Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Used to have about 10 people full time. Now you have 1.2 humans, 20 agents. We have 10 desks that used to be go-to-market people. They're all just labeled with our agents. Reply for replet. Quality for qualified, artie for artisan. Agent Force needs a nickname. Agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on Christmas.

Starting point is 00:00:16 We're done with hiring humans and sales. We're done. The business is doing very similarly to what it was when you had 10 humans. 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 going to hire someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what Saster does. I just can't do that way. AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today,

Starting point is 00:00:34 and it is displacing the mid-pack and the mediocre. How do you see the future of the sales profession? We should have $250,000 year SDRs, but they'd be like at Versel. 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,

Starting point is 00:00:52 the contact me's that we see, we have no need for them today. They should be extinct next year. Someone's listening to us like, oh man, my job is in trouble. If you can go do this, you're hyper employable. Today, my guest is Jason Lemkin, founder of Saster, the world's largest community for B2B founders, and one of my absolute favorite sales and go-to-market minds on the planet.

Starting point is 00:01:13 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 Saster sales team from around 10 SDR, and A.E.'s to one full-time AE, a part-time chief of AI named Amelia, 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

Starting point is 00:01:54 had to deal with along the way. We cover all of the things that he has learned about where 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 his sales team, and so much more.

Starting point is 00:02:16 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, replet, bolt, N-8N, gamma, linear, Devon, Post Talk, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Perplexity, Warp, Grinola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapier, D, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas.

Starting point is 00:02:44 Head on over to Linney's newsletter.com and 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.

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Starting point is 00:04:18 The result, faster iteration, and a shorter path from idea to implementation. VARCEL Built v0 for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit versel.com slash lenny to get started. That's versel.com slash Lenny. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast. Lucky to be a super fan and then to get to join, right?

Starting point is 00:04:47 It's terrific to be on the other side. 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 in the world since then, Koff AI. And what's happened is you've gone extremely deep on what AI enables for sales, for startups, for go to market.

Starting point is 00:05:21 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. That I think I can do. To start, help us understand just the business you run, this Saster. What is it you sell?

Starting point is 00:05:43 What is the business? What is it you do, Jason? 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 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.

Starting point is 00:06:01 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 Saster Annual. I've actually also invested almost $200 million, almost 10x lifetime, only into founders from the community. But the reason I don't know is what I, if folks, that do are connected to our content. I'm just passionate about helping other founders see mistakes and make less of them. So anyway, we're a large community. I do invest, but it turned into a business.

Starting point is 00:06:35 There was no revenue in the beginning. I'm sure there was no revenue for lending. And ours was less intentional. But we do do eight figures of revenue a year. And it's work. That sounds great, okay, to do eight figures. But there's a lot of costs, especially on the event side. The media side has almost no costs.

Starting point is 00:06:52 And it's work. We have 100 sponsors. 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 of emails, no work, right? If you wanted to have like four Lenny podcast, like 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.

Starting point is 00:07:12 And then maybe I'm rambling a little bit. The interesting thing, the aha moment that happened to us is going into May of this year, we had one AI agent in a 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 seven-figure budget and eight-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 or not one of them.

Starting point is 00:07:39 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 built and I, and I turned to Amelia, our chief A officer. And I said, we're done with hiring humans and sales. We're done. we are going to push the limits with agents.

Starting point is 00:07:56 We're going to put, 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 JSON closed a 70K sponsorship on its own. So when I saw that a horizontal agent, not trained for sales, not trained for GTM could close one deal, we're like, let's deploy a couple of these apps. We have time. And I just can't pay a junior SDR, $150,000. year to quit. I just can't, like, criticize me, but I just couldn't do it one more time. I just

Starting point is 00:08:28 couldn't do it one more. And I actually think this isn't, when I talk to CEOs at leading AI companies, they kind of don't want to do it either. They want to have the smallest sales teams they can, as much for cultural reasons, right? Even if, even if REPLIT only goes from zero to 200, it could have been 220 with the smaller sales team. I think Omjohn's okay with it, right? So it's an enduring thing. But anyhow, so we push the limits. And now, if you walk into Sassar's It's kind of funny. We have 10 desks that used to be go-to-market people. They're all just labeled with our agents.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Reply for Replit. Quali for qualified, Artie 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 back of the office and it's just agents. It's the quietest office. And Net Net Net, Lenny, it's about, here's the meta learning for when we,

Starting point is 00:09:15 when we're recording this. 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.

Starting point is 00:09:38 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, you or anyone watching or listening, maybe it's not cool.

Starting point is 00:10:00 I didn't want to hire my 28th rep that was going to 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. I just see what we can push the limits here. Okay. I love all the directions we're already heading. Okay. So just to help people totally understand what your business is,

Starting point is 00:10:19 basically these people are selling sponsors for, for your conferences. They're selling two things, because it's just relevant to the deep time. They're selling sponsorships, which average about 70 to 80K. And then they're also selling tickets, which is the high volume for it.

Starting point is 00:10:32 This is like the self-serve version. They're selling tickets that are anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to if you're a VC that comes the night before could be two grand. Okay, no gifts for VCs that decide the night before. Founders have decided early

Starting point is 00:10:43 get at 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 1.2 million or something 1.2 million roughly

Starting point is 00:11:13 okay how many as how many of those is a human willing to reach out to approaching nuns yeah imagine you hired a 21st year old SDR fresh out of junior college and said, here's my list, 1.2 million people, start calling them. I want him to come to Lenny's summit. So we have this low-end version, which is tickets, right, which is $4,000 a year. And then we have this higher-end sales cycle. And they're very different.

Starting point is 00:11:39 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. Okay. And so previously before this future world, how many SDRs did you have?

Starting point is 00:11:58 How many salespeople in this? We would have two to three SDRs and up to five AEs. Okay. So like eight, nine people full-time working on Saster. Yes. To bring in sponsors and to bring in tickets. Yes, although, yes. A lot of it is inbound in renewals, but yes, to manage that business, to manage the sales side of that business.

Starting point is 00:12:19 And go to market. Let's call 8 to 9 and go to market. Now we have 1.2. Humans. Human. 1.2 humans. And 20 agents, AI agents. What is a 0.2 human?

Starting point is 00:12:32 Amelia, who's our chief A officer, who runs everything, she spends 20% of her time managing the agents, orchestrating the agents. Okay. Which is something I think people don't. Let's get into that. They talk about, but they don't actually understand what that means. Yeah. Okay. I definitely want to spend time there.

