SaaStr 860: Tired vs. Wired: $4 Trillion in IPOs Coming, $100B in M&A, and Why the SaaSpocalypse is Over

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
The recovery is not coming if you're not getting the AI budget. It ain't coming. It ain't coming. There is no additional budget for pre-AI workflow tools, pre-AI Kanban tools. It's just not coming. So stop pretending. Stop pretending it's just been a rough year. Stop pretending we're going back to 2024 I know nobody in this room is literally thinking we're going back in time.
But I got to tell you, at a lot of companies that we're growing 50% or 100% that are growing 10% or 15% or 20%. There's a lot of performative work being done. There's a lot of folks running the same playbooks as a year and a half ago. There's a lot of folks talking about AI and board meetings with slides. But I don't see the products coming to market that people want to buy. There's a lot of folks running not just the same playbooks, but acting as if something's going to happen and growth is going to reaccelerate. If it hasn't reaccelerated by now, you have to make it reaccelerate. The markets are not magically coming back to you.
All right, everybody. Again, thanks for being here.
I always do a late intro or summary. I know most of you were here yesterday and we're pretty deep into it this year. I think if I had to summarize everything, I'll give you the next slide. If you were here last year, it's nothing like last year. I mean, the rate of change is so high and I wanted to summarize if it's helpful.
There's so much on social media.
Anthropic just is projecting, I think that they're going to be at 50 billion in revenue by the end of June. That was out today. But we have a SaaS apocalypse with many leaders down 70 percent in the stock market. This year, what's going on? I thought I would try to summarize at least what I see, what we see, tired versus wired, having a little fun with an old trope, but tired versus wired. I think if you were here yesterday when I was with Amjad, the CEO and founder of Replit, the idea that we're going to vibe code our CRM, it's just dead, guys. It's just dead. Let's not talk about it anymore. If you think it's possible, use your Replit or Versailles credits from here, try it. Go to one of these apps which have gotten so good today, these are on Replit and say, build me my own sales source, see what you get. You're not going to get it. It don't work. Even if it did work, you could build your own lightweight CRM. It wouldn't be collateral, it wouldn't work with the team, it wouldn't have the security, it wouldn't integrate with the 100 apps that are here.
You're going to vibe code a lot. We've coded almost every single application running this event, but you're not going to vibe code anything you can build that's good, that's actually good, that's agentic. The opposite, it's quite the opposite. That was what people were saying last year, the world's going to end, you're going to vibe code everything, all our apps are dead. Now if you talk to the folks here, if you talk to Monaco or Artisan or Lightfield or Oracel or others, the goal is that the CRM brings in deals itself.
Who cares if you can vibe code a crummy clone of Salesforce from 2006? What if the CRM puts deals on your calendar? That's what we're building today. This is what you should be building a version of if you're not yet for your own companies. Not tracking deals for humans, putting deals on the calendar. If you, some of these vendors here, guys are doing millions per week and didn't even exist last year or barely existed last year. Okay. They're doing millions per week in new revenue. Not because the leads, contacts, and opportunity tabs are prettier or have purple gradients, but because they're putting frigging deals on your calendar. That's worth $50,000, $100,000 even to the smallest company. Whereas paying $200 a month feels like a lot of money for software. Okay. So that's your goal. Who cares if you can build your own CRM? I want deals on my calendar. The other thing, and hopefully most folks in this room are well past it, but the world still isn't.
I don't trust AI last year. It hallucinates too much. Everything's wrong. Guys, look at the apps that we've talked about. Look at the CPL panel we just have. The biggest issue we're going to have going forward is our agents are going to get so good, they sit idle all day long. They don't have enough work. 10K, we're going to talk all through event about our own agents. 10K that we built, our VP of Arc, AI VP of Arc and VP of Arc. 10K is just sitting here all day waiting for something to do. He's already done all the marketing for this event. 10K is already, I didn't get to the slide before, 10K is already nudging us and annoying us to get going on SaaStr 2027 I'm not kidding. It sends us three things we should be doing this morning for SaaStr 2027 I'm like, 10K, we got to get through this event, leave us alone and we got to take a break. Our agents sit idle. Some of the vendors here that we've used for our AISDRs that we've talked about a lot, they sit idle all day because they're so good, they've already hit our entire base of 450,000 people. So once you actually get an agent in production and it's valuable for your customers for real and they'll pay a lot of money for it, we're going to have to start thinking, what do we do the 23 hours when they just sit there waiting for something else to do? This is something we should be thinking about, not hallucinations.