SaaStr AI London is Dec 1-2!! See You There!!

Helping, founding, funding, and growing B2B start-ups.  Making it a positive-sum game for everyone involved.  VC checks $500k-$4m @ SaaStrFund.com.  2x founder with nine figures of founder exits.

"Do or do not. There is no try."

Specialties: helping people grow and become their best.  Doing not the impossible, but the unlikely.  Never giving up.

Join 10,000 of us IRL at SaastrAnnual.com May 12-14 in SF Bay!!

FREE Weekly Workshops and Live AMAs, Sign up here -> https://www.saastr.com/workshop-wednesday/

SaaStrFund.com investments include:

- Co-led Series A in Salesloft ($2.3B exit)
- Co-led Seed in Pipedrive ($1.5B exit)
- Led Seed in Algolia ($2.3B)
- First VC in Talkdesk ($10B)
- Led Seed in Gorgias ($800m)
- Led Seed in Owner.com ($1B)
- First Investor in RevenueCat ($500m)
- First VC in Logikcull ($280m exit)
- Proud smaller investor in Greenhouse ($800m exit), Sqreen ($400m exit), Automile ($1B SEK exit), Opus Pro, Higgsfield.ai, and many others!
- and much more

Jason M. Lemkin

So far I've watched 3 VC seed deals this year where the founders just decided to keep the money for themselves and not build the product.

All were on SAFEs, and they took the position they owed investors nothing and that in fact they were not even investors. Just SAFE holders.

One eventually returned cash after keeping a large chunk for themselves.

Another hired an attorney who said plainly nothing was owed to the investors and the founders could pay themselves whatever they wanted.

I did not personally invest in these deals but I might have, they had a lot going for them (or so it seemed).

This is going to happen in the Age of AI. It's the flip side of so many things also exploding so quickly and growing at insane rates.

It's just a risk to be more aware of perhaps than in the past.

SaaStr AI Annual ’26 is May 12-14 in SF Bay!! See You There!!

Engineering: sell what we have

Sales: build what I can sell

This, is The Enterprise

You can't scale if you can't recruit 

First, learn to love it

Then, learn to staff it

So I’ve been vibe coding for about 4 months and shipped 10 apps and now I’m doing something I didn’t want to do.  I’m starting to build our own vibe’d marketing automations (on top of Resend).

If there’s one thing I don’t think you should do yourself, it’s marketing automation.  Building lists, segmenting lists, sending millions of emails … this is something you don’t want to get wrong.  Or wing it.  Buy a tool that does this all day long.  

But … but … we’ve reached the limits from our existing vendors, too.

I want to use AI to hyper personalize emails in many of the same ways we do for our AI SDRs.  Not exactly the same (that would be time and cost prohibitive), but to some extent.

And our existing horizontal tools just can’t do this.

So I vibe’d a series of new campaigns to SaaStr AI this week.  We’re sending 5 different campaigns ourselves now, outside our marketing automation tools.  Soon it will be more. 

I didn’t want to.  But we needed to.

taplio