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0:02 used to have about 10 people full-time. Now you have 1.2 humans, 20 agents.
0:06 >> We have 10 desks that used to be go to market people. They're all just labeled
0:10 with our agents. Reply for replet, quali for qualified, arty for artisan, agent
0:14 force needs a nickname. Agents work all night and they work weekends and they
0:16 work on Christmas. We're done with hiring humans in sales. We're done.
0:20 >> The business is doing very similarly to what it was when you had 10 humans. If I
0:24 had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't get me wrong, I would hire
0:27 them tomorrow. But I'm not going to hire someone that after their third month in
0:30 the job doesn't know what Saster does, I just can't do that. AI is replacing the
0:34 jobs people don't want to do today, and it is displacing the midpack and the
0:37 mediocre. >> How do you see the future of the sales profession?
0:41 >> We should have $250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Versel, they'd be
0:45 managing 10 agents, not 10 people. The classic SDR junior kid that is hired out
0:50 of college to send emails, we don't need them. folks that qualify leads coming
0:54 in, the contact me that we see, we have no need for them today. They should be
0:56 extinct next year. >> Someone's listening to this like, "Oh
0:59 man, my job is in trouble." >> If you can go do this, you're hyper
1:03 employable. Today, my guest is Jason Lmin, founder and CEO of Saster, the world's largest
1:09 community for B2B founders and one of my absolute favorite sales and go to market
1:14 minds on the planet. Jason is not only deeply knowledgeable about everything
1:18 sales, he's also extremely articulate and direct and is also now personally
1:24 going super deep on what AI can do for a sales or he's transformed his own saster
1:30 sales team from around 10 SDRs and AEES to one full-time AE, a part-time chief
1:37 of AI named Amelia, and 20 AI agents. He is seeing the same performance from his
1:41 AI team as he saw with his former human team and he's just getting started.
1:45 These are my favorite kinds of conversations because the guest is
1:49 living in the future and comes here to show us what the future is like, where
1:52 we're headed and how we can get there ourselves and also just how to avoid all
1:55 the pitfalls that he had to deal with along the way. We cover all of the
1:59 things that he has learned about where sales and go to market is going in the
2:04 AI age. He gives a bunch of advice for salespeople and the future of their
2:08 careers. the future of the goto market org, how to win as an AI startup right
2:13 now, what tools he's finding most useful, what it took to shift a sales
2:17 team, and so much more. This episode is going to get your mind spinning in the
2:21 best way possible. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and
2:23 follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously.
2:27 And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 19 premium
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2:38 replet, bolt, naden, gamma, linear, devon, post talk, superhuman, dcript,
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2:45 mobin, and stripe atlas. Head on over to lenny'snewsletter.com and click product
2:49 pass. With that, I bring you Jason Lenin after a short word from our sponsors.
2:54 Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform
2:58 designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need
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3:29 more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vzero
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4:26 V0 for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can
4:31 dream it, you can ship it. Visit verscell.com/lenny Jason, thank you so much for being here
4:44 and welcome back to the podcast. >> Lucky to be a super fan and then to get
4:48 to join, right? It's it's it's terrific to to to be on the other side.
4:52 >> So, this is our second conversation. Uh we did our last conversation a year and
4:55 a half ago. I don't know if you know this, but it became a pretty legendary
4:59 episode. It's something people continue to share. And uh that conversation is
5:04 around basically a deep dive into building your sales or >> and a lot has changed
5:08 >> yes >> for you and the world since then uh cough AI
5:15 >> and what uh what's happened is you've gone extremely deep on what AI enables
5:21 for sales for startups for go to market and what I love about conversations like
5:24 this is you're basically living in the future and you're here to give us a
5:29 glimpse of where things are heading and tell us how avoid the wrong turns and
5:34 just help us get there ourselves. >> That I think I can do
5:39 >> to start. Yes. Help us understand just the business you run this uh SAS.
5:43 >> Uh what is it you sell? What is the business? What is it? What is it you do?
5:45 Jason, >> you know, I'm still trying to figure it out, Lenny. Maybe you are too in some
5:49 ways. Um >> yeah, that's true. So, you know, I I I am a two-time founder who started
5:57 writing a blog, my god, in 2012 about all the mistakes I made after I sold my
6:01 startup to Adobe. We started doing a couple meetups. You've done meetups. Um, before anyone
6:07 did this stuff, we did a big meetup in 2015. Thousands of people came. Then we
6:12 do 10,000 people a year at Saster Annual. I've actually also invested
6:18 almost $200 million almost 10x lifetime um only into founders from the
6:22 community. Um but the reason I don't know is what I folks that do are
6:28 connected to our content. I'm just passionate about helping other founders
6:31 see mistakes and make less of them. So anyhow, we're we're a large community. I
6:35 do invest but but it turned into a business. There was no revenue in the
6:38 beginning. I'm sure there was no revenue for for Lenny in the beginning and ours
6:41 was less intentional, but we do do eight figures of revenue a year and it's work.
6:46 It's it's that sounds great, okay, to do eight figures, but there's a lot of
6:50 costs, especially on the event side. The media side has almost no costs and it's
6:54 work. We have a hundred sponsors and as you know, like you have sponsors, but
6:58 there's a certain level where it becomes a lot of work. Like getting two folks to
7:01 sponsor your podcast with a couple emails, no work, right? Uh if you wanted
7:05 to have like four Lenny podcast, like it just it just scales. So we have built
7:09 our own go to market team over time and I've lived the frustrations folks have
7:13 followed it and then maybe I'm rambling a little bit the interesting thing the
7:18 aha moment that happened to us is going into May of this year we had one AI
7:21 agent in production called Deli that we both use for digital lending and digital
7:26 Jason really interesting learnings and we went into our 10,000 person event
7:29 this year with with an eight you know a seven figure budget and eight figure
7:34 topline and two folks on the sales team who are were paid high end of market I
7:38 have many flaws, but paying well and being loyal are not one of them. And two
7:41 of them just quit at the event. They just quit on site. Okay. And I this is
7:46 like the third time I've done this, like the eighth team I've built. And and I
7:49 turned to Amelia, our chief a officer, and I said, "We're done with hiring
7:53 humans in sales. We're done. We are going to push the limits with agents.
7:57 We're going to p even if it doesn't quite work." Okay? And I knew from this
8:02 deli, this general agent, that it would sort of work because going into annual,
8:06 this general agent, this digital Jason closed a 70k sponsorship on its own. So
8:12 when I saw that a horizontal agent, not trained for sales, not trained for GTM,
8:16 could close one deal, like let's deploy a couple of these apps. We have time and
8:23 I just can't pay a junior SDR $150,000 a year to quit. I just can't like
8:27 criticize me, but I just couldn't do it one more time. I just couldn't do it one
8:30 more. And I actually think this is an when I talk to CEOs at leading AI
8:34 companies, they kind of don't want to do it either. They want to have the
8:38 smallest sales teams they can as much for cultural reasons, right? Even if
8:43 even if Replet only goes from zero to 200, it could have been 220 with a
8:46 smaller sales team. I think John's okay with it, right? So, it's an enduring
8:50 thing. But anyhow, so we push the limits and now if you walk into SAS's office,
8:55 it's kind of funny. We have 10 desks that used to be go to market people.
8:58 They're all just labeled with our agents. Reply for replet, quali for
9:03 qualified, arty for artisan. Agent Force needs a nickname. Maybe we can make one
9:06 up with Salesforce. There's Amelia's corner office at one end. I'm in the I'm
9:09 in the back of the office and it's just agents. It's the quietest office. And
9:14 netnet Lenny, it's about here's the metalarning for when we when we're
9:17 recording this. The pro the net productivity is about the same. It's not
9:25 better. It's not worse. Um, but it's so much more efficient and it scales
9:30 because software scales. So, and uh we can talk about what we've
9:35 learned. I think it's important that it takes time to train these agents. They
9:39 don't work out of the box. Um, but when you dial them in, when you take your
9:44 best person or your best script and you train an agent with your best person and
9:48 best script, that agent can start to become a version of your best
9:52 salesperson, your best person. And that's what we've learned and how to
9:56 perfect it. And I just think because and criticize me, anybody, you or anyone
10:00 watching or listening, maybe it's not cool. I didn't want to hire my 28th rep
10:04 that was going to quit that. But I just couldn't do it one more time in the age
10:07 of AI. I'm like, it's time to go to the bleeding edge and just see what we can push the limits
10:12 here. >> Okay. I I I love all the directions we're already heading. Okay. So just to
10:18 help people totally understand what your business is. Basically these people are
10:23 selling sponsors for your conference is >> they're selling two things to because
10:26 it's just relevant to the deep dive. They're selling sponsorships which
10:29 average about 70 to 80k >> and then they're also selling tickets
10:32 which is the high volume for this is like the the self-s serve version.
10:35 They're selling tickets that are anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to
10:38 if you're a VC that comes the night before could be two grand. Okay. No no
10:42 no gifts for VCs that decide the night before. founders that decide early get
10:46 get it at about 10 20% of cost and and and it's work to sell these tickets,
10:51 right? And so you can just post an email like you do and you probably fill up
10:55 Lenny Summit, but if you want to max it out, you got to do work. You got to do
10:58 drip campaigns. You got to reach out to people. You have to reactivate folks
11:02 that came to Lenny Summit, you know, three years ago, but you want them back
11:05 because they're good people. And that just requires work. And as your base
11:09 scales, you know, you have how many people subscribe to Lenny's newsletter
11:12 now? 1.2 two million or something. >> 1.2 million roughly.
11:15 >> Okay. How many as how many of those is a human willing to reach out to
11:19 >> approaching nuns? >> 2,000. Yeah. >> Imagine you hired a 21-year-old SDR
11:24 fresh out of junior college and said, "Here's my list, 1.2 million people.
11:29 Start calling them. >> I want him to come to Lenny Summit." But
11:33 anyhow, so we have this low-end version, which is tickets, right? Which is four
11:36 or five million a year. And then we have this higherend sales cycle. And they're
11:40 very different. And actually, they have different agents. And then we have a
11:43 different agent to get people to come back. Laps people. So we have lapsed
11:47 high-end and low-end agents. And they have different workflows and we actually
11:51 use different vendors for now. For now we use different vendors.
11:55 >> Okay. And so uh previously before this future world, how many SDRs did you
11:59 have? How many salespeople in the >> We would have two to three SDRs and up
12:03 to five AES. >> Okay. So like eight, nine people full-time working on Saster. Yes. to
12:10 bring in sponsors and to bring in tickets. >> Yes. Although yes, a lot of it is
12:16 inbound and renewals but not but yes to manage that business to manage the sales
12:20 management and go to market. Let's call it 8 to9 and go to market. Now we have
12:24 1.2 >> uh 1.2 >> humans >> human 1.2 humans
12:30 >> 20 agents AI agents >> 1 point what is a 0.2 human?
12:34 >> Amelia who's our chief a officer who who runs everything. She spends 20% of her
12:39 time managing the agents, orchestrating the agents. >> Okay.
12:41 >> Which is something I think people don't Let's get into that. They talk about,
12:44 but they don't actually understand what that means. >> Yeah. Okay. I definitely want to spend
12:48 time there. Uh Okay. So, you used to have about 10 people full-time. Now you
12:53 have 1.2 humans and you said 20 agents. >> 20 agents. Yeah.
12:55 >> Okay. And what you're describing is the business is doing very similarly to what
13:00 it was when you had 10 humans. Now you have 20 agents. The business doing the
13:02 same. >> Yeah. Now listen, if I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't
13:07 get me wrong, and this is true of every fast, I would hire them tomorrow, okay?
13:12 And and if you go if you go to Verscell, if you go to Replet, if you go to
13:14 they're all going to tell you the same. I was literally in London when we were
13:18 just at our abundant event. We with with Maggie who's in the leadership of
13:21 OpenAI. She said they just can't hire enough enterprise reps now. Okay. And
13:24 but what what it is replacing are the midpack and below. The ones that don't
13:30 really understand what linear does. The ones that don't really know what a pull
13:35 request is or exactly how replet works. The AI can do better. Not than the best,
13:39 right? So I would love to have more humans, but I'm not going to hire
13:43 someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what Saster does. I
13:47 just can't do that one more time. And you don't need to. I don't think you
13:50 need to. So we're not doing This is the thing. AI is replacing the jobs people
13:55 don't want to do today and it is displacing the media the midpack and the
13:59 mediocre. They are their jobs are at risk. They are at risk. The best humans
14:04 it is true that they will get superpowers from AI but I'm not sure the
14:08 rest will. It's a it's a cautionary but I would love to have more than one but
14:12 at the end of the day and 1.2 humans is plus 20 AI agents is doing about what 10
14:17 human GTMs is. >> Wow. Okay. I want to spend time on the
14:20 different agents you've built, but first of all, just kind of zooming out, having
14:25 gone through this experience. How do you see the world of go to market changing
14:31 next year in the coming years? All the plays work. It's the playbooks that are
14:35 kind of broken in the age of AI. All the plays work. Outbound still works.
14:39 Webinar still works. Podcasts still work. Okay. Events still work. All this
14:44 stuff works. All this stuff works. Why is 11 Labs out doing a road show, right?
14:49 It works. Why? Why do they go on Lenny's podcast? It works. So, the plays all
14:54 work. It's just the playbooks are broken because at at for folks that aren't in
14:59 the age of AI, growth has decelerated so much that nothing seems to work. Okay,
15:03 it's working. It just works so much worse than 2021, but the plays still
15:07 work. They just they don't have enough ROI. There's not enough budget for old
15:12 school SAS from 2021. the ones that are blowing up, right? The Verscels, the
15:17 Replets, the 11 Labs, they have so much demand, so much demand that, you know, that
15:24 they're still running the plays, but they're they're doing them differently.
15:26 They're doing them from a hyper PLG focus because there's so much demand and
15:30 they're often picking and choosing which prospects to talk to to to contact. So,
15:35 like, for example, Bolt is probably a distant number three behind Rep and
15:37 Lovable, right? But one of my old sales guys runs sales there. And I talked to
15:41 him when they went from 0 to 50 million in like six months. He's like, "We
15:45 honestly just have so many leads. We just are half our job is picking which
15:49 ones to respond to, right?" And he's like, and he also is like, "We closed a seven figure deal we
15:54 stole from Lovable because no one called them back at lovable." So your
15:57 traditional B2B SAS company, even ones at billions of revenue, even the
16:02 HubSpots and the and and and uh all of them, they don't have so many great
16:06 leads, they don't call them back. So that is a different world um not easy
16:09 different world and then this this world where nothing seems to be working is
16:14 just because the demand has evaporated right so both ends have an incentive in 2026 to
16:22 push the limits for AI for go to market the ones that are hyperrowing can't
16:26 touch everybody they can't do everything not everyone like Versell will build
16:30 their own internally we can talk about why most folks should not build they
16:34 should buy for the same reasons it's always been true in software or we can
16:37 talk about it. At the low end, you still need humans, but ruthless efficiency is
16:41 going to be the name of the game for 2026. So, anything where AI works, the
16:45 demand is inexhaustible. So, everyone's either looking for more efficiency or
16:49 they just can't service the massive amount of inbound they have. Um, and so
16:53 maybe that doesn't totally answer your question or I got a little bit off
16:56 track, but that's how the world's changing. Like, when we first did this,
17:00 which wasn't that long ago, in a way, pre the AI explosion, all B2B companies
17:04 were kind of the same. like they grew at somewhat different rates. Some blew up
17:08 faster like a Samsara. Some took longer like a UiPath, but come on. They were
17:12 all they all kind of grew the same way for the same ACV for the same deal size.
17:16 Now, just like in venture and everything else, it's wildly bifurcated, right?
17:19 You've got the low end, which is all about price increases and forcing things
17:24 onto the base. And at the high end, we have something we've never seen since
17:28 2020, which is everyone in the market at once. Everyone in the market at once. This is
17:33 something that people don't understand. Why why are why are these companies
17:36 doing so well? Why are they blowing up? Because they're it's not just at the
17:39 software. We we love this stuff, Lenny, right? All these new tools. We love
17:43 them. But it's not one law firm looking at Harvey. It's everyone. It's everyone,
17:48 right? It's not a few folks looking at video on the internet. It's everyone
17:51 trying to make video on the internet >> because there's a lot of push from the
17:54 top of like we need to adopt AI. We need to be more productive. Now, everyone,
17:58 not the traditional, like the traditional metric was in most
18:02 categories, 3 to 5% of prospects would be in market a year. >> So, you'd send a trillion emails and you
18:08 do cold calls and you'd hope maybe 2026 was the time they're willing to dump
18:12 Salesforce for your new product. So, add all that up, 5%. In many categories,
18:17 we're north of 50% in market. So, that just totally changes. The plays
18:21 still work. showing up in person, actually knowing what the hell you're
18:24 selling, knowing how to get through procurement, all of those are work. But
18:28 other than these weird windows, artificial windows in 2020, we've never
18:31 had so many people in market at once. >> And this is for AI products specifically
18:34 or >> Yeah. that that have massive ROI. >> Yeah. Productivity.