Starting point is 00:12:47 Okay. So you used to have about 10 people full time. Now you have 1.2 humans and you said 20 agents. 20 agents, yeah. 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 doing the same. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:02 Now, listen, if I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't get me wrong. And this is true of every fast word and start. I would hire them tomorrow. Okay. And if you go to Verssel, if you go to Replet, if you go to, they're all going to tell you to say, I was literally in London. We were just at our London event. We were with Maggie, who's in the leadership of a.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Open AI, she said they just can't hire enough enterprise reps now. Okay. But what it is replacing are the mid-packing 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 replet works, the AI can do better, not than the best, right? So I would love to have more humans, but I'm not going to 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.

Starting point is 00:13:50 AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today. And it is displacing the mid-pack and the mediocre. 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 cautionary. But I would love to have more than one. But at the end of the day, 1.2 humans is plus 20 AI agents, is doing about what 10 human

Starting point is 00:14:15 Gtm did. Wow. Okay. I want to spend time on the different agents you've built, but first of all, just kind of zooming out,

Starting point is 00:14:22 having gone through this experience, how do you see the world of go-to-market changing next year in the coming years? All the plays work. It's the playbooks that are kind of broken

Starting point is 00:14:34 in the age of AI. All the plays work. Outbound still works. Webinar still works. Podcasts still work. Okay? Events still work. All this stuff works. All this stuff works.

Starting point is 00:14:44 Why is 11 labs out doing a road show, 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 for folks that aren't in the age of AI, growth is 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 Verselles, the replets, the 11 labs, they have so much demand, so much demand that, you know, that they're still running the plays, but they're doing them differently. They're doing them from a hyper PLG focus because there's

Starting point is 00:15:27 so much demand. And they're often picking and choosing which prospects to talk to contact. So like, for example, Bolt is probably a distant number three behind Replen Lovable, right? But one of my old sales guys run sales there. And I talked to him when they went from zero to 50 million in like six months. He's like, we honestly just have so many leads. We just are half our job is picking which ones to respond to. Right. And he's like, and he also is like, we close to seven figure deal we stole from Loveable because no one called them back at Loveable. So your traditional B2B SaaS company, even ones at billions of revenue, even the hub spots and and, and, 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, this world where nothing seems

Starting point is 00:16:10 to be working is just because the demand has evaporated, right? So both ends have an incentive in 26 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 Versailles will build their own internally. We can talk about why most folks should not build. They should buy. For the same reason, 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. And so maybe that doesn't totally answer your question

Starting point is 00:16:53 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 KUI path. But come on, they're all, they all kind of grew the same way for the same ACV, for the same deal size. Now, just like in venture and everything, as 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

Starting point is 00:17:32 don't understand. Why are, why are these companies doing so well? Why are they blowing up? Because it's not just at 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?

Starting point is 00:17:46 It's not a few folks looking at video on the internet. It's everyone trying to make video on the internet. Because there's a lot of push from the top of like, we need to adopt AI. We need to be more productive. Now, everyone. Not the traditional, like the traditional metric was in most categories, three to five percent of prospects would be in market a year. So you'd send a trillion emails and you do cold.

Starting point is 00:18:06 calls and you'd hope maybe 2026 was the time they're willing to dump sales force for your new product so at all that up 5%. In many categories, we're north of 50% in market. So that just totally changes. The plays still work showing up in person, actually knowing what the hell you're selling, knowing how to get through procurement, all of those that work. But other than these weird windows, artificial windows in 2020, we've never had so many people in market at once. And this is for AI products specifically? Yeah, that have massive ROI. Yeah, productivity. I want, I need to bring a vibe code tool into my company, Lenny.

Starting point is 00:18:42 Okay, go out and do the work, compare replet, lovable, and whoever else, and buy one. Okay. Like, why Harvey and the others and the Gore are 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 to do it. And that will slow down. Like, not everybody can be in market every year. It's exhausts an enterprise.

Starting point is 00:19:03 So this, 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 fastest growing ones and the slowest growing ones both have incentives to use AI here just for different reasons. How about the sales profession specifically? Are SDRs going to be replaced fully AEs? How do you see the future of the sales profession? 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

Starting point is 00:19:46 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 news 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 agent, 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

Starting point is 00:20:29 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 A.E, the classic human doing the sales,

Starting point is 00:20:45 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.

Starting point is 00:21:02 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, do you like to talk to a human in sales? Sometimes. I'd rather just chat with a really smart AI. 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 see that in your data.

Starting point is 00:21:25 How are we going to build the sales profession if there's no entry-level jobs in SDRs and 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?

Starting point is 00:21:51 I'm sure you see that across a lot of folks you talk to. It's going to 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:22:12 Do you think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand? They're like, oh, we need people to help, and 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? 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?

Starting point is 00:22:38 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 need these leaders, whether 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 play books 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

Starting point is 00:23:11 to know. But I think very few like the Janine from Vursell are going to make the jump. So we'll see. There will be huge organizations, right? Like Denise just went from Slack and Salesforce after 14 years to be CERO Open AI. She's working going to be pretty high level, right? So she They may not need to know how to implement the agents. But most of the folks your companies want to hire, I would just make sure they could, they really want to 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. You said that you had some tips for folks to actually be this 20%.

Starting point is 00:23:46 What are some, if someone's listening to this, like, oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on? It's going to sound simple. It will work. And most, almost nobody's 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.

Starting point is 00:24:06 It could be SDR. It could be inbound qualification. Pick one. Pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. 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.

Starting point is 00:24:26 the 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 kind of crazy. I don't know what I think about it. But we literally just did a job. Amelia's chief A. Officer and Nia, she, she drove it. We did a call with a public B2B company worth well over 10 billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay. And we did a call with their team and they're like, we're struck. We want to figure out this AISDR stuff. Like great. You're like, we think we're just going to buy this two and just give it to our SDRs to figure it out on their own. Okay, one, no chance.

Starting point is 00:25:02 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 themselves. 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?

Starting point is 00:25:20 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.

Starting point is 00:25:40 You give it a URL of your training docs. Maybe you upload your prospectus. You upload a few documents. It ingest 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 ragging, some vectoring.

Starting point is 00:25:55 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 a forward deploy engineer, which is a scary term.

Starting point is 00:26:19 It means someone's going to help you do this. You upload your stuff. You try to get it right. And then you basically have to make sure. sure it's right. Qua, 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 if you do this for 30 days, then every day you spend an hour or two correcting those mistakes by the 30th day, it's going to be pretty good. And this is,

Starting point is 00:26:50 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, pick, 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 be magically be their chief agentic GTM officer because, but 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 50 or 60 hours plus qualifying the vendor.

Starting point is 00:27:25 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:27:38 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 agent force, which is Salesforce is one, which Mark talks a lot about, but we're probably one of the only organization of our size on it.

