SaaStr 873: Agents Are Your New Power Users: How Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki Is Remaking a $1.4B Business for the Agent Era

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
How many employees do you have, Andrew?

**Andrew Bialecki** (0:01)
We're about 2,300 Klaviyos.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:04)
I know they're all great, all the Klaviyons, but all the product folks and the designers, whether it's through Dark Factory or others, truly can commit code. They've all stepped up to the challenge.

**Andrew Bialecki** (0:17)
Yeah, so look, so we've, you know how there's these different levels of autonomy of driving, right? So we define, say like, okay, an L1, you know, it is not unique to an engineer or a product person. Like you say, same thing for sales and marketing. Hey, they might be like, I'll use it to search or whatever, right?

**Jason Lemkin** (0:32)
Yeah.

**Andrew Bialecki** (0:33)
Level 2 might be like, okay, I spin up a little cloud session or whatever, and I kind of run an agent.
We saw it right, it's like, look, by the end of June, you need to be an L3, which is if you're not constantly running either end sessions or a team of agents, right? You're just not, you're not going to be skilled to survive in this next era.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:50)
If you guys don't know Andrew Bialecki, Andrew will describe it, but far and away, one of the most successful players in B2B for e-commerce, number one in the Shopify ecosystem, IPO'd. Well, you were like the first IPO after the death of the 2021 era, right? Something like that. Were you the first one to go public?

**Andrew Bialecki** (1:10)
Yeah, maybe like two or three of us in that like 2023 cohort.

**Jason Lemkin** (1:13)
Almost nobody, right? Incredible rocket ship. I should know the metrics cold today, 1.4 billion in revenue or something like that. And for those of you that don't know, Klaviyo really dominated marketing for e-commerce. And this is probably, if you don't know Klaviyo, I'm going to be overly simplistic, but it is HubSpot and more for e-commerce. It's a brutal oversimplification, but if HubSpot, there's a parallel universe for you to be in e-commerce. And Klaviyo had 80 percent market share. And it was when I started to learn about the ecosystem through some investments, and I said this when Andrew was here a couple years ago, it was the single most beloved app I'd ever heard to. I would talk to e-commerce merchants. They would like folks in the ecosystem. They would like Gorgias and these other apps. And then they'd be like, Klaviyo.
I f-ing love Klaviyo. And I want to tell you why that's important. That was interesting pre-AI, and Andrew did a podcast and came here a couple of years ago.
And the pre-AI aha moment was, and I didn't learn this till Andrew was here before, is one of the reasons, one reason I loved it is it worked for marketing, but Andrew and his team had what now is maybe a cap and obvious insight. Instead of logging in to Klaviyo and seeing how many marketing opens you had and how many sends, it was able to connect with your cart and Shopify the other day and say, not only did you send 11,000 emails, this campaign made you $18,372. And if you look on social media or LinkedIn, you'll still people showing screenshots of Klaviyo, not showing email sends, but how much money that made. So that changed the industry. They destroyed the competition, everyone loved it. It wasn't that expensive, so everyone used it. Couldn't do much better. Now we're in an AI world.
So now Andrew's got to rethink owning this pre-AI, the magic of email being dollars. And I want to learn what he's doing because in some ways, you probably have to remake the whole company, right?

**Andrew Bialecki** (3:08)
Totally.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:08)
Yeah.

**Andrew Bialecki** (3:08)
All right. So if you don't know Klaviyo, the best way I think about it is like traditional CRM. When I was growing up, around 2010, 2012, we started Klaviyo. CRM meant like you were really like for sales teams.
But we wanted to build the CRM for consumer businesses. So obviously retail, e-commerce, big chunk of that. And but consumer teams don't have salespeople.
They just, they have to deliver every experience automatically. It has to be done through software, not through people. They have way too many customers. So we started Klaviyo because we wanted to build software that could access digital brain and then the actual actions. It's funny to think about now because everybody's like, okay, well, agents, of course, I'm going to use an agent to be my like surrogate. But that was been our thesis all along. How do you build the infrastructure and then the automation to make all that possible?