18:40 >> I want I I need to bring a Vibe Code tool into my company, Lenny. Okay. Go
18:44 out and do the work. Compare Replet, Lovable, and whoever else and buy one.
18:49 Okay. Harve like why are Harvey and the others in Lagora doing so? I mean
18:52 they're great tools but everyone's like we need to automate how we review
18:56 contracts and documents with AI now. They want a leader and they're going to
19:00 do it and that will slow down like not everybody can be in market every year.
19:04 It it's exhausts an enterprise. So this this is a version of the AI bubble that
19:08 will end and we will revert in some ways to old school but when everybody's in
19:12 market it just it just changes how you run the whole thing. So the so the
19:16 fastest growing ones and the slowest growing ones both have incentives to use
19:20 AI here just for different reasons. >> How about the sales profession
19:24 specifically? Are SDRs going to be replaced fully AES? How do you see the
19:27 future of the sales profession? >> The classic SDR junior kid that is hired out of
19:37 college to send emails and respond to respond to inbound emails and maybe get
19:40 back to them later that day or the next day. We don't need them. We're not going
19:45 to need most of them. SDRs that knock on doors in a lot of industries aren't
19:49 going to be displaced, right? The emailbased cadence SDR will be 90%
19:56 displaced by AI next year. The people have different nomclature. I call BDRs,
20:00 folks that qualify leads coming in. The contact mess that we see, we have no
20:04 need for them today. They should be extinct next year. There is no reason in
20:08 the age of AI I have to hit contact me, wait two a day or two for a 21-year-old
20:13 that doesn't know what linear does to say, "Hey, what do you do? How much are
20:17 you willing to pay me? Maybe I'll set up a call with Lenny later this week."
20:21 There is no need to do that with AI. The AI, our AI alone, one of our agent fully
20:25 qualifies everybody on the website so they don't even know they're being
20:27 qualified. It just sets up the meeting with the salesperson. So this SDR, this
20:33 email-based SDR and this human qualifying leads, which is not good for
20:36 the customer. It doesn't feel good to be qualified, does it? They will be mostly
20:41 extinct next year. I'm guessing with your now the AE, the classic human doing
20:46 the sales, most of the tools aren't there yet for the most part. I think 70%
20:52 of their jobs will be safe by the end of next year, but I think it will decline
20:56 to 40 or 50. I don't think there's any reason what we're seeing in other
21:00 categories, a great agent can't close a deal too. If there's not a lot to
21:04 negotiate in price and the agent knows the product better than a human, at
21:08 least for folks like you and me. I mean, do you like to talk to a human in sales
21:12 >> sometimes? Uh I'd rather I'd rather just chat chat with a Yeah. a really smart
21:15 AI. >> Yeah. So, that's all in progress now. But the classic and the tough part and a
21:21 lot of folks ask this question, Lenny, they say, um, okay, Jason, I I see that
21:26 in your data. How are we going to build the sales profession if there's no
21:30 entry-level jobs in SDRs and AES? And that's a meta question across all of AI.
21:35 We're already seeing AI concentrate strength in sort of mid-tier folks,
21:39 isn't it? And we're already seeing lots of folks cut back on entry-level hires,
21:43 you know, Shopify and others aside, where they'd rather have the six or
21:46 seveny old engineer that's a cursor machine rather than train some kid. It's
21:51 just more efficient today, right? I'm sure you see that across a lot of folks
21:54 you talk to. It's gonna happen in sales, too. So the folks that know how to
21:58 manage an agent, work with an agent, the folks that know their product for real,
22:02 they're going to become more valuable and the rest are going to become less
22:04 valuable. >> It's interesting because I'm an investor in a bunch of startups as are you and
22:10 I'm actually seeing a lot of asks for go to market people, sales people. Do you
22:14 think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand, they're
22:16 like, "Oh, we need people to help and then this will start to become more AI
22:20 over time or are they just looking for these really senior people that you're
22:23 talking about?" Well, listen, whether you're managing humans or orchestrating
22:28 agents, you need leadership. We've yet to produce an autonomous CEO.
22:33 I know folks talk about how on on Twitter that will AI will replace the
22:36 CEO, but I don't know that that's literal as much as figurative, right?
22:39 So, we're still going to need the seuite. We're still going to need VPs. I
22:44 mean, it's become so much work to manage a million leads, right? A half million
22:49 leads. We we need these leaders whether the the question is and I've seen your
22:53 call out there and I saw your tweet on it. The question is how many of the
22:58 folks that had the current playbooks are the right folks for the future. I'm
23:04 thinking maybe 20%. of the folks I talked to 20 for are still panicking
23:09 about AI and and I'll tell you how to not how to be in the 20% if you want to
23:14 know but I think very few like the Janine from Verscell are going to make
23:18 the jump so we'll see there will be huge organizations right like Denise just
23:22 went from Slack and Salesforce after 14 years to be CRO open AAI she's working
23:26 going to be pretty high level right so she may not know how to need to know how
23:30 to implement the agents but most of the folks your companies want to hire I
23:35 would just make sure they could they really want to roll up their sleeves and
23:40 do the job of 2026 2027, right? Um just because they worked at Slack does not
23:43 necessarily mean they have the skills at your startup. >> You said that you had some tips for
23:47 folks to actually be this 20%. What are some If someone's listening to this
23:50 like, "Oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on?"
23:53 >> It's going to sound simple. It will work and most almost nobody's doing this.
23:59 Pick a tool, an agent, an agentic tool to solve one of your problems. It
24:03 doesn't almost m just one that's the most painful or the one that's most
24:07 acute. It could be support. It could be SDR. It could be inbound qualification.
24:11 Pick one. Pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. Okay? We can talk
24:15 about how to pick a vendor, but pick a leading vendor that treats you well that
24:21 you like and do it yourself. Train the agent. Ingest the data. Do the
24:28 iterations. Understand how this damn thing works. Okay. The folks that are
24:33 lost today have never done it. We literally we've turned into a consulting
24:37 shop. Lenny, it's kind of crazy. I I don't know what I think about it, but we
24:40 literally just did a job. Amelia, our chief A officer, and and Mia, she she
24:44 she drove it. We did a call with a public B2B company worth well over 10
24:48 billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay? Okay. And we did a call
24:51 with their team and they're like, "We're Okay. One, no chance. Two, we asked
25:05 them, "How much of this have you done yourself?" Like, "Have you have you done
25:07 it yourself?" And it was just crickets on this call of 20 people. No one had
25:10 done it theirel. So, they thought they could take an untrained agent with no
25:15 training and just magically give it to a bunch of young 20-year-old SDRs and and
25:19 this magically would sell on its own. It doesn't work that way, right? So, the
25:25 way all these agents work is you there's a lot of jargon which is intimidating.
25:30 Ingestion, orchestration, training. It's not that hard, guys. It's just
25:34 different. It's the same B2B stuff we've been doing for over a decade. You go to
25:38 a website, okay? You give it a URL of your website. You give it a URL of what
25:41 your wiki is. You give it a URL of your training docs. Maybe you upload your
25:45 perspectus. You upload a few documents. It ingests the data. And ingesting means
25:49 it uploads. It means it processes the data and it does some other stuff you don't really
25:54 need to know. Some ragging, some vectoring, it really doesn't matter. You
25:59 you upload some stuff and it kind of knows it and isn't great at it. And then
26:03 it will turn it into ideally it will turn it into questions and you answer
26:06 these questions and it they will be get the more you answer and train it.
26:09 Training is just answering questions and getting better and better. So, first you
26:13 upload a bunch of your stuff. Then you spend hours training it, often with the
26:17 help of a vendor, someone called a forward deploy engineer, which is a
26:19 scary term. It means someone that's going to help you do this. You upload
26:23 your stuff, you try to get it right, and then you basically have to make sure
26:29 it's right. QA testing. And every day when that AISDR sends out emails and do
26:33 practice emails, they will say some dumb things. Maybe it's hallucinations. It
26:37 really doesn't matter what the technical term is and you correct it and each and
26:43 if you do this for 30 days and every day you spend an hour or two correcting
26:47 those mistakes by the 30th day it's going to be pretty good and this is
26:51 anyone can do this that has been in B2B or SAS anyone can do what I just
26:54 described it is not that different than other things we've done it's just
26:58 sequenced differently but nobody does this everyone's panicked and if you if
27:01 you can go do this pick any tool pick pick uh agent force pick qualified pick
27:05 artisan pick whatever you want If you can go do this and get it live into
27:09 production, you're hyper employable. All the companies you talked about that need
27:13 a GTM person, they will hire you. You could be imaginally be their chief
27:18 agentic GTM officer because but almost anyone can do this if they want to. It's
27:21 just going to take a month of your time and it might take you 50 or 60 hours
27:25 plus qualifying the vendor, right? And in the old days, like when we diverted
27:30 our podcast, you'd hire an agency and disappear. That's how you do this stuff.
27:33 Don't It don't work that. The agencies don't know how to do this. you've got to
27:37 do it yourself. But if you do, man, you will rock. You will just you will just
27:41 rock and you will learn, right? You will learn um and you will learn the limits
27:46 and you will learn the agent can what it can do and where it can't do. And then
27:49 you will learn how to do the next one, right? So like we're pretty far on agent
27:53 force, which is Salesforce's one, which Mark talks a lot about, but we're we're
27:55 probably one of the only organizations of our size on it. I will tell you a
27:59 cheat code which is pretty interesting. So, we've got we had three of these
28:03 agents working for sales. After training it and learning it and
28:06 spending months time to learn it, we got it down to one prompt. And prompt is
28:10 another almost intimidating word. A string of text that describes what you
28:14 want this thing to do. Okay? We took that prompt and gave it to agent force.
28:18 Then a day was pretty good. So, you will if you can do one of these, it'll be
28:21 really hard. It'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier. And then
28:25 you're going to be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it
28:27 yourself. But if you're waiting for people on your team to do it, if you're
28:32 waiting for an agency to do it, I think you're going to be out of a job.
28:37 Right? So this is like everyone comes to us as an experts. We're not we're only
28:41 experts because we did it 20 times. >> I think what might be helpful here
28:45 actually is to do a a tour kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've
28:47 built and what they do, which ones have been most impactful. And then as you do
28:52 that, what products you use, what what powers these agents that that you like
28:56 and maybe don't like. If any if anyone goes to saster.ai/agents,
29:00 we'll you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out. You can copy us
29:04 and I'll walk you through it. But two two caveats or things at the top. I
29:07 built a lot of stuff in Replet. We can talk about it for fun. I'm like a top 1%
29:11 user. I love it. None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it
29:15 yourself. You're not Versel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer
29:19 that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same
29:23 idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these
29:28 products are expensive. They're not so expensive. It's worth and then
29:32 maintaining the pace of innovation is so fast. Even if you can hire someone to
29:35 build it internally, it will become obsolete if you're not careful in a
29:39 couple months. So, we've built a lot of stuff. We could talk about um uh I we I
29:43 built a a calculator to do startup calculations, used 800,000 times in 90
29:46 days >> for valuation, right? >> Yeah. For valuations. I built a pitch
29:50 deck reviewer that's reviewed almost 3,000 pitch decks. Lots of fun stuff,
29:53 but none of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. None of it. So, just a
29:56 caveat, don't build it yourself unless you're Verscell, unless you have a
30:00 reason. That was a great pod. It was wonderful. Don't do it. Don't do that.
30:03 >> Basically, if unless you have a awesome go to market engineers
30:06 >> for and they really want to do it. They're really are chomping at the bit
30:11 to do it. Um, don't do it. So, I started and this is not where other folks would
30:13 start, but there's some learnings. I started there's an app called Deli,
30:18 which makes digital clones. And, um, you used it for the Lenny bot a long time
30:21 ago. I saw you do it. What's that? Yeah. Lenny.com. Yeah. Check that out.
30:25 >> I saw it a long time ago. It was interesting, but I I I did it didn't
30:28 click. And then Brian Halligan, who's the founder chairman of HubSpot, did one
30:32 too. Uh there's Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia, so he helped
30:35 them early on. And then I kind of had a magic moment and this is the way it
30:38 works in AI when I saw the combination of the two. So yours was really like
30:42 people should love moneybot because it's got it's if folks haven't tried it, try
30:46 it. It is ingested. I know a scary term for some. It is ingested every single
30:50 interview you've ever done, right? Every word of content you've written. So, and
30:54 it can combine them all together. It can combine the Verscell story and the and
30:58 and and and uh what what you did with at with Dylan at Figma and can synthesize
31:02 the knowledge and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. What I liked about Brian's
31:07 better than yours though was that it was Brian and Lennybot is kind of Lenny, but
31:11 it's also kind of all your guess, right? I think that's the superpower of it,
31:14 right? That's the way I think about it is not just my intelligence. It's the
31:17 the lessons of every single person I've had on this podcast.
31:19 >> So, it's great. But, I thought, hey, maybe I could finally do one that's
31:23 that's in between the two. Like I I've been a founder and I and I've written
31:27 10,000 pieces of content. So, that's a little bit like Brian, but I have more
31:30 than Brian and I'm not Lenny in terms of productivity, but I've got a lot of
31:33 voices. So, I'm like, I'll try it. I used Deli. I instantly broke it because
31:36 I had too much data to ingest. It took about a week to get going. Um, and it
31:40 worked. people and it's just like you people some people spend hours a day on
31:44 digital JSON in another browser and they don't do what they do with Lenny but
31:47 they'll they'll ask about their sales wos and what to do with their sales team
31:50 and they'll and they'll upload LinkedIn and ask if they should hire people
31:55 and then a curious thing happened which is that because we do these events
31:57 people started to use it for questions for the events hey how do I get a refund
32:02 hey can I get a discount hey where is the Sanonteo County Fairgrounds Jason
32:05 Liz is really in the San Francisco Bay area like who's speaking or and and like
32:10 there's endless questions Right. And we used to use prefin intercom and we're so
32:14 busy we would answer like two weeks later like it was ter worst support ever
32:18 and the the agent just started doing support on its own and then it did this thing where it sold
32:26 sponsorship on its own right so so start you can start with so one place to start
32:31 if you haven't started is in support okay and you don't have to buy Sierra
32:35 and you don't have to buy decacon necessarily and you don't have to buy
32:40 Finn but one potential place to start is is your support like can you do great
32:45 24/7 support? Can you most most apps can't in fact some of the worst
32:48 offenders are AI leaders they they have no support at all on their website. So
32:52 that's one place to start. Um and then the next place we started so for us the
32:56 long game for the next place we started is hey we want to try outbound. Okay
33:01 because we don't have 1.2 million names like you have but we have like 400,000.
33:04 Okay. And we have data on them. So we wanted to say hey come come back to our
33:09 SAT event. So we didn't know what to use and I'll tell you some learning. So we
33:12 picked a YC company called Artisan. They've gone like from like nothing to
33:15 10 million this year. Um we picked them but this is important why they were at
33:19 they were a sponsor at Saster. We didn't know and they offered to help us the
33:23 most. This is the critical insight. We didn't know if Artisan was the I have
33:27 opinions now. We hadn't deployed them but another vendor argued with us. He
33:33 said I need 100K up front before I help you. Okay. Another one said they were
33:38 scared of Saster. They didn't want bad PR if it failed. Fair.
33:41 >> Oh, be Yeah, certain company. >> We don't want to be your first. Okay.
33:46 And Artisan said, "We'll do it." And uh we had nothing. And here's the
33:49 interesting thing about Agentic stuff. It's like support. If you have nothing,
33:53 like it doesn't have to like change the world. If you're literally doing nothing
33:57 and you start to do something that's high ROI, like you're going to get
34:02 return, right? So, we did that one. We trained it. It's great. We did about
34:07 60,000 emails. Um saw pretty high rates. Um then we said, well, we'll try
34:12 inbound. We like we don't want to have this depressing experience where a
34:15 salesperson quits and it's two weeks later until they talk to. So we used
34:19 this vendor called Qualified, which was founded by the XMO of Salesforce that
34:22 does a lot now, but mostly focus on qualified stuff. That immediately
34:26 worked. Like we had someone at 11 p.m. on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor
34:30 and they sponsored and it worked and it and it worked great. Um, but again they
34:33 helped us >> and this is an agent that is emailing with prospects selling them on a
34:37 sponsor. >> Well, it's literally if you go to sasterannual.com and anyone should buy a
34:41 product like this. It doesn't have to be qualified but but and they'll be the
34:46 bubble the intercom like bubble is tuned to to qualifying inbound prospects.
34:50 Folks that say, "Hey, I want to sponsor Lenny's podcast. Sorry, we're sold out
34:54 through 2028, but if you want to be on the wait list, sign up here, okay?"