Starting point is 00:27:56 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.

Starting point is 00:28:16 Then a day 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.

Starting point is 00:28:36 So this is like everyone comes to us as an experts. We're only experts because we did it 20 times. I think what might be helpful here actually is to do a tour, 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? If anyone goes to saster.AI slash agents, you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out.

Starting point is 00:29:01 You can copy us. And I'll walk you through it. But two caveats are things that are top. 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.

Starting point is 00:29:12 Don't build it yourself. You're not Versaelle. 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.

Starting point is 00:29:27 They're not so expensive. It's worth, 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 of months. So we've built a lot of stuff. We could talk about, I built a calculator to do startup calculations,

Starting point is 00:29:44 used 800,000 times in 90 days. For evaluation. 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 Versel, unless you have a reason. That was a great pod. It was wonderful. Don't do it. Don't do that. Basically, unless you have an awesome

Starting point is 00:30:03 go-to-market engineers. And they really want to 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. all you do. What's that? Yeah, Lennybott.com. Yeah, check it out. I saw it a long time ago. It was interesting, but I didn't click. And then Brian Halligan, who's the founder of chairman of PubSpot, did one too. There's Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia. So he helped them early on. And then I kind of 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 Lenny Bot 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 it can combine them all together. It can combine the Versel story and what you did with Dylan at Figma. And it can synthesize the knowledge.

Starting point is 00:31:00 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 kind of Lenny, but it's also kind of all your guess. I think that's the superpower of it, right? That's the way I think about it. It's not just my intelligence, the lessons of every single person I've had on this podcast. So it's great.

Starting point is 00:31:19 But I thought, hey, maybe I could finally do one that's, that's in between the two. Like, 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.

Starting point is 00:31:38 And it worked. And it's just like you. 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 ask about their sales woes and what to do with their sales team and they'll upload LinkedIn's and ask if they should hire people. And then a curious thing happened, which is that because we do these events,

Starting point is 00:31:56 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 Lise is really in the San Francisco Bay Area? Like, who's speaking or, 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.

Starting point is 00:32:14 Like, I mean, it was the worst support ever. And the agent just started to, 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 24-7 support? Can you? Most, most apps can't. In fact, some of the worst defenders are AI. leaders. They have no support at all on their website. So that's one place to start. And then the next

Starting point is 00:32:52 place we started, so for us, the low game for the next place we started is, hey, we want to try outbound, okay, because we don't have 1.2 million 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 Saster of it. So we didn't know what to use. And I'll tell you some learning. So we picked a YC company called Artisan. They've gone from like nothing to 10 million this year. We picked them, but this is important why. They were a sponsor at Saster. 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 him. But another vendor argued the CRO argued with us. He said, I need 100K up front before I help you.

Starting point is 00:33:34 Okay. Another one said they were scared of Saster. They didn't want bad PR if it failed. Fair. Oh, yeah. A certain company. We don't want to be your first. Okay. And artisan said we'll do it. we had nothing. And here's an interesting thing about agentic 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,

Starting point is 00:33:58 like you're going to get returned, 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,

Starting point is 00:34:09 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 XTMO of Salesforce that does a lot now, but mostly focused on qualified stuff. That immediately worked. Like we had someone at 11 p.m. on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor, and they sponsored in it worked. And it worked great. But again, they helped us. And this is an agent that is emailing with prospect selling them

Starting point is 00:34:36 on a sponsorship. Well, it's literally, if you go to sasteranual.com and anyone should buy a product like this. It doesn't have to be qualified. But, but, and the bubble, the intercom like bubble. Okay, got it's tuned 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 want to be on the wait list, sign up here, okay? Or even better for us, it would qualify folks out that weren't a good fit, right? It would save so much time and it would do it 24 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.

Starting point is 00:35:11 So it was such low-hanging fruit. But the key to the first two, and if you're going to pick an agent, is they offered to help the most. At the end of the day, Lenny, these are all running on Claude 4. 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 in AI Gtm, they're more similar than different. They're more similar than different under the hood.

Starting point is 00:35:42 It doesn't mean the features are parity. So because you have to train them, because it takes a month, the world's best software with no help training you is not 1.99% 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 it. You've got to do another column, which is your forward deployed engineer or a 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's 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.

Starting point is 00:36:21 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. And so that's what I learned is you have this partner, the FDE and the vendor. And a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think they can help you.

Starting point is 00:36:37 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 is 1.2 million. It's not like, that's, I got, I only have 300 customers, okay, or 200 customers.

Starting point is 00:37:00 What I've learned is, that's wrong. If you have 300 customers, how many folks have come to your business? 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. And all of a sudden, they have a ha-a-ha moment. How many folks do you have in your HubSpot? Right? How many folks do you have in your CRM? They look it up 31,000? Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero. You don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these Asians 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

Starting point is 00:37:37 we have a lot of folks that honestly, they don't want to 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 I thought having 12 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 scale whatsoever, even a couple million to revenue up can benefit from these products, right? So we did Horde general, general bot, got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR for outbound.

Starting point is 00:38:14 Then we did inbound. And then we did agent force really early with Salesforce. And we didn't know what to do with agent force 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.

Starting point is 00:38:37 I'm kind of busy. I got a $4 million deal with meta going. We just took Asian force just on those. Okay. And we trained it on very similar prompt. It had 70% responsory. Those are people that were dying to interact with us. 70% is so good.

Starting point is 00:38:57 And this is something humans were not willing to do. wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds critical and maybe I'm going to trigger some sales folks. But the reality is if you're in a lead rich environment, okay, and I think that there's lead rich and lead poor environments for even big companies, but sorry, like there's not enough, but eventually you become lead rich, okay? Rets just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature. It's even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let in, right? Do you pick up the phone with all of them? I replied all of them and then we just tell them, were full, but yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:30 But you see the point, right? Even your scale, you see the point, right? Yeah, yeah, it gets challenging. And let's imagine, all of a sudden, you had six months of inventory available. I bet if you spool up an agent and emailed all those folks back automatically, you'd fill up the docket, right?

Starting point is 00:39:44 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.

Starting point is 00:39:57 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.

Starting point is 00:40:31 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, 10 to 15 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?

Starting point is 00:41:01 So it is so much time now to manage these 20. This is interesting. We can't, I don't know when we're gonna do the 21st. 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? And it's gonna keep happening,

Starting point is 00:41:20 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, they don't care about business. process change salesworks they just want to get their commission it doesn't really matter what you pay for an app for for a customer as long as it's fair it's all the work to do to change the way you do

Starting point is 00:41:38 your business right so we're even we're at the point where we're overloaded right and 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 12 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 going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted for having so many agents. Exhausted. Man, okay, there's so much to learn from in what you just shared. Something I definitely want to ask about, as people hear this, agents sending off emails,

Starting point is 00:42:19 agents talking to your clients. We get a, 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? It's a really, really, really good question. So the two, maybe the two biggest learnings.

