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Jason Lemkin

Founder & CEO, Saastr

Search every verified Jason Lemkin interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jason Lemkin, founder and CEO of SaaStr, has been active in recent months as a commentator on SaaS, venture capital, and AI industry trends. He has appeared on the 20VC podcast discussing topics such as the Valar Atomics lawsuit against Day One Ventures, Meta's AI product Muse, and the state of venture capital returns. Lemkin stated that most VC firms underperform NASDAQ and described venture capital as a "niche asset class only designed for outliers." He also commented on the high turnover rate among executives, citing data that 63% of CMOs changed jobs in the last 16 months, and discussed the impact of AI agents on software pricing, noting that seat-based vendors are raising prices for agent access. Lemkin has also shared operational insights from his own company, SaaStr, including the use of the 10K tool to reduce late invoices from 56% to 8% and average overdue days from 17 to 6. He discussed what CEOs want from their VP of Marketing, expressing skepticism about having marketing report to a CRO, calling it "a terrible idea." Lemkin has also commented on AI industry developments, including Meta's Muse product, Anthropic's IPO plans, and Nvidia's performance, while expressing views on open source AI's market share and the importance of coding as a key economic driver in the AI era.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think as usual in these disputes no one's 100% right. It's rare. It's rare in life. Uh there are disputes where someone's 100% in the wrong and even when you look back, you might say, you know what, may maybe I contributed just a little bit to that. Here's here's my read of the situation for what it's worth. Here's here's the more interesting thing. What what happened? Um I I listen, we only can read the tweets, ri”

“I think at 22 billion we should consider doing up to 10% of the fund. Time is short. We're at an 18-month deployment cycle. One of our most esteemed partners is going back to run a public company. So we're losing some of the folks on the team. The way I see it, 11 Labs has done something quite different with actually a fair amount of intense competition. It's lead keeps widening. It is one of the 10 most important un”

“I think it's a terrible idea. Let me simplify the answer. A terrible idea. There are two simple reasons. One, almost no CRO knows what marketers do. Two, you spend even more money. This is what I've learned. The companies I've seen that do it, there's no control. Well, this is what happens. And then I'll tell you why it happens, which is perhaps the most important lesson. If you have this marketing reporting to the C”

“The budgets, broadly speaking, are about half of what they were in 2021 because revenue per employee has doubled. If we have to generate 400,000 in revenue per employee and it was 125 in 2021, people don't... I know they don't have to care, but they should understand this. Where does that come from? Where does 400,000 in revenue per employee come from? And I understand that people are burned out or that the world has”

“I think open source has reached its maximum as a market share. I think it's going to keep going down. Two reasons. One is at the end of the day, Anthropic and Open AI are just deciding what they want to price their non-Max frontier models and they have many ways to compete directly. They have many there's no reason they can't be as cost competitive as they want to be. Reason number two is boy, people really don't wan”

“We're in a moment in time where everything valuations are extraordinarily high and then traction and outcomes and all these other things are extraordinarily high. And so people are like, do you think we're investing at the right speed? And I'm like, we're definitely not investing at the right speed. We are either investing way too fast or way too slow. But when both sides of the equation are this out of whack, the od”

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