34:58 Okay. Or or even better for us, it would qualify folks out that weren't a good
35:02 fit, right? It would save so much time and it would do it 24 hours, then it
35:05 would just set up the meeting. So, the reason that was a great second one was
35:08 because no one was willing to do that. No human was willing to pick up the
35:12 phone and talk to these people. So, it was such lowhanging fruit. Um, but the
35:18 key to the first two and and if you're going to pick an agent is they they
35:23 offered to help the most. You're I at the end of the day, Lenny, these are all
35:27 running on cloud 4. They're all basically using a bunch of APIs mashed
35:30 together. That's not new to software, right? Mashing a bunch of APIs under the
35:34 hood. But deep down, I don't want to get anybody trigger anybody. Many of these
35:39 leader the leaders in AI GTM, they're more similar than different. They're
35:42 more similar than different under the hood. It doesn't mean the features are
35:46 are parody. So, because you have to train them because it takes a month, the
35:51 world's best software with no help training you is not one 99% of people
35:57 should buy. So today in the old days we would qualify the best software. We
35:59 would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare
36:02 features and do it. You got to do another column which is your forward
36:05 deployed engineer or solution architecture your SE and talk to them
36:10 and say who is going to help me and before you write a check get on the
36:13 phone with Lenny and see if Lenny's really going to do deployment and if
36:16 Lenny rocks and the other vendor is better and won't help you don't do it.
36:20 And that's why we've had so much success is the first two we did. Yeah, they were
36:24 startups, right? So they worked harder, but Artisan and Qualified just did the
36:27 work with us. And we're not stupid, but it was work. We needed help, right? And
36:32 so that's what I learned is you you have this partner, the FD and the vendor. And
36:36 um and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think
36:38 they can help you. The best ones turn away a lot of business today, which is
36:41 interesting, right? An interesting learning from this for folks is um a lot
36:46 of folks say and they would say it to you if you use these lender they say you
36:50 have too much data. Saster is not like us. We're a startup. We're tiny. You
36:53 have 400,000 people in your database. Lenny has 1.2 million. It's not like
36:58 that's I I got I I I only have 300 customers. Okay. Or 200 customers. What
37:04 I've learned is um that's wrong. If you have 300 customers, how many folks have come to your website
37:11 ever? 30,000. How many leads do you have? How many folks in your database?
37:14 How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing.
37:17 And then they all of a sudden they have the aha moment like, "How many folks do
37:20 you have in your HubSpot?" Right? How many folks do you have in your CRM? They
37:24 look it up. 31,000. Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero. You
37:28 don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these agents work.
37:33 You need you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic,
37:37 but not as much as you think. So all the learnings we have a lot of folks that
37:40 honestly they don't want to do the work. They're like well Saster has a lot of
37:43 scale. They have a lot of years. It's not true. And it turns out to also be
37:47 like true with the training. I'm sure you've seen it with Lenny. Like I
37:50 thought having 12 years of content made the difference. Nah. It's having like a
37:54 couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that. But you don't
37:59 need as deep training and as much as you think. You just need a bit to be really
38:03 good. So anyone that has any scale whatsoever, even a couple million
38:07 revenue and up can benefit from these products, right? So we did hor general
38:12 general bot got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR then for outbound then
38:16 we did inbound and then we did agent force really early with Salesforce and
38:19 we didn't know what to do with agent force at first, right? Um but we decided
38:25 we would reactivate the folks that sales decide was not worth their time.
38:30 folks that reached out to sales. And this is true at every startup. We even
38:34 just talked about some of the AI leaders where a human says, "You know what? I
38:37 don't think this is enough commission. I'm kind of busy. I got a $4 million
38:43 deal with meta going." We just took Asian Force just on those. Okay. And we
38:47 trained it on very similar prompt. It had 70% response rate.
38:52 Those are people that were dying to interact with us. 70% is so good at and this is something
39:00 humans were not willing to do. It wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds
39:02 critical and maybe I'm going to trigger some sales folks. But the reality is if
39:07 you know if you're in a lead rich environment, okay, and there and I I I
39:10 think there's lead rich and lead poor environments for for even big companies,
39:14 but startups like there's not enough. But you eventually you become lead rich,
39:18 okay? Reps just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature.
39:22 It's even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let
39:26 in, right? Do you hum Do you pick up the phone with all of them?
39:29 >> Uh I reply to all of them and then we just sell them. We're we're full. But
39:32 >> yeah, but you see the point, right? Even your scale, you see the point, right?
39:34 >> Yeah. Yeah. It gets challenging. >> Um and let's imagine all of a sudden you
39:38 had six months of inventory available. I bet if you spooled up an agent and
39:40 emailed all those folks back automatically, you'd fill up you'd fill
39:44 up the docket, right? Mhm. >> So, anyone can do these sorts of You
39:48 think you can't um unless you're so small >> that you have sufficient humans to talk
39:53 with every potential lead, every person that touches your website, every person
39:57 that clicks with anything, you can So, that was kind of our journey and
40:04 then we've done a lot of other niche stuff. I'll tell you at the end that the
40:08 where we are today this is a maybe this is almost too much learning is we're at
40:12 the point where maybe we can't do one more because right now when we when we did
40:18 deli in the beginning when I copied you with deli even me I spent almost an hour
40:23 a day training it in the beginning because when we started to use it for
40:27 support it had an initial it started telling people the wrong dates okay and
40:30 we could talk about why so I had to fix it and it made some mistakes and so when
40:33 people started to use it I had to spend an hour each morning firing up Deli
40:37 reviewing the issues and answering them. I don't have to do it anymore. It's well
40:41 trained. Um we have so many agents going in so many emails that Amelia has to
40:47 spend, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week reviewing the outputs and it's
40:50 exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on
40:53 Christmas. It's a big issue, right? This is not being the orchestrator or the chief AI
40:59 person is not a good job for lazy people because the agents never sleep, right?
41:04 So it is so much time now to manage these 20. This is just interesting. We
41:07 can't I don't know when we're going to do the 21st. We may be full. And for
41:13 folks that are startups, this is a reason to go harder because everyone was in market this
41:19 year. Okay, everyone. And it's going to keep happening. But business process
41:23 change remains an issue for business software. Business process change at the
41:27 end of the day. And so many founders get this wrong. And 99% of sales folks, they
41:30 don't care about business process change. in sales works, they just want
41:32 to get their commission. Doesn't really matter what you pay for an app for for a
41:36 customer as long as it's fair. It's all the work to do to change the way you do
41:40 your business, right? And so we're even we're at the point where we're
41:44 overloaded, right? And so just be aware if you're if you're a startup or even
41:48 Salesforce or HubSpot, maybe maybe close those deals in the next 12 months
41:51 because the window may close where people say, "Listen, that's the coolest
41:54 agent I've ever seen. I'm exhausted from the last five. I had to do five last
41:58 year. I just can't literally cannot bring one more app into my enterprise.
42:02 And so that's going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has
42:05 tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted
42:10 for having so many agents. Exhaust, man. Okay. There's so much to to learn
42:15 from in what you just shared. Something I definitely want to ask about as people
42:19 hear this uh agents sending off emails, agents talking to your clients. Uh we
42:24 get I get a ton of emails that are terrible. >> Yes. H what have you learned about
42:30 making these outbound emails good and not just you know noise? How do you make
42:33 these conversations high quality? How do you >> It's a really really really good
42:36 question. >> So the two maybe the two biggest learnings um
42:42 take your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have, take their email
42:49 copy and use that as a template for your AI. If you the the the the terrible
42:53 mistake people make people all everyone in 2024 said these products didn't work.
42:57 There were two reasons they didn't work. It was before cloud 4, right? Replet
43:01 didn't work. Lovable didn't exist. Gamma didn't really work before 2025, right?
43:06 Before CL like the LMS reached this point where they would work for these
43:09 use cases. So that was one threshold. The other thing that happened in 2024 is
43:14 the vendors kind of lied and said uh just turn the product on. It'll get you
43:17 revenue. No no need to train it, no need to do anything. we'll just do everything
43:21 as this magic AI savant. It's not it's not the way it works this way. What you
43:25 do is an a an agent will be successful in go to market in sales today. If you
43:28 take what works for your best person, train I know this seems like a scary
43:33 term, but it's not. Upload that text. Okay? Train the agent on it and let it
43:37 iterate an AB test from that. Agents are really good at AB testing. They're
43:40 really good at creating variants. AI like you ask Claude or or chat for a
43:44 variant of your best email. Say, "Give me three versions of my best email."
43:46 They'll be pretty good. That's all the agent has to do is take your best email
43:50 you ever sent and stick it through an API and go it's it's I I'm I'm making it
43:55 sound simpler than it is, but but not by too much. So train it and then what and
44:00 then what it'll do and then give it some data sources and the data source could
44:04 be as simple as Salesforce. Okay? And and and then if it has any
44:09 data on Lenny, it can pull data and it can lightly personalize that email.
44:14 Okay? And even better, if a lot of these products track all the visitors to your
44:18 website, so they can see what's happened and they use other APIs and so they can
44:23 personalize your emails more. And so what ends up happening is the emails
44:28 that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's
44:31 a poorly trained product from a bad vendor. You should be getting emails
44:35 when you get them and you're like, "This isn't as good as Jason said on Lenny's
44:40 podcast, but it's pretty good." Okay, that's what AI can do today. And the
44:43 magic is if a human isn't even doing that or if your mediocre humans are
44:50 worse. And I'll tell you, you know, one of the first lessons I learned when my
44:53 last startup was acquired by Adobe. Sam Blonde was one of our sales leaders.
44:57 Then he became CRO of Brex and others. And he we inherited a bunch of reps from
45:00 Adobe. We didn't ask for them. And he's like, "My god, I never read everyone's
45:03 emails before. These are the worst emails that I've ever read." So the AI
45:09 can do better than that. the AI can do better than than that. And so you just
45:12 train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. And so so you just haven't
45:17 seen a well-trained agent. And then what I learned and then another question
45:20 folks ask is, "Okay, Jason, that email was pretty good. It wasn't as great as
45:23 you said on stage, but it was pretty good." But do you do you tell people
45:28 it's an AI or do you or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending
45:30 hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. people. We're we're we're we're we're in
45:38 an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they
45:41 know they're going to get an instant response. We've tried both. We've tried
45:43 to say, "Hey, it's digital Amelia or digital Jason." We've tried to fake it.
45:47 And what we've learned is now we just send it. We We just send it and no one
45:51 cares. And sometimes we'll get especially founders will get an email
45:53 back. They'll be like, "Haha, I can tell this is NI but it's pretty good. Can I
45:57 do a meeting?" That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Mhm. So, we're worrying
46:03 we're creating issues as excuses to not do the work. >> Your point about how sale human sales
46:10 people's emails are not great already is really powerful because all we're
46:13 looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying okay but humans
46:16 they're not actually that much better if you actually look at them. My god,
46:20 they're not the be listen the best outbound emails you've ever gotten. Um
46:25 like for example, I know you've done a bunch of investments a lot of them are
46:27 inbound to you. They want Lenny involved. Right. >> That's right.
46:30 >> Some of them are just so good you can't believe it. Right.
46:33 >> A few. >> Yeah. >> How many are that? But but a lot of them
46:35 aren't. Right. >> Right. >> So like the best founders and the best
46:41 sales execs and the best SDRs will spend two hours researching an email. Okay.
46:45 Who exactly did IBM should I reach out to? What did IM? Who else exactly is a
46:49 competitor that's using them? Exactly what was the ROI? They'll give you a
46:52 perfect story. Like you get the world's best story. Here's your competitor.
46:55 Here's how they use it. Here's exactly when they bought. Here's the ROI. Here's
46:59 the case study. That's gonna that's a great email, right? How many 21-year-old
47:04 STRs do that. No, they they use a to an automation tool whether it's Outreach or
47:08 Gong or Salesoft or Mixmax or an AI based, but they do no work. It's not
47:12 going to be that great. It's not going to be that great. So, that's why for for
47:17 people get a little confused. The bar for good enough for AI GTM is not as
47:23 high as we think. It's just like uh you know a a fimile of your best person
47:27 reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your midpack person. It's going to
47:30 beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.
47:34 >> Is this is this an opportunity for humans to continue to thrive this layer
47:38 of much better emails. Uh this came up when we had Jen Ael on the podcast. She
47:41 I asked her like what tools do you use? What do you use? She's like nothing. I
47:46 just write it out artisally. Uh and it works really well because everyone's
47:49 sending AI emails. Is this just like where go to market sales people still
47:54 can exist that's much better email or is that also >> for for if you have a high performing
48:01 human team hunting high dollar value logos and when this is classic stuff
48:05 Lenny and I and Jen are in a in a conference room we put a whiteboard of
48:09 the 50 best folks that we want to sponsor Lenny's podcast there's only 50
48:13 okay and we write notion and we write linear and we write rap there's only 50
48:17 it's a and we're all trying to sell them these new sponsorships They're they're
48:20 they're half a million bucks for two years. Take it or leave it. Okay. And I
48:24 give we divide them up and we say Lenny's best at this, Jason's best is
48:29 Jen and we each take 15 or 17. >> Dude, no need for AI there, is there?
48:33 >> Agreed. No need for AI today >> because the ROI is really high.
48:36 >> Yeah. And we're and we're great and and we know that the three of us are we're
48:39 different. The three of us are really different. It's going to crush and we
48:42 don't need any Maybe one of us will take our emails and run it through Claude
48:44 real quick just to make it better, right? or or what I do is I do it for
48:48 more research. Like I write the world's best email and then I say, "Claude, how
48:51 could I make this better? Do a little research. It will still be better." So
48:54 that's an AI boost Jen should be doing. I love Jen, but she should be she should
48:58 at least be making it better. But for our 45 50 best ones, we don't need it.
49:02 What if it's 5,000? Her approach just doesn't work. So yes, a lot of the stuff
49:07 we're talking about lends itself to higher volume sales. But as everyone
49:12 gets bigger, it's all higher volume. It's all there's just so much volume as
49:16 you scale, right? So, yes, if you're tiny and you have three prospects and
49:20 you're you're just getting into Y Combinator, maybe you don't need these
49:24 tools, but we we graduate out of that more quickly. And and the bespoke thing
49:29 for Jen, I think, will work for high dollar value enterprise, but is outside
49:37 of that, I don't know, man. Uh it's uh you just can't touch enough people.
49:40 Humans can't touch enough people, and humans don't want to do the work. They
49:44 don't want to talk to the mediocre leads. They literally don't. I'll tell
49:49 you an like when I was in London, I wanted to buy a $10,000 product. Okay?
49:53 And I'm literally in London. I and we're doing SAS. I don't have any time, right?
49:57 And I get confused with the time zones, Lenny. I don't know if you do. I don't
49:59 even know what time it is in the Bay Area. So, I just emailed this rep at the
50:02 end of the year. I'm like, just send me the contract. I want to buy it, but I
50:05 have two questions. I have two questions I want answered. I told him these two
50:08 questions. And they weren't even about price. took him three days to get back to me
50:13 and he introduced me to someone else on his team. It wasn't worth his time. 10
50:16 grand wasn't enough because not enough commission for him, right? So, he
50:19 introduced someone else to me and the other guy said, "I can't answer your
50:21 questions unless you'll get on the phone." And I said, "I'm in London. I'm
50:27 traveling. If you will," ordinarily, I would have ended this, but I'm I'm It's
50:29 a journey. I'm like, "If you answer my two questions, I will buy your property
50:32 for 10K." He's like, "I need to get on the phone." Like, AI is better than
50:37 that. This is not Jen's in the whiteboards thing of doing it. So, um,
50:42 it will at least it will fill the even if Jen's process is right, AI can fill
50:47 all the gaps. What about all the sponsors we the leads we didn't follow
50:51 up with and we got a 70% response rate, right? I mean, the gens are diamond in a
50:55 rough and whatever the expression, the diamond. There's not that many of them.
51:00 There's not that many of them. So, uh, I I love her and I love what she says and
51:06 I agree with 99% of it. But here's a po a related point. Most of us are don't have the hottest
51:14 brands and we don't have the most elite CRO running them. So we end up settling
51:20 for not the best sales team. That's the truth. Most 99% of the best
51:25 sales reps want to work just at the hottest brands. And the minute you're
51:29 not the minute your star fades just a little bit, they don't want to work.
51:32 They they immediately want to jump to the next one. It's just there's a lot of
51:37 reasons why. So bear in mind 99% of of the world cannot attract a team of gens
51:42 or better. It's just pract even I can't even you could Lenny you're so great but
51:45 even a lot of folks that would want to go work for you if you want to hire
51:48 someone they'd be like well I love the but what do I have to do? I've got to
51:52 sell newsletter sp like no no no no no no no I want to be CRO at lovable I love
51:57 Lenny but is that really going to get me there? Right. >> Yeah.
52:03 >> So we AI can AI can beat those. But AI can't beat the enterprise thing.
52:07 AI I I have no idea how AI is going to do inerson sales. I someone smarter than
52:13 me is going to have to answer that. But um a lot of I you know you have such a
52:16 huge audience, Lenny, but I still think most of your folks are in tech and doing
52:20 tech sales. Tech is the largest segment of our economy and growing, right? So
52:24 for the most part, these tools will work for tech sales. Tech sales is over the
52:28 Zoom, over the phone, over email. We're not We should knock on more doors. We
52:32 should do more in person. All the data I've ever collected shows everything
52:35 closes at a higher rate if you go in person. It's just not. But in tech, it's
52:38 basically as much automation as we can get away with in GTM.