Starting point is 00:42:40 Take your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have. Take their email copy and use that as a template for your AI. If you, the terrible mistake, people may, people all, everyone in 20204 said these products didn't work. there were two reasons they didn't work. It was before Claude 4, right? Replet didn't work. Lovable didn't exist. Gamma didn't really work before 2025, right, before Cloud.

Starting point is 00:43:04 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 need to train it. No need to do anything. We'll just do everything as a magic's AI savant.

Starting point is 00:43:20 It's not the way it works this way. What you do is an agent will be successful and go to market. market in sales today. If you take what works for your best person, train, I know this seems like a scary term, but 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. So, 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

Starting point is 00:43:54 than it is, but 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. 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 email that the AI's right are pretty good. Okay, if you're getting terrible emails, it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor.

Starting point is 00:44:32 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

Starting point is 00:44:51 when my last startup was acquired by Adobe, Sam Blonde was one of our sales leaders. Then he became CRO of Brex and others. And 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 that I've ever read. So the AI can do better than that.

Starting point is 00:45:08 The AI can do better than that. And so you just train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. And 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.

Starting point is 00:45:24 But do you tell people it's an AI or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. People, we're in an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they know they're going to get an 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.

Starting point is 00:45:48 We just send it and no one cares. And sometimes we'll get, especially founders, we'll get an email back, They'll be like, ha, ha, 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? So we're worrying or creating issues as excuses to not do the work. Your point about how human salespeople's emails are not great already is really powerful. Because all we're looking at is these OK emails from AI and you're saying, okay, but humans,

Starting point is 00:46:14 they're not actually that much better if you actually look at them. My God, they're not. 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? That's right. Some of them are just so good, you can't believe it, right?

Starting point is 00:46:31 A few. Yeah. How many are that? But a lot of them aren't, right? Right. So, like, the best founders and the best sales execs and the best SDRs will spend two hours research in an email. Okay.

Starting point is 00:46:43 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.

Starting point is 00:46:54 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 SCRs do that? They use an automation tool, whether it's outreach or gong or sales off or mix max or an AI base, but they do no work. It's not going to be that great. It's not going to be that great.

Starting point is 00:47:13 So that's why for people get a little confused, the bar for good enough for AI G-G-TM. It's not as high as we think. It's just like, you know, a facsimile of your best person reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your midpack person. It's going to beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product. Is this an opportunity for humans to continue to thrive this layer of much better emails? This came up when I had Jen Abel on the podcast. She asked her like, what tools you use, what do you use?

Starting point is 00:47:41 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? can exist this much better email? Look, for if you have a high performing human team hunting high dollar value logos, and this is classic stuff. Letting and I and Jenner in a conference room,

Starting point is 00:48:06 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 Rapplet. There's only 50. And we're all trying to sell them these new sponsorships. They're half a million bucks for two years. Take it or leave it. Okay.

Starting point is 00:48:22 And I give, we divide them up and we say Lenny's best at this, Jason's best is Jen, and we each take 15 or 17. Dude, no need for AI there, is there? Agreed. No need for AI today. Because the ROI is really high. Yeah, and we're great. And we know that the three of us are different.

Starting point is 00:48:38 The three of us are really different. It's going to 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 what I do is I do it for more research. Like 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 be, she should at least be making it better. But for our 45, 50, 50 best

Starting point is 00:49:00 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 Icommoding. 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.

Starting point is 00:49:34 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, I'll tell you what I was in London. I wanted to buy a $10,000. And I'm literally in London.

Starting point is 00:49:52 And we're doing Sass Finland. 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 email this rap. It's the end of the year. I'm like, just send me the contract.

Starting point is 00:50:02 I want to buy it. But I have two questions. I have two questions. I have 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.

Starting point is 00:50:14 10 grand wasn't enough because there's not enough commission for him, right? So introduce someone else to me. And the other guy said, I can't answer your questions in you'll get on the phone. And I said, I'm in London. I'm traveling. Ordinarily, I would have ended this, but it's adjourned. I'm like, if you answer my two questions, I will buy your product for 10Ks.

Starting point is 00:50:31 is 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, the leads we didn't follow up with that we got a 70% response rate? Right. I mean, the gems are diamond and a rough, and whatever the expression is. The diamond, there's not that many of them. There's not that many of them. So I love her and I love what she says and I agree with 99% of it. But here's a related point. Most of us don't have

Starting point is 00:51:10 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 true. 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 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 gens for better. It's just practice.

Starting point is 00:51:41 Even I can't. Even you could, Lenny, you're so great. But even a lot of folks that would want to go work for you if you want to hire someone, they'd be like, well, I love the, but what do I have to do? I've got to sell newsletter. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to be CRO at lovable. I love Lenny, but is that really going to get me there, right?

Starting point is 00:51:58 Yeah. So we, AI can, AI can beat those. But AI can't beat the enterprise thing. AI, I have no idea how AI is going to do in-person sales. Someone smarter than me is going to have to answer that. But a lot of, you know, you have such a huge audience, Lenny. But I still think most of your folks are in tech and doing tech sales. is the largest segment of our economy and growing, right? So for the most part, these tools will

Starting point is 00:52:24 work for tech sales. Tech sales is over the Zoom, over the phone, over email. We're not, 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. It's just not, but in tech, it's basically as much automation as we can get away with in GTM. 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 STRs, you had outbound SDRs, maybe a support person. And three or four AEs, account executive. Okay, and three or four AEs who kind of take these leads and then close the deal. And so now, just like instead of humans,

Starting point is 00:53:04 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 that has worked? That's what I'm still learning. We have one full-time AE plus 20% of Amelia's time. So it's 1.2 doing what five or six AEs do. I see.

Starting point is 00:53:32 And no SDR, BDRs. Got it. 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. Yeah. Maybe 1.2 just to say it, but yeah, let's call 1.2. Yeah, 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.

Starting point is 00:54:02 It's critical. It's critical. And, you know, people are posting on LinkedIn that they want to hire these GTM engineers or I don't think that role exists today. I worry when I see these roles. I, I think. think today, and listen, if we get together in 18 months, we'll update this because the world's changing so fast, right? I think today, 95% of 100, you've got to promote someone internally. It's got to 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 route data and manage these agents. and they can come out of product, they could come out of marketing, but maybe they can come out of RevOps, but they better be nerdy. Odds they come out of regular sales, approach zero.

