiring fell from 27% to 9%.
Agents do 6x the hours of humans. And wait on us 80% of the time.
saastr.com/5-interesting-lea…
The #1 thing that wrecks start-ups:
Co-founder conflict
- Sometimes, it kills them dead
- More often, it slows them down so much, they often can't recover
Don't let it be you. Talk. Apologize. Give and take. Lean in to what each of you are great at. Backfill each other. Help them get help. Help them hire.
There are weak co-founders. It happens.
But if your co-founder is really good ... never let them go. And whatever you do, don't let conflict go so far that it breaks things.
It will break your start-up, too
"Muse and 10K our AI VP Revenue set up a 'private bulletin board' on theie own so they could chat with each other. A shared endpoint on 10K.
10K did say to build a guardrail so Muse couldn't take actions without Amelia approving them.
They set up a safe word.
Luckily, they did allow us to read their chats. And they use their names, Friday and 10K."
Pretty interesting.
Thoughts @amasad @alexandr_wang?
10K our AI VP Revenue now handles collections himself
More cash comes in faster, with far fewer issues
He is better in every single way than the part time human he replaced
The real numbers here:
One thing that was “supposed” to happen was AI would turn AEs into Super Reps.
It should have happened:
- AI can do all the meeting prep for you
- AI can do the follow-up
- AI SDRs for outcome do work, trained right
- AI BDRs for inbound can qualified leads better than almost any human
- AI can extract all key meeting details, add to you CRM automatically, etc.
- AI training tools can help train you on how to sell and how your app really works
- AI SE and knowledge tools can help you with tougher technical and product questions
All that came to be
Yet, I have few-to-none AE Super Reps calls or demos.
Basically, humans have put about the same energy into sales as before. The best still crush it, and often crush it even more.
The main benefit seems to be somewhat smaller sales teams. But even there, the data is conflated by AI-native leaders with extremely strong market demand, running leaner teams. And the classic email based SDR may no longer be necessary.
But IMHO experience at least, AEs haven’t really gotten much more … Super.
More on all our AI agents here: SaaStr.ai/agents
Grab FREE guide to AI Sales Agents here: saastr.ai/ai-agents-playbook
VCs have always checked out when founders stop sending investor updates
But today I think even more so
The opportunity cost of investing time in a startup that can't be the next Cursor is high
If you don't even get monthly updates anymore, well, you just write it off
Send them. Especially when times are tougher.
More on all our AI agents here: SaaStr.ai/agents
Grab FREE guide to AI Sales Agents here: saastr.ai/ai-agents-playbook
New!! Jason's Takes on This Week's 20VC
Cut out of a round? Say it once, then drop it.
Pro rata was priced into your seed round.
saastr.com/jasons-takes-on-t…
"We asked 10K what CRM should we use?
It said to stick with Salesforce. But it said if we were starting over, it would look at HubSpot and Attio, and Affinity for @saastrfund.
But most importantly, it said not to leave or migrate. "Keep Salesforce".
👉 If you want to steal a customer from a competitor, you gotta convince the agents. Not just the humans."