52:41 >> What I think might be helpful is just like let me zoom out for a second and
52:45 describe what you've gone through here. So you used to have I love this visual
52:49 you had of the desks of the sales folks in your office uh where you had inbound
52:54 STRs, you had outbound SDRs, maybe a support person >> and three or four AES account.
52:59 >> Okay. three or four AES who kind of take these leads and then close the deal.
53:04 >> And so now in just like instead of humans, there's an agent doing each of
53:07 these jobs. Yes. >> You have this inbound this outbound uh
53:11 agent that's just sending emails trying to find potential leads. Uh an inbound
53:16 agent that's talking to people that are interested, trying to get them uh more
53:21 excited. And then is there an AE agent or I forget what that?
53:24 >> We have that's what I'm still learning. We have one full-time AE plus
53:30 >> 20% of Amelia's time, so it's 1.2 doing what five or six AES do.
53:32 >> I see. >> And no SDR BDRs. >> Got it. So basically all the top of
53:39 funnels is AI. Yes. >> And there's one human now that takes all
53:42 this all the great stuff and just closes the deals, negotiates pricing, things
53:45 like that. >> Yeah. Maybe 1.2 just to say it. But but yeah, let's call 1.2.
53:50 >> Yeah. So that's where I wanted to go. So Amelia, so that feels really important.
53:53 just somebody, not necessarily full-time, but just staying on top of
53:56 these agents, watching the emails, making sure quality is high, making sure
53:59 they're running correctly. Talk about just like how important that part is to
54:02 this whole operation. >> It It's critical. It It's critical. And,
54:07 you know, people are posting on LinkedIn that they want to hire these GTM
54:11 engineers or I don't think that role exists today. I I I worry when I see these roles. I
54:17 think today, and listen, if we get together in 18 months, we'll we'll
54:20 update this because the world's changing so fast, right? I think today 95% of 100
54:24 you've got to promote someone internally. It's got to be a nerd,
54:28 someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant. You know, a lot of BTOC
54:32 people are frankly good at this stuff because in B toc sales and marketing are
54:36 kind of the same thing, you know, but someone that's a nerd that loves to sit
54:39 in front of data for a couple hours a day and and route data and manage these
54:45 agents and uh they come out of product, they could come out of marketing, but
54:49 maybe they could come out of RevOps, but they better be nerdy. Odds they come out
54:55 of regular sales approach zero. So, I would find someone on my team that
54:59 raises their hand and says, "I've already done this." Okay, I I've already
55:02 I've already written 10 apps in Replet and I and I and I love Verscell and I
55:05 did this and I've already tried these ones on my own. Can I please manage
55:09 these for you? And then have them be your chief orchestration officer. But it
55:15 is a new skill set. It it really is. And and ultimately finding someone that's
55:18 going to spend an hour or two a day to manage these agents is the new new
55:22 frontier for us to figure out. Um they they do not they they operate
55:27 autonomously but not without constant oversight and iteration. That's the
55:31 confusing part. It and and you just if you just buy one of these products and
55:35 disappear, you will have zero ROI. So maybe too long of an answer, but that's
55:39 critical. And I just think unfortunately >> you're going to you have to grow this
55:43 resource at home today. You have to even within versel that basically grew the
55:47 resource in home, right? We're not all versel, but I just haven't seen it.
55:53 Everyone's hosting for this job. Um but we need veterans. We don't have veterans yet, right? And
55:58 going back early in the conversation, if that is you, you're going to be super
56:02 employable next year. You're going to have so many job offers,
56:04 you're not going to know what to you're going to have to beat them off.
56:08 >> And when you think of is Amelia, would you describe as a go to market engineer
56:11 or do you is that a different role? Chief I would say officer.
56:13 >> Yeah. Okay. >> But she knows the product's cold
56:19 >> she knows how the all the quirks work, how all the agents work in and here's a
56:24 this is this is a a complicated issue, but an interesting one. If you're
56:28 running multiple agents, okay, someone's got to segment which of the base the
56:32 agents are working with or they're going to have tons of conflict, you need
56:37 someone smart enough and any like really nerdy demand genen marketer that loves
56:40 data can do this. But you've got to segment your base >> otherwise it just becomes a mess. There
56:45 are no people on X and the internet talk about these master agents that can
56:48 manage agents that can manage agents. We're not there yet. Okay m maybe like
56:51 I'm excited for it but we're not there yet. So just even figuring out how to
56:56 segment your base so you can do inbound, retargeting, remarketing, new marketing,
57:02 like so so that that is complicated, but most badass marketers kind of
57:06 understand that. They're already doing AB testing, segmenting their bases. This
57:10 is not new, is it? >> No. >> No. Yeah, >> it's Yeah,
57:14 >> but turning it on with zero work is a F. Like it's just it's just no chance.
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58:38 That's data hq.com/lenny. I'm looking back at some notes I took as
58:42 you were talking of just like advice for each function almost of how to be
58:45 successful in this future that you're seeing. So I try to summarize briefly.
58:50 So your advice for sales people is use the agents, build one yourself, try to
58:55 train it, help it run, run alongside you so that you understand these tools and
58:59 be the person within the sales or that's uh >> for for leadership. I advise that
59:02 >> for leaders, >> I don't know that if your average SDR or
59:05 junior salesperson is going to get budget for their own agent. If they do
59:10 run with it, the problem, Lenny, is that all these agents that work today, they
59:13 have forward deployed engineers, they have training, so they're all like 50
59:17 grand and up. 50 grand, 80 grand. I mean people pay more don't get me wrong but
59:21 kind of the entry level point for these is sort of like 50 grand plus 25k for
59:27 the FDE or 75 like they want even clay I think starts at 100k a year so if you're
59:31 a bigger organization that's cheaper than a human right it's it's a tall but
59:37 but there are no $99 a month uh products which has a lot of it they're trying and
59:40 I think it's going to come they don't autotrain yet particularly well and so I
59:45 don't know that junior folks are going to have access to 100k budget
59:49 unfortunately right so that advice is for the VPs the folks that are worried a
59:53 lot of them are worried that I'm obsolete right that I'm obsolete that I'm not
59:58 going to get that role at Verscell or OpenAI um so keep keep going my the
60:05 advice for the junior folks is to embrace it you if you whatever tools your
60:12 organization is using become the best person at working with that agent and
60:15 you will automatically get more Yeah. Is it annoying that that you walk
60:20 into work and the agent set up four calls for you and maybe you only wanted
60:24 to do two of them? Embrace it. Embrace it because you'll be twice as
60:28 productive. Right. I was literally talking yesterday. There's a company I'm
60:31 on the board of called owner.com which is kind of like AI for restaurants are
60:34 crossing 100 million in revenue going really quickly. He's got 100 folks on
60:39 the sales team. Kyle does. With AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million
60:43 in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar
60:50 company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more
60:54 efficiency. Still 100 reps, right? 100 reps. Uh he's going to need more to hit
60:58 the number for next year, but 3 to 5 million per rep. So, if you're that guy
61:02 that can work with those tools, you become more valuable. But if you fight it, if you don't want
61:08 to do that extra meeting, if you fight it, um there's a there's a there's a
61:14 tool, another tool we use for RevOps. There's two we use. One's called
61:18 Momentum, one's called Attention. They're both great. They're very
61:20 similar. And what it does is every single thing a human does is
61:23 automatically tracked in your CRM instantly. Every comm real time. There
61:27 have been tools that have done some of this before, but literally everything.
61:31 And and when we rolled it out, and it happened with a few other folks I know,
61:34 one of the folks on that old team quit that day. Quit the day we rolled out the
61:39 the AI RevOps. You know why? He hadn't done anything in 30 days.
61:42 >> The gig was up. >> Oh wow. >> Every day he would show up to our
61:45 standup and he said, "Yeah, I'm doing outbound and I'm really working on that
61:49 deal with Versel >> and nothing would close." And then we
61:53 said, "Oh, we're" and he quit that day. So my point is he didn't lean into it,
61:57 right? Lean into it. Now you're going to have full total transparency on your
62:00 day. You know, granola is, you know, a side example for everything. But but AI
62:04 is going to track everything you do. Like if you want to fight it, you want
62:07 to fight the future, good luck to you. But embrace it and you will you will
62:10 leap ahead of your peers that aren't embracing this. Embra embrace all the
62:14 transparency, all the leads, all the work it makes you do. Because you can't
62:17 close 10 times as much doing the same amount of work, can you?
62:20 >> Nope. >> We do more work with AI. I'm working the
62:24 hardest I've ever worked. That's with all these agents and all the
62:27 output they create and Ameilia does a lot of it but even I am working the
62:31 hardest but but it but it's better but it's not less work it's the it's more
62:35 work the agents are so productive you have to keep up so I so sorry to
62:39 interrupt for the for the for the managers buy an agent deploy it yourself
62:43 don't have someone else do it do everything from training to ingestion to
62:46 orchestration and those terms will be less scary to you for the junior folks
62:51 be the guy the gal the person that loves these tools and that is the first person
62:55 to embrace whatever it is. Don't fight it. >> Awesome. Okay. For founders in startups,
63:01 what I'm hearing is the um be that forward deployed engineer, have that
63:04 person, that sales engineer that's sitting there helping companies. This is
63:09 basically an opportunity to to uh compete with bigger players where you're
63:12 actually there helping them set things up. Like all the companies you
63:14 mentioned, none of them are big companies. They're all startups, which
63:16 is really interesting. >> It is true. I will say it is working
63:21 with Salesforce the way we are. It's the way I haven't worked with Salesforce
63:24 since it was the first product I bought. I mean, 20 years ago, dude. Um, when I
63:29 bought Salesforce 20 years ago, I got everything was hands-on. I bought two
63:32 seats. I remember back in the day talking to my rep. I'm like, "Don't talk
63:35 to me. You don't have time. You work at Salesforce. I'm buying two seats." He's
63:39 like, "No, no, no. This is what we do. I'm here for you. I'm going to help you
63:42 get your app on the app exchange. We're going to do all that." And that went
63:44 away. It's kind of back, right? And Mark's got 2,000 folks doing this at
63:48 Salesforce now. So, we have a forward deployed engineer. I'm not even sure it
63:51 makes economic sense. And maybe in two years someone like you or I would not
63:56 get an FDE, but but but the big companies are figuring it out. But yes,
64:00 pick a vendor that will make you a success with with an FDE, right? And and
64:04 um people throw this term out, but again, it's just someone that's going to
64:07 make sure you get trained and onboarded with your product for real. But yeah, so
64:11 start startups have a motivation to do this in a way that maybe some of the
64:15 incumbents really are still figuring out, right? >> Which is a big opportunity for startups
64:19 to actually do this. And this actually resonates uh very uh closely to what Jen
64:24 suggested for startups which is sell services initially just like do work for
64:28 them solve their problem not with software to get things started to grow
64:31 that into a massive contract with them that is software. >> You mean the mean land and expand start
64:36 with a smaller deal and grow it. >> Start no like like a for like a person
64:41 sitting there doing this work with them. Essentially what you're describing don't
64:44 just like we have software go try using it. It's like we will have someone on
64:48 our team helping you figure this out and and maybe there's not even software yet
64:51 to do all these things, but we'll have them do it for you and then the software
64:55 will take on more and more of that work over time. >> I think that's always been great advice
64:59 and startups have always been great at this like in the early days you the CEO
65:03 does it is is doing support and co's on boarding you. I think what's different
65:08 today is the agent will fail without training and onboarding this product. It
65:11 it it will fail like it will never it will never work. So it it becomes an
65:15 imperative if you want to win like you need I I you this term has been bandied
65:20 about too much but you need a team of humans we can call them forward deployed
65:23 engineers that make a 100% sure that when the agent is turned on it's awesome
65:28 that's your job as a founder make sure it's awesome versus in the old days that
65:33 even when I built one of the first e signature services that was so easy to
65:36 use we'd have some customers take them two years to go live big customers
65:40 that's just not okay in the age of AI >> right >> yeah And these forward to deploy
65:44 engineers is that just another name for sales engineer or is that a different
65:46 sort of background? >> It can be and I think all this nomclature is confusing man all this
65:52 orchestration and ingestion. I think we're we we're conf like Palunteer is
65:56 obviously the single most successful public B2B company at the moment right
65:59 maybe maybe data bricks and a few others will beat them in the next wave of IPOs
66:03 but their idea for forward deployed engineers is similar but these are nine
66:06 figure deals. Most of us aren't doing hundred million dollar deals. So the
66:09 idea that you'll have Gary Tan and an army of folks out in the office for 6
66:14 months getting the software to work that that that sort of inspires the idea but
66:17 it's really sure it could be a sales engineer or solution architect but the
66:21 difference is the sees that a lot of us worked with in the days were resources
66:27 and often like there was also a classic resource of like eight sales reps to one
66:30 SE. So the eight reps would there'd be a pod and one SE would be responsible and
66:34 you'd kind of have to fight to get Jason or Lenny's time to help the eight reps.
66:39 This is inverted. The FDE's number one job is to make the customer a success.
66:43 Okay. I was literally the other day doing a presentation, an AI leader that
66:50 closed a $3 million deal. Um, the FTE did it all themselves. Sales wasn't even
66:54 involved in the deal. They went on site, they got the deployment going, they
66:57 tuned it everything. All sales did was manage it through the procurement
67:00 process. Okay, that's pretty different than a guy answering some questions for
67:03 the humans, right? So it is a combination of customer success and SE
67:09 or whatever but it is it is really I mean frankly it's just being a a classic
67:15 consultant that gets the product done on day one on on day one. That's the
67:19 difference is that when you go live it works. When you go live it works. That's
67:24 what that and it's a fancy name for a bunch of folks on your team that when it
67:28 goes live the AI agent actually works. So you have a 100% success rate instead
67:33 of like the 5% rate of 2024. So those people, but they do need to be tech
67:36 technical. I don't know if they need to be engineers. It can really vary based
67:40 on, you know, I love it when they're kind of like mediocre engineers that are
67:44 like in love with the product. That's my favorite type of FD. Like they're only
67:47 they don't really want to code much anymore, but they did code and they like
67:53 just love your product. Um but uh I don't think it can be someone with no
67:56 product chops but it could all different folks can work but they they've got to
68:00 know the product cold but um yeah I would startups like I mean the term is
68:03 thrown around you need four folks that will just make sure that on go live the
68:07 product works your agentic product works that's what you need
68:11 >> I think what might be useful to close out this conversation is to kind of go
68:15 through what are the things that are changing like maybe a handful of things
68:19 that that are changed that are now going to be different in the world of sales go
68:21 to And what are a few things that are just going to stay the same?
68:25 >> Yeah, let's go through it. Obviously, support is the first one to have
68:28 changed. It's our obviously permanently changed with AI, right? Whatever vendor
68:32 you look at, 50 to 80% of support is done by AI. And we don't always think
68:37 about support as GTM, but it is it's the start of a customer journey. It's very
68:39 important to the customer journey. So, so if you're skeptical, go look at, you
68:43 know, support has changed permanently. So, that that train's left the station.
68:48 Really, as we record this, not much has changed in sales. I mean, I do think the
68:51 stuff we've talked about is the bleeding edge. I do think the classic
68:58 cadencebased SDR running campaigns through a through a tool him or herself
69:02 will be mostly extinct with 12 months. There is no reason AI can't do a better
69:07 job than that role. The classic qualifier qualifying inbound leads,
69:11 which is a crappy experience for customers, should be similarly extinct
69:18 within mostly extinct um in 12 months. the rest we're we're going to wait and
69:23 see. I think what we do know for reps, for sales reps, everyone wants to be
69:26 even more efficient in the next 12 months. There's a lot of reasons people
69:30 want to be again at the bottom end, it's it's it's cost, it's profitability
69:33 pressures. At the high end, it's cultural. We just don't want 200 reps
69:38 running around Verscell or Rep. Everyone at just the company owner, 3 to
69:42 5 million per rep is a lot different than 3 to 500,000. So, you have to
69:47 adjust as a rep. you still there's still every AI leader can't hire enough reps
69:50 like we talked about, but you're going to have to adjust to being geometrically
69:55 if not exponentially more productive with help from AI. So, you have to
69:58 embrace these tools for real. And everyone, a lot of folks, a lot of old
70:02 school GTM leaders are like, you know, AI isn't going to hurt sales reps. It's
70:05 just going to make them give them superpowers. The best ones, yes, the mediocre are
70:13 just going to be like more mediocre, right? Um, so I think the AE is we will
70:19 always have salespeople, but being a people person is not enough anymore.
70:23 You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson, Lenny? >> You ask them what they're really good
70:28 at. I'm a people person, Lenny. You know how you can you know you know how you
70:32 you know how good I am, Lenny? I I I'm on text with 10 of my best customers.