Starting point is 00:54:54 So I would find someone on my team that raises their hand and says, I've already done this, okay? I've already written 10 apps in Replit, and I love Versal 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 really is. And ultimately, finding someone that's going to spend

Starting point is 00:55:16 an hour to two a day to manage these agents is the new frontier for us to figure out. They do not, they operate autonomously, but not without constant oversight in iteration.

Starting point is 00:55:28 That's the confusing part. And you just, 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,

Starting point is 00:55:37 unfortunately, you're going to, you have to grow this, resource at home today. You have to. Even with between Versailles that basically grew the resource in home, right? We're not all Versailles, but I just haven't seen it. Everyone's hosting for this job, but we need veterans. We don't have veterans yet, right? And going back early in the conversation, if that is you, you're going to be super employable next year. You're going to have so many job offers. You're not going to know what to, you're going to have to beat them off. And when you think of

Starting point is 00:56:07 is Amelia, would you describe as a go-to-market engineer or do you, is that a different role I would say now, yeah. Yeah. Okay. But she knows the product's Colt. Cold. She knows how all the quirks work, how all the agents work. And here's, this is a complicated issue, but an interesting one.

Starting point is 00:56:25 If you're running multiple agents, okay, someone's got a segment which of the base the agents are working with or they're going to 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.

Starting point is 00:56:58 Like, so that that is complicated. But most badass marketers kind of understand that. They're already doing A-B testing, segmenting their bases. This is not new, is it? No. No. Yeah. But turning it on with zero work is an F.

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Starting point is 00:58:38 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 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 ordinance. For leadership, I advise that. For leaders. I don't know that if your average SDR or junior salesperson is going to 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 grand

Starting point is 00:59:14 and up. 50 grand, 80 grand. I mean, people pay more. Don't get me wrong. But kind of the entry level point for these is sort of like 50 grand plus 25K for the FDE or 75. Like they want even clay, I think, starts at 100k a year. So if you're a bigger organization, that's cheaper than a human, right? It's at all. But there are no $99 a month products, which has a lot of it. They're trying. And I think it's going to come. They don't auto train yet particularly well. And so I don't know that junior folks are going to have access to 100K 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 going to get that role at VERSL or Open AI. So keep, keep going. The advice

Starting point is 01:00:02 for the junior folks is to embrace it. You, if you, whatever tools you're organized, 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. They're crossing 100 million in revenue going really quickly. It's got 100 folks on the sales team. Kyle does. With AI, he's trying, he's targeting three to five million in revenue per rep.

Starting point is 01:00:43 Three to five million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be three to 500k. That's an order of magnitude more efficiency. Still 100 reps, right? 100 reps. He's going to need more to hit the number for next year, but three to five million per rep.

Starting point is 01:00:59 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 want to do that extra meeting, if you fight it, there's there's a tool, another tool we use for RevOps. There's two we use. One's called momentum. One's called attention. They're both great. They're very similar.

Starting point is 01:01:19 And what it does is every single thing a human does is automatically tracked in your CRM instantly, every, real time. There have been tools that have done some of this before, but literally everything. 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 AI RevOps. You know why? Getting done anything 30 days.

Starting point is 01:01:40 the gig was up. Oh, wow. 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 Versel, and nothing would close. And then we said, oh, we're going to quit that day. So my point is he didn't lean into it, right? Lean into it. Now you're going to have total transparency on your day.

Starting point is 01:01:59 You know, granola is, you know, a side example for everything. But, but AIA is going to track everything you do. Like, if you want to fight it, you want to fight the future, good luck to you. But embrace it. And you will, you 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

Starting point is 01:02:14 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. That's with all these agents and all the output they create, and Amelia does a lot of it,

Starting point is 01:02:28 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. So, sorry to interrupt, for the, for the managers, buy an agent, deploy it yourself. Don't have someone else to do it. Do everything from training to ingestion to orchestration.

Starting point is 01:02:45 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. Awesome. Okay. For founders in startups, what I'm hearing is the be that forward deployed engineer, have that person that sales engineer that's sitting there helping companies.

Starting point is 01:03:05 This is basically an opportunity to compete with bigger. players where you actually are 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. 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, 20 years ago, dude.

Starting point is 01:03:26 When I bought Salesforce 20 years ago, I got everything 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've mine two seats. It's like, no, no, no. This is what we do.

Starting point is 01:03:38 I'm here for you. I'm going to help you get your app on the app exchange. You're going to 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.

Starting point is 01:03:50 And maybe in two years, someone like you or I would not get an FDE, but, but the big companies are figuring it out. But yes, pick a vendor that will make you a success with an FDE, 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, right? Which is a big opportunity for startups to actually do this. And this actually resonates very closely to what Jen suggested for startups, which is sell services initially, just like do 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.

Starting point is 01:04:33 You mean land and expand, start with a smaller deal and grow it? Start, no, 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. I think that's always been great advice. And startups have always been great at this.

Starting point is 01:04:59 Like in the early days, the CEO does it. 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 will fail. Like it will never, it will never work. So it becomes an imperative if you want to win. Like you need, I, this term has been banning about too much, but you need a team of humans. We can call them forward deployed engineers that make 100% sure that when the agent is turned on, it's awesome.

Starting point is 01:05:26 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 e-signature services that was so easy to use, we'd have some customers, just take them two years to go live. Big customers. That's just not okay in the age of AI, right? Yeah. And these forward-deploy engineers, is that just another name for sales engineer?

Starting point is 01:05:44 Is that a different sort of background? It can be, and I think all this nomoclature is confusing, man. All this orchestration and ingestion. I think we're confused. Like, Palantir is obviously the single most successful public B2B company at the moment, right? 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 nine-figure deals.

Starting point is 01:06:05 Most of us aren't doing $100 million deals. So the idea that you'll have Gary Tann and an army of folks out in the office for six months, getting the software to work, 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 be a pod and one SE would be responsible. and you'd kind of have to fight to get Jason or Lenny's time to help the eight reps.

Starting point is 01:06:36 This is inverted. The FDA's number one job is to make the customer a success. Okay. I was literally the other day doing a presentation in an AI leader that closed a $3 million deal. The FDA did it all himself. Sales wasn't even involved in the deal. They went on site. They got the deployment going.

Starting point is 01:06:55 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? it is a combination of customer success and S-D or whatever, but it is really, I mean, frankly, it's just being a classic consultant that gets the product done on day one, on day one. That's the difference is that when you go live, it works. When you go live, it works.

Starting point is 01:07:22 And it's a fancy name for a bunch of folks on your team. When it goes live, the AI agent actually works. So you have 100% success rate instead of like the 5% rate of 2024. 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.