70:35 I'm a people person. >> Um, what are the toughest technical
70:38 objections you have at your product? What what they don't they don't know, but
70:43 they're a people person. you know, this is like golf 3.0. It just it's not
70:46 enough. Like it's it's it's insufficient. So people people are
70:52 becoming obsolete in sales. Um field sales, no idea how AI is going to impact
70:57 that if you're out in the field. I mean, you know, the enterprise leaders are
71:00 hiring more field sales people than ever. Salesforce is hiring more than
71:04 ever. Um and knocking on doors still works, man. So don't don't know the
71:09 answers there. But the office worker and the work from home worker, AI is going
71:13 to take as much of your job or make you as much better as it can and you got to
71:17 embrace it. So that that's a I would say from support to knocking on doors. You
71:21 know, we're going to go from 80% to 0%. Uh >> what about phone calls?
71:26 >> You know, it's a great question and we should have hit it. Obviously, there's
71:30 there's plenty of robocall and regulatory issues around it. Um
71:33 certainly a lot of startups are breaking the rules anyway. I would say this.
71:38 Listen, there are there's phone calls and there's even SMS. There's limits to how
71:43 much SMS you can automate, right? A lot of old school businesses don't even
71:47 check emails, right? I mean, you're working in the shop floor. So, those are
71:51 unanswered questions. People are breaking the rules. Open AI still breaks
71:55 the rules, right? Um, now it's licensing Disney content. It used to just borrow
72:01 Disney content. We will see. Um, so I don't I don't know the answers to that.
72:04 I think in in Europe it'll certainly be much slower than in the US, but startups
72:07 are going to push the limits. They're going to push the limits on what we can
72:12 do with AI calls, AI enhanced, whether a human's kind of on the line, but AI is
72:16 doing all the work. Maybe that maybe that's legal, right? Getting more
72:20 consent for SMS than we typically get. So to think that the typical barriers to
72:25 roboc calling in SMS is gonna that startups aren't going to bend the rules
72:29 in the age of AI, I I'm I'm dubious, but it's a good question. It's harder to do.
72:33 The one thing I will add is um and it's a good objection to all of this and and
72:38 I'd love to get Jen's thoughts too, but if you talk to the startups you'd invest
72:43 in, uh Lenny, fewer of them are good at outbound phone calls than you'd think,
72:48 right? We had um we had multip of the heads of uh revenue at um Ripling Speak
72:53 at Saster, the old CRO worked on my team and others. They were late to develop uh
72:58 cold calling because we never did it back in the the CRO was on my team. So,
73:02 we had to you had to bring in someone that had worked with Sam Blonde at Brex
73:06 who had done it. It is a real art to pick up the phone and close business. It
73:10 is a specialized skill. And so, if you if if that's your specialized skill and
73:13 there's no way for AI to benefit, so be it. But I don't think for most tech
73:17 calls that that is as impactful as we pretend it is. I don't think most of the
73:21 startups you and I work with and most of the folks listen to this do not close
73:25 the majority of their revenue with cold human cold calls. It's it is a it is a
73:30 craft that works but man it you got to be good at it. >> You have this line somewhere that if you
73:34 can close on a text message AI can close it. >> Yes it is. I'm being facitious in the sense
73:42 that people say that I think have weaker relationships with customers. This is
73:45 why a is people have weaker relationships with their customers than
73:49 they think. Yeah. And if it's so easy to close a deal on a text message, and
73:53 we've done hundreds of thousands of these and found it, folks don't mind if
73:57 it's an AI. If it's a good AI, why won't it close it on the text message? Right?
74:03 AI can be people people, too. It really can't. If you don't believe
74:06 me, folks, go to Lennybot. Is that the URL? Lennybot.com. >> Lennybot.com.
74:09 >> If you don't think AI can be people people, go spend hours on Lennybot,
74:13 don't they? >> Yeah. And uh the best part is you could
74:16 talk to talk to Lennybot uh with voice. There's a voice feature that sounds
74:19 exactly like me. It's unbelievable. >> Yeah. So, and and one a meta reason to
74:25 go use Lennybot. Go in with a learning a learning mind. Don't go in bias. You
74:30 will find that AI can be people people. People spend hours. Our best who are our
74:33 best therapists today as we record this chat. GPT is our best best therapist on
74:37 planet Earth. It's a people person. I mean, it sounds silly, but if if that is
74:42 your best defense in sales that you're a people person, uh you you're the the
74:48 sands are the sands are sinking beneath you right now. It's it's not enough of a
74:52 skill. It's people person is great when people buy enterprise software that's
74:55 going to take two years to roll out and they have no idea how it works and it's
74:59 a hope and a prayer when you expect the agent to work during
75:08 the pilot before the big check comes people person is insufficient
75:13 terrific talk tell me the person that's going to launch my agent train it and
75:17 get into production for me before I even pay you it was you know it is this is
75:21 the dream when he this is maybe this is one of the biggest changes of all
75:26 when I talk with Mark Beni off and Salesforce is the biggest right it's 44
75:29 billion it's the biggest ship to to turn right he's like the number one thing I
75:34 envy in Palunteer one is their high deal sizes he made that joke in all the media
75:37 and all the press but the other thing is I wish he said I wish I could I can't
75:41 today I wish every Salesforce customer now could go live before they pay
75:47 that is so different from how we've been trained in many ways to almost rip off
75:51 the customer to get them to buy the product. Uh try first try to avoid a
75:55 pilot, then have the smallest pilot we can, then roll it out over years to
76:00 different people. AI has upped the bar in terms of what customers expect. And
76:03 that's why the best ones are blowing up because the the ROI is so high. Um and
76:09 so you you've got to deliver the ROI before the document is e- signed today.
76:14 That will people that haven't fully embraced that are at public companies
76:20 growing 8%. They're still trying to play games. >> What are some other things that you
76:24 think are going to change that people may not be thinking about that's going
76:27 to change the way we do sales in the next couple years? >> Net net, we're going to need more sales
76:33 and go to market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so
76:37 quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human
76:42 beings than ever. I I I I we'd have to put together a spreadsheet to see the
76:46 crossover point. Obviously, many folks are shrinking headcount. Microsoft's
76:49 already said they're past peak employee. They will never they'll never going to
76:52 be bigger. You're we're seeing this all across the companies we work with. They
76:54 don't want to be they want to be as lean as they can. But AI is such a huge part
77:00 of our economy already, right? And it's such it's such a force of nature and
77:04 everyone is, you know, everyone eventually goes enterprise. Everyone
77:07 eventually has a sales team. Everyone eventually does it. It's happening
77:11 faster. You know, 11 Labs um 50% of their sales is through enterprise now,
77:16 right? I mean, I don't know everybody. Um, the fact that Verscell just added
77:19 Janine means they're going more enterprise by definition, right? I think
77:23 Replet just added a sales team a couple months ago for real and now they've
77:26 added another CRO. So they got to 10 and something million with no traditional
77:30 sales team, but at a billion it's going to be flooded with salespeople. So if
77:36 you get great at this stuff, if you go buy an agent today, when you listen to
77:40 this and deploy it yourself and do the hard work and train it and ingest it and
77:43 iterate it every day and get ahead of it and then get two agents, then three and
77:47 then four, you may become more valuable, have a better experience in DTM, and I believe
77:54 I hope actually be better paid. Like I've talked about that we should have
77:59 $250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Versel, they'd be managing 10 agents,
78:03 not 10 people. then they're worth 250 grand instead of 80 grand or 90 grand.
78:08 It's it's not that much, is it? So there is a great world coming. These are the
78:11 best of times, aren't they, Lenny, for product and business, right? Just it's
78:16 not evenly distributed. So you want to be you want to have if you have those
78:20 skills, even though we're not going to need these SDRs and even though we're
78:23 not going to be BDRs, even though we can get rid of half of AES, there is so the
78:27 amount of revenue and growth in AI leaders is so phenomenal, right? Not not
78:31 just at the startups at the Google clouds at everywhere the the Azour there
78:37 they're hiring so many humans that netnet it's a positive for the
78:41 profession but not for the way we've done it in the past you're at risk
78:45 >> that is really interesting that we're still hiring and and and and this is
78:48 what I've seen too just like everyone's hiring sales people go to market people
78:51 do you think there's like going to be this peak in the next couple years of
78:54 just okay now that AI is doing more and more of this or is it or is it just hard
78:58 to predict because who knows how big AI gets how big these companies
79:02 I mean it is over a trillion dollars. I don't see any re and it's accelerating
79:07 the amount of AI is is increasing the amount Gartner says next year will be
79:11 the fastest acceleration of money deployed into it and software in a
79:16 decade. It's reacelerated. That can that last forever? No. Eventually we we
79:20 consume 100% of the global GDP. There's no money left to buy. Like there there
79:24 are some some limits. But I I think for I don't think you and I and anyone any
79:27 of the millions of people that follow you, I don't think we got to think too
79:30 much more than three to four years out here. It's too much. There's too much
79:35 change. If you if you become a master of the universe and AI, you will be hyper
79:38 employable the next two to three years. And if you stay with a learner's mind,
79:43 that will just compound. And so you will you will have a a job that I think is
79:47 far more interesting, even if more tiring than than than we used to have.
79:52 But the days of working 20 hours a week and kind of phoning it in and getting a
79:57 few deals, uh, you know, I I think those are forever beh That That was a great
80:01 time. Um, even you had a little bit of that. You're I think you're working
80:04 harder than you used to, aren't you? >> I am. I am. >> I mean, the classic Lenny vibe at
80:10 100,000 subscribers was kind of leave me alone. I take a lot of vacations. I do
80:14 some good work. I mean, it's still part of your vibe, but I I think you're
80:17 working harder. >> I'm working incredibly hard. I am. The
80:21 original idea was create this like like chill newsletter life. I'm just going to
80:24 write a newsletter once a week. Life's gonna be good. >> And uh it was just it's just hard to
80:28 pass up on really cool opportunities and and do more, help it grow bigger. Like
80:33 it's just I couldn't resist. So yeah, I'm working. >> And that should be all of us though.
80:37 Like we should you should be feel if you're not feeling what you said or even
80:41 a version of what I said then then you're not you're not living you're not
80:44 in the right you're not living the AI dream today. It is more work. It should
80:47 be tired. It should be like it if nothing even if it's better in some ways
80:52 it is just more work. Um but but this is the most exciting time of our lifetimes
80:57 to be in software. I mean good god I'm like I can't even code Lety and I've
81:00 built 12 apps on replet in the last 150 days used by a million million times.
81:04 I've been waiting 10 years for some of these folks to build some of these apps.
81:08 I just did it myself, right? I literally just when I was in London, I built a
81:11 whole app where you can sell you can practice selling Harvey Cursor Replet
81:18 and ChatgBT Enterprise and it works like we couldn't this wasn't even
81:21 possible at the start of the year, was it? So, these are magical times and we
81:26 the fact that we can we can run an eight figureure business with three people and
81:31 20 agents. It's like, you know, get get excited or like go join one of these
81:37 really slow growing be like I I my advice is pick one of two paths today.
81:41 Either be working harder like even you and I are, right? We don't have to. Um
81:47 or honestly, I will say the truth is the the there were a thousand unicorns born
81:51 in 2021, right? 800 of them are growing pretty slowly, will never IPO, may not
81:56 have an exit, but they're okay with 8% or 15% growth. If you don't want to be
81:59 on the journey we talked about, I'm not judging. I get it. We're humans, right?
82:03 We have families. Not all of us are obsessed. I think I'm kind of obsessed.
82:06 I think you've become more obsessed. If that's not you, join join something more
82:11 slow growing. They still need people. Not as many. They still need people. But
82:14 I would pick I would pick a lane for next year. Don't pretend that there's
82:18 this middle path going to start because it don't exist in GTM. And I don't think
82:21 it exists in product or engineering either. >> I love just how excited you are about
82:25 this. just like you could tell on Twitter just how fun this is for you
82:29 just learning and sharing and uh and I love that you're sharing it, but I think
82:33 it's just a symptom of you're just so excited about what's happening and what
82:36 you're learning and it's just like you can't help but share it. I'm in the same
82:38 way. I'm just like, "Oh I just vibed this really cool thing. I got to
82:41 tweet about it." >> It's just it is just magical that our ability to build things that we
82:49 couldn't build before or build in ways and paces. It it's just
82:55 >> it it's and it's accelerating. It's so I mean we could talk about it forever, but
82:58 even for me for like I just picked Rep. I picked Replet because Twitter told me
83:00 to. I could have picked another tool. Like I'm not an investor and I'm not I'm
83:05 not even biased, but I'm in the top 1%. >> Just to double down what you said,
83:09 you're top 1% user of Replet. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Yeah. So it really didn't work well when
83:15 I started about 170 days ago. Then a V2 came out and it got better. the
83:19 hallucinations went away and then this is just like you got to get excited
83:22 about folks may not know this and other tools when V3 came out I don't know 45
83:27 days ago now it has agents talking to agents so what happens is when you when
83:31 you and I again I can't really code so when I have an issue and I'm trying to
83:35 figure out how to do something the agent calls in an architect or another agent
83:38 and they debate and argue with it and they come up with the right answer the
83:42 first time this happened I just fell out of my chair it's just so not only is it
83:46 magical I mean great you can do a prompt and build a crappy app it doesn't work
83:49 now like 150 days later you have agents debating how to build better code with
83:52 each other and you don't even need to know how to code I mean this is the
83:56 greatest the only greater time is going to be next year right I've been waiting I've been
84:03 waiting right um and uh you know and just that the things that you can build
84:07 today and the other I mean you know this but other folks I mean that's me
84:12 building without being able to code the other Captain Obvious thing you know if
84:15 you're building any why are folks so productive on all these tools I Every
84:18 bit of open source software in the world is in these tools. If you want to build something that's
84:25 been built before, it's so easy. The novel stuff's really hard, right? It's
84:29 not any easier, but man, it's just these are these are great. And so, and and
84:33 maybe may maybe and so for GTM for sales, it's it's it's a couple beats behind and
84:40 and and and um there's probably a bunch of reasons for it. Some of it is, I
84:44 think, ironically, is just where founders are interested. So marketing is
84:50 behind sales for AI. Like the AI SGR has exploded. I don't really know why. I
84:54 invested in a couple of PreAiI tools. Um I invested in Salesoft which was sold
84:57 for two and a half billion as like the last deal the 2020 ones like the seed
85:01 investment. No one wanted to be in that category. Now everyone in the world
85:04 wants to build an AISD AR CRM. But marketing is slower just because they're
85:08 really people don't really want to build the cursor for marketing. People say
85:12 they do but but you it's just not but it it will get there. But um the innovation
85:17 will just accelerate. It's just going to accelerate. So So don't be a skeptic on
85:20 this stuff. Like if you're not as excited as me, then here's my last bit
85:25 of advice on this for folks. If you're not if you don't feel what I feel,
85:30 here's my advice over the holidays. When you have a quiet moment when you're
85:33 having your mold wine or your hot chocolate or whatever, go fire up your
85:38 browser. Do it in incognito. Go to your app and do everything
85:44 with a fresh Gmail address. Try support. See how your support is. Try to contact
85:49 sales. Sign up for the newsletter. Do everything. Try your product. If you do
85:54 this quietly, your heart, you're going to cry about some of the things you've
85:57 seen. You're going to cry how bad your support is. You're going to cry how long
86:00 it takes sales to get back to you. You're going to cry about a couple
86:03 things. Pick the thing that makes you cry the most over your mold wine and go
86:07 buy that agent and fix it. and and then you will have the passion that we have
86:13 this I always counel people to do this it just wasn't as actionable before
86:19 but so many f you just get lost you forget about what these things you
86:21 forget about the onboarding workflow and you forget about support and you forget
86:25 how bad contact me and you're so lost in the strategic so you got it once a year
86:28 ideally once a quarter just do this incognito mode test and even for lady's
86:32 newsletter I bet we can find some part you forgot to touch >> nope not gonna happen I'm Just I'm just
86:37 joking. >> You like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I I didn't touch that since I launched the
86:42 Substack. It doesn't even go to the right that page just gets a 404.
86:47 >> I'm going to do this over the holidays." And I love that this like usually the
86:51 advice would have been, okay, email your product manager and tell them you found
86:54 all these bugs. What you're saying here is no, find an agent to take care of
86:58 this in the future. Like make this a much better experience for everyone
87:00 always. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if it's the one that makes you cry, it may motivate you to do
87:04 it. >> Yeah. And you don't it's not like you have to publish it to production. It's
87:08 not like you have to have your, you know, CEO approve this thing. It's just
87:12 like show them what you might be able to do. Here's what I did over the weekend.
87:15 Uh maybe we should explore doing this thing with our site. >> Yeah. The jaw is just my job.
87:19 >> Yeah. >> Oh man. Jason, I feel like I could chat
87:24 with you for hours, but uh I think it's this is a good point to to wrap things
87:29 up. Is there anything that you wanted to share or is there anything you want to
87:32 leave listeners with? One last thing maybe that comes up that I've learned
87:36 that that are on people's minds and we can break is a lot of folks are
87:39 concerned. Hey, this will impact people's jobs. What do I do? Like, okay,
87:43 I want I I did what you said. I did the incognito mode. I'm going to bring in
87:47 this this agent, this sales agent or this support agent. I've tried I've even
87:51 did but but I'm worried I'm going to get pushed back and people are going to lose
87:55 their jobs. Um I don't h I I don't have the perfect answer to this one, but I
88:00 think be honest about it. be be honest that for the best people it will make
88:03 them more productive. For the best people it it it will be even fun. For
88:09 the best people they will be better at their job. And if it is a threat to some
88:13 of the folks on the team, the future's coming anyway. We might as well embrace
88:18 it. So it's just when I hear I I I wouldn't I would be positive about it. I
88:21 would explain it helps the best people. Um but I I don't think dancing around it
88:25 is the right answer in your organization. it it will result in
88:29 change and if it if some jobs change from one world to the other that that's
88:32 life in the age of AI don't don't hide it I don't think it helps
88:35 >> I love that in your case and in uh Jean's case at Verscell it's not like
88:40 you let anyone go in your case the SDRs quit uh and in her case she moved them
88:45 from I believe from inbound to outbound or outbound to inbound she just kind of
88:48 reshuffled them to do to have higher impact somewhere else >> I think that's an important a really
88:53 important point this is another thing that I think the media creates too much
88:58 drama on I don't think AI is not I mean AI has led to some layoffs. Um but even
89:02 though most of the ones we read it's just a justification to do layoffs. It's
89:05 just it's just a reason to blame it on it. Um uh what's a much bigger issue is
89:11 that people just won't be backfilled with humans. We will use AI to
89:14 backfield. That's what we did. Like we didn't fire I've never fired anyone in
89:16 my whole career other than for inappropriate conduct a few times,
89:20 right? That's that you fired today for that stuff. But pretty much I've never
89:22 fired anyone that didn't do something inappropriate. they just when they go
89:25 this time we just said now it's the agents right and so that's a much bigger
89:29 force of nature than some random layoffs which probably aren't really new to AI
89:33 right it's probably not because you brought in 20 agents in 2025 it's
89:36 probably because you just want to downsize anyway and this is the excuse
89:41 um so it's not it's not a it's probably less of a threat to you than you think
89:45 AI um but it what it does mean is if you're not don't want to embrace it
89:49 Lenny maybe don't leave your current job >> yeah I was just
89:53 >> maybe don't leave your current top >> because the new place might not be
89:55 hiring for this role. >> Yeah, I have a God I have I have a a
89:59 sales exec who I love. I worked I'd known for many years and he went from a
90:04 100k job then almost an 800k job then down to a 200k job then left that one
90:09 because he didn't like it and now he can't get a job at all. He's back in
90:13 school. So maybe stay. >> We all maybe stay. >> No shame in staying is there?
22:04 valuable. >> It's interesting because I'm an investor in a bunch of startups as are you and
22:10 I'm actually seeing a lot of asks for go to market people, sales people. Do you
22:14 think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand, they're
22:16 like, "Oh, we need people to help and then this will start to become more AI
22:20 over time or are they just looking for these really senior people that you're
22:23 talking about?" Well, listen, whether you're managing humans or orchestrating
22:28 agents, you need leadership. We've yet to produce an autonomous CEO.
22:33 I know folks talk about how on on Twitter that will AI will replace the
22:36 CEO, but I don't know that that's literal as much as figurative, right?
22:39 So, we're still going to need the seuite. We're still going to need VPs. I
22:44 mean, it's become so much work to manage a million leads, right? A half million
22:49 leads. We we need these leaders whether the the question is and I've seen your
22:53 call out there and I saw your tweet on it. The question is how many of the
22:58 folks that had the current playbooks are the right folks for the future. I'm
23:04 thinking maybe 20%. of the folks I talked to 20 for are still panicking
23:09 about AI and and I'll tell you how to not how to be in the 20% if you want to
23:14 know but I think very few like the Janine from Verscell are going to make
23:18 the jump so we'll see there will be huge organizations right like Denise just
23:22 went from Slack and Salesforce after 14 years to be CRO open AAI she's working
23:26 going to be pretty high level right so she may not know how to need to know how
23:30 to implement the agents but most of the folks your companies want to hire I
23:35 would just make sure they could they really want to roll up their sleeves and
23:40 do the job of 2026 2027, right? Um just because they worked at Slack does not
23:43 necessarily mean they have the skills at your startup. >> You said that you had some tips for
23:47 folks to actually be this 20%. What are some If someone's listening to this
23:50 like, "Oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on?"
23:53 >> It's going to sound simple. It will work and most almost nobody's doing this.
23:59 Pick a tool, an agent, an agentic tool to solve one of your problems. It
24:03 doesn't almost m just one that's the most painful or the one that's most
24:07 acute. It could be support. It could be SDR. It could be inbound qualification.
24:11 Pick one. Pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. Okay? We can talk
24:15 about how to pick a vendor, but pick a leading vendor that treats you well that
24:21 you like and do it yourself. Train the agent. Ingest the data. Do the
24:28 iterations. Understand how this damn thing works. Okay. The folks that are
24:33 lost today have never done it. We literally we've turned into a consulting
24:37 shop. Lenny, it's kind of crazy. I I don't know what I think about it, but we
24:40 literally just did a job. Amelia, our chief A officer, and and Mia, she she
24:44 she drove it. We did a call with a public B2B company worth well over 10
24:48 billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay? Okay. And we did a call
24:51 with their team and they're like, "We're Okay. One, no chance. Two, we asked
25:05 them, "How much of this have you done yourself?" Like, "Have you have you done
25:07 it yourself?" And it was just crickets on this call of 20 people. No one had
25:10 done it theirel. So, they thought they could take an untrained agent with no
25:15 training and just magically give it to a bunch of young 20-year-old SDRs and and
25:19 this magically would sell on its own. It doesn't work that way, right? So, the
25:25 way all these agents work is you there's a lot of jargon which is intimidating.
25:30 Ingestion, orchestration, training. It's not that hard, guys. It's just
25:34 different. It's the same B2B stuff we've been doing for over a decade. You go to
25:38 a website, okay? You give it a URL of your website. You give it a URL of what
25:41 your wiki is. You give it a URL of your training docs. Maybe you upload your
25:45 perspectus. You upload a few documents. It ingests the data. And ingesting means
25:49 it uploads. It means it processes the data and it does some other stuff you don't really
25:54 need to know. Some ragging, some vectoring, it really doesn't matter. You
25:59 you upload some stuff and it kind of knows it and isn't great at it. And then
26:03 it will turn it into ideally it will turn it into questions and you answer
26:06 these questions and it they will be get the more you answer and train it.
26:09 Training is just answering questions and getting better and better. So, first you
26:13 upload a bunch of your stuff. Then you spend hours training it, often with the
26:17 help of a vendor, someone called a forward deploy engineer, which is a
26:19 scary term. It means someone that's going to help you do this. You upload
26:23 your stuff, you try to get it right, and then you basically have to make sure
26:29 it's right. QA testing. And every day when that AISDR sends out emails and do
26:33 practice emails, they will say some dumb things. Maybe it's hallucinations. It
26:37 really doesn't matter what the technical term is and you correct it and each and
26:43 if you do this for 30 days and every day you spend an hour or two correcting
26:47 those mistakes by the 30th day it's going to be pretty good and this is
26:51 anyone can do this that has been in B2B or SAS anyone can do what I just
26:54 described it is not that different than other things we've done it's just
26:58 sequenced differently but nobody does this everyone's panicked and if you if
27:01 you can go do this pick any tool pick pick uh agent force pick qualified pick
27:05 artisan pick whatever you want If you can go do this and get it live into
27:09 production, you're hyper employable. All the companies you talked about that need
27:13 a GTM person, they will hire you. You could be imaginally be their chief
27:18 agentic GTM officer because but almost anyone can do this if they want to. It's
27:21 just going to take a month of your time and it might take you 50 or 60 hours
27:25 plus qualifying the vendor, right? And in the old days, like when we diverted
27:30 our podcast, you'd hire an agency and disappear. That's how you do this stuff.
27:33 Don't It don't work that. The agencies don't know how to do this. you've got to
27:37 do it yourself. But if you do, man, you will rock. You will just you will just
27:41 rock and you will learn, right? You will learn um and you will learn the limits
27:46 and you will learn the agent can what it can do and where it can't do. And then
27:49 you will learn how to do the next one, right? So like we're pretty far on agent
27:53 force, which is Salesforce's one, which Mark talks a lot about, but we're we're
27:55 probably one of the only organizations of our size on it. I will tell you a
27:59 cheat code which is pretty interesting. So, we've got we had three of these
28:03 agents working for sales. After training it and learning it and
28:06 spending months time to learn it, we got it down to one prompt. And prompt is
28:10 another almost intimidating word. A string of text that describes what you
28:14 want this thing to do. Okay? We took that prompt and gave it to agent force.
28:18 Then a day was pretty good. So, you will if you can do one of these, it'll be
28:21 really hard. It'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier. And then
28:25 you're going to be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it
28:27 yourself. But if you're waiting for people on your team to do it, if you're
28:32 waiting for an agency to do it, I think you're going to be out of a job.
28:37 Right? So this is like everyone comes to us as an experts. We're not we're only
28:41 experts because we did it 20 times. >> I think what might be helpful here
28:45 actually is to do a a tour kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've
28:47 built and what they do, which ones have been most impactful. And then as you do
28:52 that, what products you use, what what powers these agents that that you like
28:56 and maybe don't like. If any if anyone goes to saster.ai/agents,
29:00 we'll you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out. You can copy us
29:04 and I'll walk you through it. But two two caveats or things at the top. I
29:07 built a lot of stuff in Replet. We can talk about it for fun. I'm like a top 1%
29:11 user. I love it. None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it
29:15 yourself. You're not Versel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer
29:19 that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same
29:23 idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these
29:28 products are expensive. They're not so expensive. It's worth and then
29:32 maintaining the pace of innovation is so fast. Even if you can hire someone to
29:35 build it internally, it will become obsolete if you're not careful in a
29:39 couple months. So, we've built a lot of stuff. We could talk about um uh I we I
29:43 built a a calculator to do startup calculations, used 800,000 times in 90
29:46 days >> for valuation, right? >> Yeah. For valuations. I built a pitch
29:50 deck reviewer that's reviewed almost 3,000 pitch decks. Lots of fun stuff,
29:53 but none of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. None of it. So, just a
29:56 caveat, don't build it yourself unless you're Verscell, unless you have a
30:00 reason. That was a great pod. It was wonderful. Don't do it. Don't do that.
30:03 >> Basically, if unless you have a awesome go to market engineers
30:06 >> for and they really want to do it. They're really are chomping at the bit
30:11 to do it. Um, don't do it. So, I started and this is not where other folks would
30:13 start, but there's some learnings. I started there's an app called Deli,
30:18 which makes digital clones. And, um, you used it for the Lenny bot a long time
30:21 ago. I saw you do it. What's that? Yeah. Lenny.com. Yeah. Check that out.
30:25 >> I saw it a long time ago. It was interesting, but I I I did it didn't
30:28 click. And then Brian Halligan, who's the founder chairman of HubSpot, did one
30:32 too. Uh there's Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia, so he helped
30:35 them early on. And then I kind of had a magic moment and this is the way it
30:38 works in AI when I saw the combination of the two. So yours was really like
30:42 people should love moneybot because it's got it's if folks haven't tried it, try
30:46 it. It is ingested. I know a scary term for some. It is ingested every single
30:50 interview you've ever done, right? Every word of content you've written. So, and
30:54 it can combine them all together. It can combine the Verscell story and the and
30:58 and and and uh what what you did with at with Dylan at Figma and can synthesize
31:02 the knowledge and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. What I liked about Brian's
31:07 better than yours though was that it was Brian and Lennybot is kind of Lenny, but
31:11 it's also kind of all your guess, right? I think that's the superpower of it,
31:14 right? That's the way I think about it is not just my intelligence. It's the
31:17 the lessons of every single person I've had on this podcast.
31:19 >> So, it's great. But, I thought, hey, maybe I could finally do one that's
31:23 that's in between the two. Like I I've been a founder and I and I've written
31:27 10,000 pieces of content. So, that's a little bit like Brian, but I have more
31:30 than Brian and I'm not Lenny in terms of productivity, but I've got a lot of
31:33 voices. So, I'm like, I'll try it. I used Deli. I instantly broke it because
31:36 I had too much data to ingest. It took about a week to get going. Um, and it
31:40 worked. people and it's just like you people some people spend hours a day on
31:44 digital JSON in another browser and they don't do what they do with Lenny but
31:47 they'll they'll ask about their sales wos and what to do with their sales team
31:50 and they'll and they'll upload LinkedIn and ask if they should hire people
31:55 and then a curious thing happened which is that because we do these events
31:57 people started to use it for questions for the events hey how do I get a refund
32:02 hey can I get a discount hey where is the Sanonteo County Fairgrounds Jason
32:05 Liz is really in the San Francisco Bay area like who's speaking or and and like
32:10 there's endless questions Right. And we used to use prefin intercom and we're so
32:14 busy we would answer like two weeks later like it was ter worst support ever
32:18 and the the agent just started doing support on its own and then it did this thing where it sold
32:26 sponsorship on its own right so so start you can start with so one place to start
32:31 if you haven't started is in support okay and you don't have to buy Sierra
32:35 and you don't have to buy decacon necessarily and you don't have to buy
32:40 Finn but one potential place to start is is your support like can you do great
32:45 24/7 support? Can you most most apps can't in fact some of the worst
32:48 offenders are AI leaders they they have no support at all on their website. So
32:52 that's one place to start. Um and then the next place we started so for us the
32:56 long game for the next place we started is hey we want to try outbound. Okay
33:01 because we don't have 1.2 million names like you have but we have like 400,000.
33:04 Okay. And we have data on them. So we wanted to say hey come come back to our
33:09 SAT event. So we didn't know what to use and I'll tell you some learning. So we
33:12 picked a YC company called Artisan. They've gone like from like nothing to
33:15 10 million this year. Um we picked them but this is important why they were at
33:19 they were a sponsor at Saster. We didn't know and they offered to help us the
33:23 most. This is the critical insight. We didn't know if Artisan was the I have
33:27 opinions now. We hadn't deployed them but another vendor argued with us. He
33:33 said I need 100K up front before I help you. Okay. Another one said they were
33:38 scared of Saster. They didn't want bad PR if it failed. Fair.
33:41 >> Oh, be Yeah, certain company. >> We don't want to be your first. Okay.
33:46 And Artisan said, "We'll do it." And uh we had nothing. And here's the
33:49 interesting thing about Agentic stuff. It's like support. If you have nothing,
33:53 like it doesn't have to like change the world. If you're literally doing nothing
33:57 and you start to do something that's high ROI, like you're going to get
34:02 return, right? So, we did that one. We trained it. It's great. We did about
34:07 60,000 emails. Um saw pretty high rates. Um then we said, well, we'll try
34:12 inbound. We like we don't want to have this depressing experience where a
34:15 salesperson quits and it's two weeks later until they talk to. So we used
34:19 this vendor called Qualified, which was founded by the XMO of Salesforce that
34:22 does a lot now, but mostly focus on qualified stuff. That immediately
34:26 worked. Like we had someone at 11 p.m. on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor
34:30 and they sponsored and it worked and it and it worked great. Um, but again they
34:33 helped us >> and this is an agent that is emailing with prospects selling them on a
34:37 sponsor. >> Well, it's literally if you go to sasterannual.com and anyone should buy a
34:41 product like this. It doesn't have to be qualified but but and they'll be the
34:46 bubble the intercom like bubble is tuned to to qualifying inbound prospects.
34:50 Folks that say, "Hey, I want to sponsor Lenny's podcast. Sorry, we're sold out
34:54 through 2028, but if you want to be on the wait list, sign up here, okay?"
34:58 Okay. Or or even better for us, it would qualify folks out that weren't a good
35:02 fit, right? It would save so much time and it would do it 24 hours, then it
35:05 would just set up the meeting. So, the reason that was a great second one was
35:08 because no one was willing to do that. No human was willing to pick up the
35:12 phone and talk to these people. So, it was such lowhanging fruit. Um, but the
35:18 key to the first two and and if you're going to pick an agent is they they
35:23 offered to help the most. You're I at the end of the day, Lenny, these are all
35:27 running on cloud 4. They're all basically using a bunch of APIs mashed
35:30 together. That's not new to software, right? Mashing a bunch of APIs under the
35:34 hood. But deep down, I don't want to get anybody trigger anybody. Many of these
35:39 leader the leaders in AI GTM, they're more similar than different. They're
35:42 more similar than different under the hood. It doesn't mean the features are
35:46 are parody. So, because you have to train them because it takes a month, the
35:51 world's best software with no help training you is not one 99% of people
35:57 should buy. So today in the old days we would qualify the best software. We
35:59 would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare
36:02 features and do it. You got to do another column which is your forward
36:05 deployed engineer or solution architecture your SE and talk to them
36:10 and say who is going to help me and before you write a check get on the
36:13 phone with Lenny and see if Lenny's really going to do deployment and if
36:16 Lenny rocks and the other vendor is better and won't help you don't do it.