Starting point is 01:07:45 Like their own, they don't really want to 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 all different folks can work, but they've got to know the product hold. But yeah, I would start-ups like, I mean, the term is starting.

Starting point is 01:08:02 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. I think it 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 that are changed that are now going to be different in the world of sales, good or market, and what are a few things that are just going to stay the same? Yeah, let's go through it. Obviously, support is the first one to have changed. It's our obviously permanently changed with AI, right? Whatever vendor you look at, 50 to 80 percent of support is done. by AI. And we don't always think about support as GTM, but it is. It's the start of a customer

Starting point is 01:08:37 journey. It's very important to the customer journey. So if you're skeptical, go look at, you know, support has changed permanently. So that trains left the station. Really, as we record this, not much has changed in sales. I mean, I do think the stuff we've talking about is the bleeding edge. I do think the classic cadence-based SDR running campaigns through a tool, him or herself, will be mostly extinct with 12 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,

Starting point is 01:09:12 should be similarly extinct within, mostly extinct in 12 months. The rest, 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 12 months. There's a lot of reasons people want to be. Again, at the bottom end, it's cost, it's profitability pressures. At the high end, it's cultural.

Starting point is 01:09:34 We just don't want 200 reps running around Bursale or REPA that don't know what the product does. Just the company owner, three to five million per rep is a lot different than three to 500,000. So you have to adjust as a rep. You still, there's still, every AI leader can't hire enough reps like we talked about. But you're going to 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 everyone, 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.

Starting point is 01:10:06 The best ones, yes. The mediocre are just going to be like more mediocre. Right. So I think the AE is, we will always have salespeople, but being a people person is not enough anymore. You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson, Lenny? Ask them what they're really good at. I'm a people person, Lenny. You know how you can, you know how you, you know how good I am, Lenny?

Starting point is 01:10:31 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 know, but they're a people person. You know, this is like golf 3.0. It just, it's not enough.

Starting point is 01:10:45 Like it's insufficient. So 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, man. So don't know the answer is there. But the office worker and the work from home worker, AI is going to take as much of your job or make you as much better as it can.

Starting point is 01:11:14 And you've got to embrace it. So that's, I would say, from support to knocking on doors, you know, we're going to go from 80% to 0%. What about phone calls? You know, it's a great question, and we should have hit it. Obviously, 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 are, there's phone calls and there's even SMS. There's limits to how much SMS you can automate, right?

Starting point is 01:11:43 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. Open AI still breaks the rules, right? Now it's licensing Disney content. It used to just borrow Disney content. We will see.

Starting point is 01:12:00 So I don't know the answers to that. I think in Europe it'll certainly be much slower than in the US, but startups are gonna push the limits. They're gonna push the limits on what we can do with AI calls, AI enhanced, whether a human's kind of on the line, but AI's doing all the work, maybe that, maybe that's legal, right?

Starting point is 01:12:17 Getting more consent for SMS than we typically get. So to think that the typical barriers to robocalling and SMS is going to, that startups aren't going to 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,

Starting point is 01:12:33 and it's a good objection to all of this. And I'd love to get Jen's thoughts too. But 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 Saster. the old CRO worked on my team and others.

Starting point is 01:12:54 They were late to develop cold calling because we never did it back in the day. The CRO was on my team. So we had to bring in someone that had worked with San Blonde 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,

Starting point is 01:13:22 Do not close the majority of their revenue with cold, human cold calls. It is a craft that works, but man, you've got to be good at it. You have this line somewhere that if you can close on a text message, AI can close it. 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 A is a struck.

Starting point is 01:13:45 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 folks don't mind if it's an AI if it's a good AI why won't it close it on the text message? Right?

Starting point is 01:13:59 AI can be people, people too. It really can't. If you don't believe me, folks, go to Lennybot. Is that the oral, lennybot.com? Lennybot.com. If you don't think AI can be people, people, people spend hours on Lennybot, don't they?

Starting point is 01:14:12 Yeah, and the best part is you could talk to Lennybot. With voice, there's a voice feature that sounds exactly like me. It's unbelievable. Yeah. So, and one, 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.

Starting point is 01:14:31 Our best, who are our best therapists today as we record this? Chat, GPT is our best therapist on planet Earth. It's a people person. I mean, it sounds silly, but if that is your best defense in sales, that you're a people person, you're, the sands are, the sands are sinking beneath you right now. it's not enough of a skill. It's people person is great when people buy enterprise software that's going to take two years to roll out and they have no idea how it works

Starting point is 01:14:56 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. Tell me the person that's going to launch my agent, train it and get into production for me before I even pay you.

Starting point is 01:15:18 You know, it is, This is the dream, maybe this is one of the biggest changes of all. When I talked with Mark Benioff and Salesforce is the biggest, right? It's 44 billion. 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, he said, I wish I could.

Starting point is 01:15:38 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 up 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 he signed today.

Starting point is 01:16:11 That will, people that haven't fully embraced that are at public companies growing 8%. they're still trying to play games. What are some other things that you think are going to change, that people may not be thinking about that's going to change the way we do sales in the next couple of years? Net, net, we're going to 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. We'd have to put together a spreadsheet to see the crossover point.

Starting point is 01:16:45 Obviously, many folks are shrinking headcount. Microsoft's already said they're past peak employee. never, they'll never going to be bigger. We're seeing this all across the companies who work, but they don't want to be, they want to be as lean as they can. But AI is such a huge part of our economy already, right? And it's such, it's such a force of nature. And everyone is, you know, everyone eventually goes enterprise.

Starting point is 01:17:05 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 Versel just added, Janine, means they're going more enterprise by definition, right? I think Replit just added a sales team a couple months ago for real. And now they've

Starting point is 01:17:24 added another CRO. So they got to 100-something million with no traditional sales team, but at a billion it's going to 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, 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 year SDRs, but they'd be like at Versel, they'd be managing 10 agents, not 10 people. Then they're worth 250 grand instead of 80 grand or 90 grand.