36:20 And that's why we've had so much success is the first two we did. Yeah, they were
36:24 startups, right? So they worked harder, but Artisan and Qualified just did the
36:27 work with us. And we're not stupid, but it was work. We needed help, right? And
36:32 so that's what I learned is you you have this partner, the FD and the vendor. And
36:36 um and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think
36:38 they can help you. The best ones turn away a lot of business today, which is
36:41 interesting, right? An interesting learning from this for folks is um a lot
36:46 of folks say and they would say it to you if you use these lender they say you
36:50 have too much data. Saster is not like us. We're a startup. We're tiny. You
36:53 have 400,000 people in your database. Lenny has 1.2 million. It's not like
36:58 that's I I got I I I only have 300 customers. Okay. Or 200 customers. What
37:04 I've learned is um that's wrong. If you have 300 customers, how many folks have come to your website
37:11 ever? 30,000. How many leads do you have? How many folks in your database?
37:14 How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing.
37:17 And then they all of a sudden they have the aha moment like, "How many folks do
37:20 you have in your HubSpot?" Right? How many folks do you have in your CRM? They
37:24 look it up. 31,000. Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero. You
37:28 don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these agents work.
37:33 You need you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic,
37:37 but not as much as you think. So all the learnings we have a lot of folks that
37:40 honestly they don't want to do the work. They're like well Saster has a lot of
37:43 scale. They have a lot of years. It's not true. And it turns out to also be
37:47 like true with the training. I'm sure you've seen it with Lenny. Like I
37:50 thought having 12 years of content made the difference. Nah. It's having like a
37:54 couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that. But you don't
37:59 need as deep training and as much as you think. You just need a bit to be really
38:03 good. So anyone that has any scale whatsoever, even a couple million
38:07 revenue and up can benefit from these products, right? So we did hor general
38:12 general bot got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR then for outbound then
38:16 we did inbound and then we did agent force really early with Salesforce and
38:19 we didn't know what to do with agent force at first, right? Um but we decided
38:25 we would reactivate the folks that sales decide was not worth their time.
38:30 folks that reached out to sales. And this is true at every startup. We even
38:34 just talked about some of the AI leaders where a human says, "You know what? I
38:37 don't think this is enough commission. I'm kind of busy. I got a $4 million
38:43 deal with meta going." We just took Asian Force just on those. Okay. And we
38:47 trained it on very similar prompt. It had 70% response rate.
38:52 Those are people that were dying to interact with us. 70% is so good at and this is something
39:00 humans were not willing to do. It wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds
39:02 critical and maybe I'm going to trigger some sales folks. But the reality is if
39:07 you know if you're in a lead rich environment, okay, and there and I I I
39:10 think there's lead rich and lead poor environments for for even big companies,
39:14 but startups like there's not enough. But you eventually you become lead rich,
39:18 okay? Reps just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature.
39:22 It's even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let
39:26 in, right? Do you hum Do you pick up the phone with all of them?
39:29 >> Uh I reply to all of them and then we just sell them. We're we're full. But
39:32 >> yeah, but you see the point, right? Even your scale, you see the point, right?
39:34 >> Yeah. Yeah. It gets challenging. >> Um and let's imagine all of a sudden you
39:38 had six months of inventory available. I bet if you spooled up an agent and
39:40 emailed all those folks back automatically, you'd fill up you'd fill
39:44 up the docket, right? Mhm. >> So, anyone can do these sorts of You
39:48 think you can't um unless you're so small >> that you have sufficient humans to talk
39:53 with every potential lead, every person that touches your website, every person
39:57 that clicks with anything, you can So, that was kind of our journey and
40:04 then we've done a lot of other niche stuff. I'll tell you at the end that the
40:08 where we are today this is a maybe this is almost too much learning is we're at
40:12 the point where maybe we can't do one more because right now when we when we did
40:18 deli in the beginning when I copied you with deli even me I spent almost an hour
40:23 a day training it in the beginning because when we started to use it for
40:27 support it had an initial it started telling people the wrong dates okay and
40:30 we could talk about why so I had to fix it and it made some mistakes and so when
40:33 people started to use it I had to spend an hour each morning firing up Deli
40:37 reviewing the issues and answering them. I don't have to do it anymore. It's well
40:41 trained. Um we have so many agents going in so many emails that Amelia has to
40:47 spend, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week reviewing the outputs and it's
40:50 exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on
40:53 Christmas. It's a big issue, right? This is not being the orchestrator or the chief AI
40:59 person is not a good job for lazy people because the agents never sleep, right?
41:04 So it is so much time now to manage these 20. This is just interesting. We
41:07 can't I don't know when we're going to do the 21st. We may be full. And for
41:13 folks that are startups, this is a reason to go harder because everyone was in market this
41:19 year. Okay, everyone. And it's going to keep happening. But business process
41:23 change remains an issue for business software. Business process change at the
41:27 end of the day. And so many founders get this wrong. And 99% of sales folks, they
41:30 don't care about business process change. in sales works, they just want
41:32 to get their commission. Doesn't really matter what you pay for an app for for a
41:36 customer as long as it's fair. It's all the work to do to change the way you do
41:40 your business, right? And so we're even we're at the point where we're
41:44 overloaded, right? And so just be aware if you're if you're a startup or even
41:48 Salesforce or HubSpot, maybe maybe close those deals in the next 12 months
41:51 because the window may close where people say, "Listen, that's the coolest
41:54 agent I've ever seen. I'm exhausted from the last five. I had to do five last
41:58 year. I just can't literally cannot bring one more app into my enterprise.
42:02 And so that's going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has
42:05 tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted
42:10 for having so many agents. Exhaust, man. Okay. There's so much to to learn
42:15 from in what you just shared. Something I definitely want to ask about as people
42:19 hear this uh agents sending off emails, agents talking to your clients. Uh we
42:24 get I get a ton of emails that are terrible. >> Yes. H what have you learned about
42:30 making these outbound emails good and not just you know noise? How do you make
42:33 these conversations high quality? How do you >> It's a really really really good
42:36 question. >> So the two maybe the two biggest learnings um
42:42 take your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have, take their email
42:49 copy and use that as a template for your AI. If you the the the the terrible
42:53 mistake people make people all everyone in 2024 said these products didn't work.
42:57 There were two reasons they didn't work. It was before cloud 4, right? Replet
43:01 didn't work. Lovable didn't exist. Gamma didn't really work before 2025, right?
43:06 Before CL like the LMS reached this point where they would work for these
43:09 use cases. So that was one threshold. The other thing that happened in 2024 is
43:14 the vendors kind of lied and said uh just turn the product on. It'll get you
43:17 revenue. No no need to train it, no need to do anything. we'll just do everything
43:21 as this magic AI savant. It's not it's not the way it works this way. What you
43:25 do is an a an agent will be successful in go to market in sales today. If you
43:28 take what works for your best person, train I know this seems like a scary
43:33 term, but it's not. Upload that text. Okay? Train the agent on it and let it
43:37 iterate an AB test from that. Agents are really good at AB testing. They're
43:40 really good at creating variants. AI like you ask Claude or or chat for a
43:44 variant of your best email. Say, "Give me three versions of my best email."
43:46 They'll be pretty good. That's all the agent has to do is take your best email
43:50 you ever sent and stick it through an API and go it's it's I I'm I'm making it
43:55 sound simpler than it is, but but not by too much. So train it and then what and
44:00 then what it'll do and then give it some data sources and the data source could
44:04 be as simple as Salesforce. Okay? And and and then if it has any
44:09 data on Lenny, it can pull data and it can lightly personalize that email.
44:14 Okay? And even better, if a lot of these products track all the visitors to your
44:18 website, so they can see what's happened and they use other APIs and so they can
44:23 personalize your emails more. And so what ends up happening is the emails
44:28 that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's
44:31 a poorly trained product from a bad vendor. You should be getting emails
44:35 when you get them and you're like, "This isn't as good as Jason said on Lenny's
44:40 podcast, but it's pretty good." Okay, that's what AI can do today. And the
44:43 magic is if a human isn't even doing that or if your mediocre humans are
44:50 worse. And I'll tell you, you know, one of the first lessons I learned when my
44:53 last startup was acquired by Adobe. Sam Blonde was one of our sales leaders.
44:57 Then he became CRO of Brex and others. And he we inherited a bunch of reps from
45:00 Adobe. We didn't ask for them. And he's like, "My god, I never read everyone's
45:03 emails before. These are the worst emails that I've ever read." So the AI
45:09 can do better than that. the AI can do better than than that. And so you just
45:12 train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. And so so you just haven't
45:17 seen a well-trained agent. And then what I learned and then another question
45:20 folks ask is, "Okay, Jason, that email was pretty good. It wasn't as great as
45:23 you said on stage, but it was pretty good." But do you do you tell people
45:28 it's an AI or do you or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending
45:30 hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. people. We're we're we're we're we're in
45:38 an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they
45:41 know they're going to get an instant response. We've tried both. We've tried
45:43 to say, "Hey, it's digital Amelia or digital Jason." We've tried to fake it.
45:47 And what we've learned is now we just send it. We We just send it and no one
45:51 cares. And sometimes we'll get especially founders will get an email
45:53 back. They'll be like, "Haha, I can tell this is NI but it's pretty good. Can I
45:57 do a meeting?" That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Mhm. So, we're worrying
46:03 we're creating issues as excuses to not do the work. >> Your point about how sale human sales
46:10 people's emails are not great already is really powerful because all we're
46:13 looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying okay but humans
46:16 they're not actually that much better if you actually look at them. My god,
46:20 they're not the be listen the best outbound emails you've ever gotten. Um
46:25 like for example, I know you've done a bunch of investments a lot of them are
46:27 inbound to you. They want Lenny involved. Right. >> That's right.
46:30 >> Some of them are just so good you can't believe it. Right.
46:33 >> A few. >> Yeah. >> How many are that? But but a lot of them
46:35 aren't. Right. >> Right. >> So like the best founders and the best
46:41 sales execs and the best SDRs will spend two hours researching an email. Okay.
46:45 Who exactly did IBM should I reach out to? What did IM? Who else exactly is a
46:49 competitor that's using them? Exactly what was the ROI? They'll give you a
46:52 perfect story. Like you get the world's best story. Here's your competitor.
46:55 Here's how they use it. Here's exactly when they bought. Here's the ROI. Here's
46:59 the case study. That's gonna that's a great email, right? How many 21-year-old
47:04 STRs do that. No, they they use a to an automation tool whether it's Outreach or
47:08 Gong or Salesoft or Mixmax or an AI based, but they do no work. It's not
47:12 going to be that great. It's not going to be that great. So, that's why for for
47:17 people get a little confused. The bar for good enough for AI GTM is not as
47:23 high as we think. It's just like uh you know a a fimile of your best person
47:27 reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your midpack person. It's going to
47:30 beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.
4:44 and welcome back to the podcast. >> Lucky to be a super fan and then to get
4:48 to join, right? It's it's it's terrific to to to be on the other side.
4:52 >> So, this is our second conversation. Uh we did our last conversation a year and
4:55 a half ago. I don't know if you know this, but it became a pretty legendary
4:59 episode. It's something people continue to share. And uh that conversation is
5:04 around basically a deep dive into building your sales or >> and a lot has changed
5:08 >> yes >> for you and the world since then uh cough AI
5:15 >> and what uh what's happened is you've gone extremely deep on what AI enables
5:21 for sales for startups for go to market and what I love about conversations like
5:24 this is you're basically living in the future and you're here to give us a
5:29 glimpse of where things are heading and tell us how avoid the wrong turns and
5:34 just help us get there ourselves. >> That I think I can do
5:39 >> to start. Yes. Help us understand just the business you run this uh SAS.
5:43 >> Uh what is it you sell? What is the business? What is it? What is it you do?
5:45 Jason, >> you know, I'm still trying to figure it out, Lenny. Maybe you are too in some
5:49 ways. Um >> yeah, that's true. So, you know, I I I am a two-time founder who started
5:57 writing a blog, my god, in 2012 about all the mistakes I made after I sold my
6:01 startup to Adobe. We started doing a couple meetups. You've done meetups. Um, before anyone
6:07 did this stuff, we did a big meetup in 2015. Thousands of people came. Then we
6:12 do 10,000 people a year at Saster Annual. I've actually also invested
6:18 almost $200 million almost 10x lifetime um only into founders from the
6:22 community. Um but the reason I don't know is what I folks that do are
6:28 connected to our content. I'm just passionate about helping other founders
6:31 see mistakes and make less of them. So anyhow, we're we're a large community. I
6:35 do invest but but it turned into a business. There was no revenue in the
6:38 beginning. I'm sure there was no revenue for for Lenny in the beginning and ours
6:41 was less intentional, but we do do eight figures of revenue a year and it's work.
6:46 It's it's that sounds great, okay, to do eight figures, but there's a lot of
6:50 costs, especially on the event side. The media side has almost no costs and it's
6:54 work. We have a hundred sponsors and as you know, like you have sponsors, but
6:58 there's a certain level where it becomes a lot of work. Like getting two folks to
7:01 sponsor your podcast with a couple emails, no work, right? Uh if you wanted
7:05 to have like four Lenny podcast, like it just it just scales. So we have built
7:09 our own go to market team over time and I've lived the frustrations folks have
7:13 followed it and then maybe I'm rambling a little bit the interesting thing the
7:18 aha moment that happened to us is going into May of this year we had one AI
7:21 agent in production called Deli that we both use for digital lending and digital
7:26 Jason really interesting learnings and we went into our 10,000 person event
7:29 this year with with an eight you know a seven figure budget and eight figure
7:34 topline and two folks on the sales team who are were paid high end of market I
7:38 have many flaws, but paying well and being loyal are not one of them. And two
7:41 of them just quit at the event. They just quit on site. Okay. And I this is
7:46 like the third time I've done this, like the eighth team I've built. And and I
7:49 turned to Amelia, our chief a officer, and I said, "We're done with hiring
7:53 humans in sales. We're done. We are going to push the limits with agents.
7:57 We're going to p even if it doesn't quite work." Okay? And I knew from this
8:02 deli, this general agent, that it would sort of work because going into annual,
8:06 this general agent, this digital Jason closed a 70k sponsorship on its own. So
8:12 when I saw that a horizontal agent, not trained for sales, not trained for GTM,
8:16 could close one deal, like let's deploy a couple of these apps. We have time and
8:23 I just can't pay a junior SDR $150,000 a year to quit. I just can't like
8:27 criticize me, but I just couldn't do it one more time. I just couldn't do it one
8:30 more. And I actually think this is an when I talk to CEOs at leading AI
8:34 companies, they kind of don't want to do it either. They want to have the
8:38 smallest sales teams they can as much for cultural reasons, right? Even if
8:43 even if Replet only goes from zero to 200, it could have been 220 with a
8:46 smaller sales team. I think John's okay with it, right? So, it's an enduring
8:50 thing. But anyhow, so we push the limits and now if you walk into SAS's office,
8:55 it's kind of funny. We have 10 desks that used to be go to market people.
8:58 They're all just labeled with our agents. Reply for replet, quali for
9:03 qualified, arty for artisan. Agent Force needs a nickname. Maybe we can make one
9:06 up with Salesforce. There's Amelia's corner office at one end. I'm in the I'm
9:09 in the back of the office and it's just agents. It's the quietest office. And
9:14 netnet Lenny, it's about here's the metalarning for when we when we're
9:17 recording this. The pro the net productivity is about the same. It's not
9:25 better. It's not worse. Um, but it's so much more efficient and it scales
9:30 because software scales. So, and uh we can talk about what we've
9:35 learned. I think it's important that it takes time to train these agents. They
9:39 don't work out of the box. Um, but when you dial them in, when you take your
9:44 best person or your best script and you train an agent with your best person and
9:48 best script, that agent can start to become a version of your best
9:52 salesperson, your best person. And that's what we've learned and how to
9:56 perfect it. And I just think because and criticize me, anybody, you or anyone
10:00 watching or listening, maybe it's not cool. I didn't want to hire my 28th rep
10:04 that was going to quit that. But I just couldn't do it one more time in the age
10:07 of AI. I'm like, it's time to go to the bleeding edge and just see what we can push the limits
10:12 here. >> Okay. I I I love all the directions we're already heading. Okay. So just to
10:18 help people totally understand what your business is. Basically these people are
10:23 selling sponsors for your conference is >> they're selling two things to because
10:26 it's just relevant to the deep dive. They're selling sponsorships which
10:29 average about 70 to 80k >> and then they're also selling tickets
10:32 which is the high volume for this is like the the self-s serve version.
10:35 They're selling tickets that are anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to
10:38 if you're a VC that comes the night before could be two grand. Okay. No no
10:42 no gifts for VCs that decide the night before. founders that decide early get
10:46 get it at about 10 20% of cost and and and it's work to sell these tickets,
10:51 right? And so you can just post an email like you do and you probably fill up
10:55 Lenny Summit, but if you want to max it out, you got to do work. You got to do
10:58 drip campaigns. You got to reach out to people. You have to reactivate folks
11:02 that came to Lenny Summit, you know, three years ago, but you want them back
11:05 because they're good people. And that just requires work. And as your base
11:09 scales, you know, you have how many people subscribe to Lenny's newsletter
11:12 now? 1.2 two million or something. >> 1.2 million roughly.