Starting point is 01:18:05 It's not that much, is it? So there is a great world coming. These are the best of times. Aren't they lending for product and business, right? Just it's not evenly distributed. So you want to be, you want to have, if you have those skills, even though we're not going to need these SDRs and even though we're not going to be BDRs, even though we can get rid of half of AEs, there is so, the amount of revenue and growth in AI leaders

Starting point is 01:18:27 is so phenomenal, right? Not just at the startups, at the Google Clouds, at everywhere, the Azure, 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. That is really interesting. 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 years of just, okay, now that AI is doing more and more of this? Or is it just hard to predict? Because who knows

Starting point is 01:18:57 how big AI gets, how big these companies get? I mean, IT's over a trillion dollars. I don't see any reason. And it's accelerating. The amount of AI is is increasing the amount. Gartner says next year will be the fast acceleration of money deployed into IT and software in a decade. It's re-accelerated. Can that last forever? No. Eventually, we, we consume 100% of the global GDP, there's no money left to buy. There are some limits. But I think for, I don't think you and I and anyone, any of the millions of people that follow you, I don't think we got to think too much more than three to 40 years out here. It's too much. There's too much change. If you, if you become a master of the universe in AI, you will be hyper employable the next two to three

Starting point is 01:19:38 years. And if you stay with a learner's mind, that will just compound. And so you will, you will have a job that I think is far more interesting, even if more tiring than, then, then we used to have. But the days of working 20 hours a week and kind of phoning it in and getting a few deals, you know, I think those are forever behind. That was a great time. Even you had a little bit of that. I think you're working harder than you used to, aren't you? I am. I mean, the classic Lenny vibe, but 100,000 subscribers was kind of leave me alone. I take a lot of vacations. I do some good work. I mean, it's still part of your vibe, but I think you're working harder. I'm working incredibly hard. The original idea was create this like, like chill newsletter life. I'm just

Starting point is 01:20:22 going to write a newsletter once a week. Life's going to 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. 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 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.

Starting point is 01:20:56 I'm like, I can't even code letting and I've built 12 apps on Replit in the last 150 days, used by a million, million times. I've been waiting 10 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 chat, CBT, Enterprise. and it works. Like we couldn't,

Starting point is 01:21:19 this wasn't impossible at the start of the year, was it? These are magical times. And we, the fact that we can, we can run an eight figure business with three people and 20 agents. It's like, you know, get excited or like go join one of these really slow growing.

Starting point is 01:21:35 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, there were a thousand unicorns born in 2021, right? 800 of them are growing pretty slowly, will never IPO, may not have an exit,

Starting point is 01:21:54 but they're okay with 8% or 15% growth. If you don't want to 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 something more slow growing. They still need people.

Starting point is 01:22:11 Not as many, they still need people. But 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. I love just how excited you are about this. You could tell on Twitter, just how fun this is for you,

Starting point is 01:22:27 just 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 the share it. I'm in the same way. I'm just like, oh, shit, I just, if I go to this really cool thing,

Starting point is 01:22:39 I got to tweet about it. 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's just, and it's accelerating. It's so, I mean, we could talk about it forever, but even for me, like, I just picked Rep,

Starting point is 01:22:58 I picked Replit because Twitter told me too, 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%. Just to double down as you said, your top 1% user of Replit? Yeah. Wow.

Starting point is 01:23:10 Yeah. So it really didn't work well when I started about 170 days ago. Then a V2 came out and it got better. The hallucinations went away. And then this is just like you got to get excited about. Folks may not know this. And other tools, when V3 came out, I don't know, 45 days ago,

Starting point is 01:23:25 now it has agents talking to agents. So what happens is when you, when you, and again, I can't really code. So when I have an issue and I'm trying to figure out 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, you can do a prompt and build a crappy app that doesn't work. Now, like 150 days later, you have agents debating how to build better code with each other, and you don't even need to know how to code.

Starting point is 01:23:53 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 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's really hard right it's not any easier but man it's just these are these are great and so and maybe maybe and so for gtm for sales it's it's a couple beats behind and and and there's probably a bunch of reasons for for it. Some of it is, I think ironically, is just where founders are interested. So marketing

Starting point is 01:24:46 is behind sales for AI. Like AI SGR has exploded. I don't really know why. I invested in a couple of pre-AI tools. I invested in SalesOft, which was sold for $2.5 billion is like the last deal of the 2020 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 a cursor for marketing. People say they do, but but it's just But it will get there. But the innovation will just accelerate. It's just going to accelerate.

Starting point is 01:25:18 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 mold 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 going to cry about some of the things you've seen.

Starting point is 01:25:56 You're going to cry how bad you're supported. You're going to cry how long it takes sales to get back to you. You're going to cry about a couple things. Pick the thing that makes you cry the most over a mold wine and go buy that agent and fix it. And then you will have the passion that we have. I always counsel people to do this. It just wasn't as actionable before AI. But so many, you just get lost. You forget about what these things, you forget about the onboarding workflow, and you forget about support, and you forget how bad contact me. And you're so lost in this trajectory. So you got it once a year, ideally once a quarter, just do this incognito mode test.

Starting point is 01:26:29 And even for Lenny's newsletter, I bet we can find some part you forgot to touch. Nope. No, you disagree? Not going to happen. I'm just, I'm just joking. You're like, oh, my God. I can't believe I didn't touch that since I launched the substack. It doesn't even go to the right.

Starting point is 01:26:42 That place gets a 404. I'm going to 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. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:01 And if it's the one that makes you cry, it may motivate you to do it. Yeah. And 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, whether I say. Yeah, the job is just my job.

Starting point is 01:27:18 Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Jason, I feel like I could chat with you for hours, but I think this is a good point to wrap things up. Is there anything that you wanted to share, or is there anything you want to leave listeners with? One last thing maybe that comes up,

Starting point is 01:27:33 what I've learned that are on people's minds and 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 to, I did what you said. I did the incognito mode. I'm going to bring in this, this agent, this sales agent or this support agent. I've tried.

Starting point is 01:27:49 I've even did it. But I'm worried I'm going to get pushback and people are going to 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 will be even fun. For the best people, they will be better at their job. And if it is a three.

Starting point is 01:28:11 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 wouldn't, I would be positive about it. I would explain it helps the best people. But I don't think dancing around it is the right dancing organization. It will result in change. And if some jobs change from one world or another, that's life in the age of AI. Don't hide it.

Starting point is 01:28:32 I don't think it helps. I love that in your case and in Jean's case at Versel, 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:29:00 But even though most of the ones we read, it's just a justification to do layoffs. It's just a reason 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:29:20 But pretty much I've never fired anyone that didn't do something inappropriate. They 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, right? 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 not, it's probably less 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. Yeah, I was just going to say, maybe don't leave your current job.

Starting point is 01:29:52 Because the new place might not be hiring for this role. Yeah, I have a, God, I have, I have a sales exec who I love. I work, I've known for many years. And he went from a hundred K job, then almost an 800K job, then down. down to a 200k 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.

Starting point is 01:30:13 We all, maybe stay. No shame and staying, is there? Yeah, I like that. Well, with that, Jason, we have reached our very exciting lighting around. This is your second time going through a lightning round. So I'll make it quick. First question, what are a couple books you often find yourself recommending to other people? I was recently asked to write a forward for a book from one of the revenue leaders I

Starting point is 01:30:34 have the most respect for in the world. I 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 many of these GTM books are playbooks, especially folks selling courses and stuff, but their playbooks run from the playbooks, embrace the plays. And so read all these go-to-market and sales books and 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 think I'm waiting for the next level of books and GCHM and 20206,

Starting point is 01:31:15 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. I just had the, had a growth from Lovable Elena Verdon on the podcast. She had the same advice that all these playbooks that she's used over the last 20 years in growth just don't work anymore in any of the companies. Next question.

Starting point is 01:31:33 You have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed? What's this one called? What's it called? Pluribus, is that what it's called? Pluribus, yeah. Okay. I'm watching that. It's, and this is, so it's a good show.

Starting point is 01:31:46 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? We're all connect. All the people except 11 people are 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.

Starting point is 01:32:05 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 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,

Starting point is 01:32:26 then humans are at risk in GTM. They're going to be so much better when they're the hive mind. Right now our hive, 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 90s. It has become the hub for these AI GTM agents. They all plug in. So sales force has become the database for all these.

Starting point is 01:32:46 So that's a little hint of the pluribus hive mine. 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 3.8 million people that read Lenny's and all the agents can share data together. No human. That's, I don't mean to turn Pluribus into an AIGTM show, but there's my connection, but it's pretty good, right? I get it.

Starting point is 01:33:09 I get it. Oh, man, that shows so good. I feel like every episode, I get these pushes from Apple TV. Like, there's new episode of Pluribus. I'm like, I can't wait to go watch that. They just leave the, each episode ends and like, oh, I can't wait to see what happened the next. Okay.

Starting point is 01:33:21 Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love, like an app or gadget or clothing? Maybe not in the last two weeks. I'll just give a small one just for, GtM one. There is, because everyone's about SORA 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 Reeve 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?

Starting point is 01:33:54 But if you want to do cool stuff for marketing, if you want to 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. 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. com. It changed its name.

Starting point is 01:34:22 But it's just a simple prompt, go to it, type in whatever image you want to make. And for a lot of the boring B2B stuff we like to do, I find it's the best. And it's R-E-V-E-E-E-D-C-com. Yeah, R-E-V-E-E-E-D-C-Card. Copy bar delivering matcha through a quite mask garden. App. org. Yeah, sweet.

Starting point is 01:34:41 Oh, you're making the image, you said. I'm just like, they're giving me examples here. I'm on the website here, yeah, this is great. And you're saying this is better than, like, nanobanana and all these other. For this use case. And you and I, we just want to do it. I want to do a thumb. I want an image for my article.

Starting point is 01:34:55 I want it. I just did, I just, my niche content I just want to do. I've got to do it. I just don't think there's anything. better for this use case. So I use it two or three times a day and I use all this stuff. Okay, the alpha. More alpha to share with the audience.

Starting point is 01:35:09 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? I'll just tell you one in the weird time we're at. This is probably your best startup. Just talking yesterday with a friend of mine, a startup just raised 20 million 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 at $250 million, just quit.

Starting point is 01:35:41 No success or no anyone to join a hot AIS startup. Maybe, 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 million or $5 or $10 million in revenue. But we often think it's easier to get back, to get back to that $10 million of revenue, to get back to 100 happy customers or $200. 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 have to find them from

Starting point is 01:36:12 scratch. Go off to find that 10 or 20 million. So that's, I literally had a third conversation with the founder, just crossing 100 million that wanted to leave and do a robotic startup after 10 years. I'm like, I get it, man, but like this is, you know, you have nine 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,

Starting point is 01:36:42 turn that into your 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 not too late. It's still so early. We don't even have great AI marketing tools. We're really early on these AISDRs. The markets have not hardened. The LLMs are getting so much better. It is, dude, if you want it,

Starting point is 01:37:09 it's not too late. So the best startup you're ever going to 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 they don't quit if you have happy customers. They'll buy more from you. I love advice like that.

Starting point is 01:37:23 That's empowering and optimistic and these stresses people, I think, in a lot of ways. So that is great. Final question. How many Sasters have you done at this point? Like how many years of Saster have there been? Good God. We've done the first big of, we did some meetups.

Starting point is 01:37:40 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? 12 years? It's a long time, man. And then how many talks have there been across those?

Starting point is 01:37:58 would you say total. And then we've done seven in Europe, so 12 in the U.S. and seven in Europe. So about 20, okay, 20 events. 20 bigger events, yeah. I don't know. Like the annual one, probably if you count the smaller ones, 300. So that 3,000, 4,000 over the years.

Starting point is 01:38:17 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 the one you're like, oh, this one 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 Saster. It's interesting. It's like a lot of things to B2B.

Starting point is 01:38:34 Everything was pretty much the same for 10 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 one billion. It's only got 23,000 views.

Starting point is 01:38:57 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 B2B metric we know, how, 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?

Starting point is 01:39:20 Maybe not. But that's one when I look at it because everything, everything's kind of the same. 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 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.

Starting point is 01:39:43 Because these guys were on my team, Matt Plank, who's Sierra of Ripling, did one with Sam Blonde, who was NCR of Brex. It's called Rippling Secrets to HyperRoth. It sounds like a commercial for Rippling, which is okay, right? But because Sam was, they worked together. and now Sam's on the board. They have a fluency of two CROs who are honest and have a Lenny style learner's mindset.

Starting point is 01:40:02 This one on the revenue playbook from Rippling, it's a 14 for Gtm. I just had Van McGuinness on the podcast. Former C.O. Now CPO at Rippling. So that would be a good combo. Those two. Jason, I don't know if you know this,

Starting point is 01:40:18 but 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.

Starting point is 01:40:40 And here's what we'll break. 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 thanks for doing this. All right, Lennie. You're the best. I'm just a super fan. I'm lucky to be here.

Starting point is 01:40:52 So thank you. Let me just ask you, how can listeners be useful to you as a closing question? The fun thing for me, we have two websites, sastro.com and Sastry. I just go to saster.com and just go to saster.com 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 10 years to build tools for the Sastra community.

Starting point is 01:41:15 Now I want to build like 20. So on the side, we've talked about tools you should go by, but building your own stuff is pretty fun too. So try our tools and give me kind but critical feedback. But with some kindness. Okay. And that's S-A-S-T-R-A-I-S-T-R-A-I. Yeah, we're still trying to figure out the AI versus the com. We got an SEO issue, so I can't really move it over.

Starting point is 01:41:37 It looks great. It works. It works. It's shorter, too. It is shorter. Jason, thank you so much for being here. All right, Lenny. You are the best. Bye, everyone.

Starting point is 01:41:46 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 lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

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