11:15 >> Okay. How many as how many of those is a human willing to reach out to
11:19 >> approaching nuns? >> 2,000. Yeah. >> Imagine you hired a 21-year-old SDR
11:24 fresh out of junior college and said, "Here's my list, 1.2 million people.
11:29 Start calling them. >> I want him to come to Lenny Summit." But
11:33 anyhow, so we have this low-end version, which is tickets, right? Which is four
11:36 or five million a year. And then we have this higherend sales cycle. And they're
11:40 very different. And actually, they have different agents. And then we have a
11:43 different agent to get people to come back. Laps people. So we have lapsed
11:47 high-end and low-end agents. And they have different workflows and we actually
11:51 use different vendors for now. For now we use different vendors.
11:55 >> Okay. And so uh previously before this future world, how many SDRs did you
11:59 have? How many salespeople in the >> We would have two to three SDRs and up
12:03 to five AES. >> Okay. So like eight, nine people full-time working on Saster. Yes. to
12:10 bring in sponsors and to bring in tickets. >> Yes. Although yes, a lot of it is
12:16 inbound and renewals but not but yes to manage that business to manage the sales
12:20 management and go to market. Let's call it 8 to9 and go to market. Now we have
12:24 1.2 >> uh 1.2 >> humans >> human 1.2 humans
12:30 >> 20 agents AI agents >> 1 point what is a 0.2 human?
12:34 >> Amelia who's our chief a officer who who runs everything. She spends 20% of her
12:39 time managing the agents, orchestrating the agents. >> Okay.
12:41 >> Which is something I think people don't Let's get into that. They talk about,
12:44 but they don't actually understand what that means. >> Yeah. Okay. I definitely want to spend
12:48 time there. Uh Okay. So, you used to have about 10 people full-time. Now you
12:53 have 1.2 humans and you said 20 agents. >> 20 agents. Yeah.
12:55 >> Okay. And what you're describing is the business is doing very similarly to what
13:00 it was when you had 10 humans. Now you have 20 agents. The business doing the
13:02 same. >> Yeah. Now listen, if I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't
13:07 get me wrong, and this is true of every fast, I would hire them tomorrow, okay?
13:12 And and if you go if you go to Verscell, if you go to Replet, if you go to
13:14 they're all going to tell you the same. I was literally in London when we were
13:18 just at our abundant event. We with with Maggie who's in the leadership of
13:21 OpenAI. She said they just can't hire enough enterprise reps now. Okay. And
13:24 but what what it is replacing are the midpack and below. The ones that don't
13:30 really understand what linear does. The ones that don't really know what a pull
13:35 request is or exactly how replet works. The AI can do better. Not than the best,
13:39 right? So I would love to have more humans, but I'm not going to hire
13:43 someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what Saster does. I
13:47 just can't do that one more time. And you don't need to. I don't think you
13:50 need to. So we're not doing This is the thing. AI is replacing the jobs people
13:55 don't want to do today and it is displacing the media the midpack and the
13:59 mediocre. They are their jobs are at risk. They are at risk. The best humans
14:04 it is true that they will get superpowers from AI but I'm not sure the
14:08 rest will. It's a it's a cautionary but I would love to have more than one but
14:12 at the end of the day and 1.2 humans is plus 20 AI agents is doing about what 10
14:17 human GTMs is. >> Wow. Okay. I want to spend time on the
14:20 different agents you've built, but first of all, just kind of zooming out, having
14:25 gone through this experience. How do you see the world of go to market changing
14:31 next year in the coming years? All the plays work. It's the playbooks that are
14:35 kind of broken in the age of AI. All the plays work. Outbound still works.
14:39 Webinar still works. Podcasts still work. Okay. Events still work. All this
14:44 stuff works. All this stuff works. Why is 11 Labs out doing a road show, right?
14:49 It works. Why? Why do they go on Lenny's podcast? It works. So, the plays all
14:54 work. It's just the playbooks are broken because at at for folks that aren't in
14:59 the age of AI, growth has decelerated so much that nothing seems to work. Okay,
15:03 it's working. It just works so much worse than 2021, but the plays still
15:07 work. They just they don't have enough ROI. There's not enough budget for old
15:12 school SAS from 2021. the ones that are blowing up, right? The Verscels, the
15:17 Replets, the 11 Labs, they have so much demand, so much demand that, you know, that
15:24 they're still running the plays, but they're they're doing them differently.
15:26 They're doing them from a hyper PLG focus because there's so much demand and
15:30 they're often picking and choosing which prospects to talk to to to contact. So,
15:35 like, for example, Bolt is probably a distant number three behind Rep and
15:37 Lovable, right? But one of my old sales guys runs sales there. And I talked to
15:41 him when they went from 0 to 50 million in like six months. He's like, "We
15:45 honestly just have so many leads. We just are half our job is picking which
15:49 ones to respond to, right?" And he's like, and he also is like, "We closed a seven figure deal we
15:54 stole from Lovable because no one called them back at lovable." So your
15:57 traditional B2B SAS company, even ones at billions of revenue, even the
16:02 HubSpots and the and and and uh all of them, they don't have so many great
16:06 leads, they don't call them back. So that is a different world um not easy
16:09 different world and then this this world where nothing seems to be working is
16:14 just because the demand has evaporated right so both ends have an incentive in 2026 to
16:22 push the limits for AI for go to market the ones that are hyperrowing can't
16:26 touch everybody they can't do everything not everyone like Versell will build
16:30 their own internally we can talk about why most folks should not build they
16:34 should buy for the same reasons it's always been true in software or we can
16:37 talk about it. At the low end, you still need humans, but ruthless efficiency is
16:41 going to be the name of the game for 2026. So, anything where AI works, the
16:45 demand is inexhaustible. So, everyone's either looking for more efficiency or
16:49 they just can't service the massive amount of inbound they have. Um, and so
16:53 maybe that doesn't totally answer your question or I got a little bit off
16:56 track, but that's how the world's changing. Like, when we first did this,
17:00 which wasn't that long ago, in a way, pre the AI explosion, all B2B companies
17:04 were kind of the same. like they grew at somewhat different rates. Some blew up
17:08 faster like a Samsara. Some took longer like a UiPath, but come on. They were
17:12 all they all kind of grew the same way for the same ACV for the same deal size.
17:16 Now, just like in venture and everything else, it's wildly bifurcated, right?
17:19 You've got the low end, which is all about price increases and forcing things
17:24 onto the base. And at the high end, we have something we've never seen since
17:28 2020, which is everyone in the market at once. Everyone in the market at once. This is
17:33 something that people don't understand. Why why are why are these companies
17:36 doing so well? Why are they blowing up? Because they're it's not just at the
17:39 software. We we love this stuff, Lenny, right? All these new tools. We love
17:43 them. But it's not one law firm looking at Harvey. It's everyone. It's everyone,
17:48 right? It's not a few folks looking at video on the internet. It's everyone
17:51 trying to make video on the internet >> because there's a lot of push from the
17:54 top of like we need to adopt AI. We need to be more productive. Now, everyone,
17:58 not the traditional, like the traditional metric was in most
18:02 categories, 3 to 5% of prospects would be in market a year. >> So, you'd send a trillion emails and you
18:08 do cold calls and you'd hope maybe 2026 was the time they're willing to dump
18:12 Salesforce for your new product. So, add all that up, 5%. In many categories,
18:17 we're north of 50% in market. So, that just totally changes. The plays
18:21 still work. showing up in person, actually knowing what the hell you're
18:24 selling, knowing how to get through procurement, all of those are work. But
18:28 other than these weird windows, artificial windows in 2020, we've never
18:31 had so many people in market at once. >> And this is for AI products specifically
18:34 or >> Yeah. that that have massive ROI. >> Yeah. Productivity.
18:40 >> I want I I need to bring a Vibe Code tool into my company, Lenny. Okay. Go
18:44 out and do the work. Compare Replet, Lovable, and whoever else and buy one.
18:49 Okay. Harve like why are Harvey and the others in Lagora doing so? I mean
18:52 they're great tools but everyone's like we need to automate how we review
18:56 contracts and documents with AI now. They want a leader and they're going to
19:00 do it and that will slow down like not everybody can be in market every year.
19:04 It it's exhausts an enterprise. So this this is a version of the AI bubble that
19:08 will end and we will revert in some ways to old school but when everybody's in
19:12 market it just it just changes how you run the whole thing. So the so the
19:16 fastest growing ones and the slowest growing ones both have incentives to use
19:20 AI here just for different reasons. >> How about the sales profession
19:24 specifically? Are SDRs going to be replaced fully AES? How do you see the
19:27 future of the sales profession? >> The classic SDR junior kid that is hired out of
19:37 college to send emails and respond to respond to inbound emails and maybe get
19:40 back to them later that day or the next day. We don't need them. We're not going
19:45 to need most of them. SDRs that knock on doors in a lot of industries aren't
19:49 going to be displaced, right? The emailbased cadence SDR will be 90%
19:56 displaced by AI next year. The people have different nomclature. I call BDRs,
20:00 folks that qualify leads coming in. The contact mess that we see, we have no
20:04 need for them today. They should be extinct next year. There is no reason in
20:08 the age of AI I have to hit contact me, wait two a day or two for a 21-year-old
20:13 that doesn't know what linear does to say, "Hey, what do you do? How much are
20:17 you willing to pay me? Maybe I'll set up a call with Lenny later this week."
20:21 There is no need to do that with AI. The AI, our AI alone, one of our agent fully
20:25 qualifies everybody on the website so they don't even know they're being
20:27 qualified. It just sets up the meeting with the salesperson. So this SDR, this
20:33 email-based SDR and this human qualifying leads, which is not good for
20:36 the customer. It doesn't feel good to be qualified, does it? They will be mostly
20:41 extinct next year. I'm guessing with your now the AE, the classic human doing
20:46 the sales, most of the tools aren't there yet for the most part. I think 70%
20:52 of their jobs will be safe by the end of next year, but I think it will decline
20:56 to 40 or 50. I don't think there's any reason what we're seeing in other
21:00 categories, a great agent can't close a deal too. If there's not a lot to
21:04 negotiate in price and the agent knows the product better than a human, at
21:08 least for folks like you and me. I mean, do you like to talk to a human in sales
21:12 >> sometimes? Uh I'd rather I'd rather just chat chat with a Yeah. a really smart
21:15 AI. >> Yeah. So, that's all in progress now. But the classic and the tough part and a
21:21 lot of folks ask this question, Lenny, they say, um, okay, Jason, I I see that
21:26 in your data. How are we going to build the sales profession if there's no
21:30 entry-level jobs in SDRs and AES? And that's a meta question across all of AI.
21:35 We're already seeing AI concentrate strength in sort of mid-tier folks,
21:39 isn't it? And we're already seeing lots of folks cut back on entry-level hires,
21:43 you know, Shopify and others aside, where they'd rather have the six or
21:46 seveny old engineer that's a cursor machine rather than train some kid. It's
21:51 just more efficient today, right? I'm sure you see that across a lot of folks
21:54 you talk to. It's gonna happen in sales, too. So the folks that know how to
21:58 manage an agent, work with an agent, the folks that know their product for real,
22:02 they're going to become more valuable and the rest are going to become less
22:04 valuable. >> It's interesting because I'm an investor in a bunch of startups as are you and
22:10 I'm actually seeing a lot of asks for go to market people, sales people. Do you
22:14 think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand, they're
22:16 like, "Oh, we need people to help and then this will start to become more AI
22:20 over time or are they just looking for these really senior people that you're
22:23 talking about?" Well, listen, whether you're managing humans or orchestrating
22:28 agents, you need leadership. We've yet to produce an autonomous CEO.
22:33 I know folks talk about how on on Twitter that will AI will replace the
22:36 CEO, but I don't know that that's literal as much as figurative, right?
22:39 So, we're still going to need the seuite. We're still going to need VPs. I
22:44 mean, it's become so much work to manage a million leads, right? A half million
22:49 leads. We we need these leaders whether the the question is and I've seen your
22:53 call out there and I saw your tweet on it. The question is how many of the
22:58 folks that had the current playbooks are the right folks for the future. I'm
23:04 thinking maybe 20%. of the folks I talked to 20 for are still panicking
23:09 about AI and and I'll tell you how to not how to be in the 20% if you want to
23:14 know but I think very few like the Janine from Verscell are going to make
23:18 the jump so we'll see there will be huge organizations right like Denise just
23:22 went from Slack and Salesforce after 14 years to be CRO open AAI she's working
23:26 going to be pretty high level right so she may not know how to need to know how
23:30 to implement the agents but most of the folks your companies want to hire I
23:35 would just make sure they could they really want to roll up their sleeves and
23:40 do the job of 2026 2027, right? Um just because they worked at Slack does not
23:43 necessarily mean they have the skills at your startup. >> You said that you had some tips for
23:47 folks to actually be this 20%. What are some If someone's listening to this
23:50 like, "Oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on?"
23:53 >> It's going to sound simple. It will work and most almost nobody's doing this.
23:59 Pick a tool, an agent, an agentic tool to solve one of your problems. It
24:03 doesn't almost m just one that's the most painful or the one that's most
24:07 acute. It could be support. It could be SDR. It could be inbound qualification.
24:11 Pick one. Pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. Okay? We can talk
24:15 about how to pick a vendor, but pick a leading vendor that treats you well that
24:21 you like and do it yourself. Train the agent. Ingest the data. Do the
24:28 iterations. Understand how this damn thing works. Okay. The folks that are
24:33 lost today have never done it. We literally we've turned into a consulting
24:37 shop. Lenny, it's kind of crazy. I I don't know what I think about it, but we
24:40 literally just did a job. Amelia, our chief A officer, and and Mia, she she
24:44 she drove it. We did a call with a public B2B company worth well over 10
24:48 billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay? Okay. And we did a call
24:51 with their team and they're like, "We're Okay. One, no chance. Two, we asked
25:05 them, "How much of this have you done yourself?" Like, "Have you have you done
25:07 it yourself?" And it was just crickets on this call of 20 people. No one had
25:10 done it theirel. So, they thought they could take an untrained agent with no
25:15 training and just magically give it to a bunch of young 20-year-old SDRs and and
25:19 this magically would sell on its own. It doesn't work that way, right? So, the
25:25 way all these agents work is you there's a lot of jargon which is intimidating.
25:30 Ingestion, orchestration, training. It's not that hard, guys. It's just
25:34 different. It's the same B2B stuff we've been doing for over a decade. You go to
25:38 a website, okay? You give it a URL of your website. You give it a URL of what
25:41 your wiki is. You give it a URL of your training docs. Maybe you upload your
25:45 perspectus. You upload a few documents. It ingests the data. And ingesting means
25:49 it uploads. It means it processes the data and it does some other stuff you don't really
25:54 need to know. Some ragging, some vectoring, it really doesn't matter. You
25:59 you upload some stuff and it kind of knows it and isn't great at it. And then
26:03 it will turn it into ideally it will turn it into questions and you answer
26:06 these questions and it they will be get the more you answer and train it.
26:09 Training is just answering questions and getting better and better. So, first you
26:13 upload a bunch of your stuff. Then you spend hours training it, often with the
26:17 help of a vendor, someone called a forward deploy engineer, which is a
26:19 scary term. It means someone that's going to help you do this. You upload
26:23 your stuff, you try to get it right, and then you basically have to make sure
26:29 it's right. QA testing. And every day when that AISDR sends out emails and do
26:33 practice emails, they will say some dumb things. Maybe it's hallucinations. It
26:37 really doesn't matter what the technical term is and you correct it and each and
26:43 if you do this for 30 days and every day you spend an hour or two correcting
26:47 those mistakes by the 30th day it's going to be pretty good and this is
26:51 anyone can do this that has been in B2B or SAS anyone can do what I just
26:54 described it is not that different than other things we've done it's just
26:58 sequenced differently but nobody does this everyone's panicked and if you if
27:01 you can go do this pick any tool pick pick uh agent force pick qualified pick
27:05 artisan pick whatever you want If you can go do this and get it live into
27:09 production, you're hyper employable. All the companies you talked about that need
27:13 a GTM person, they will hire you. You could be imaginally be their chief
27:18 agentic GTM officer because but almost anyone can do this if they want to. It's
27:21 just going to take a month of your time and it might take you 50 or 60 hours
27:25 plus qualifying the vendor, right? And in the old days, like when we diverted
27:30 our podcast, you'd hire an agency and disappear. That's how you do this stuff.
27:33 Don't It don't work that. The agencies don't know how to do this. you've got to
27:37 do it yourself. But if you do, man, you will rock. You will just you will just
27:41 rock and you will learn, right? You will learn um and you will learn the limits
27:46 and you will learn the agent can what it can do and where it can't do. And then
27:49 you will learn how to do the next one, right? So like we're pretty far on agent
27:53 force, which is Salesforce's one, which Mark talks a lot about, but we're we're
27:55 probably one of the only organizations of our size on it. I will tell you a
27:59 cheat code which is pretty interesting. So, we've got we had three of these
28:03 agents working for sales. After training it and learning it and
28:06 spending months time to learn it, we got it down to one prompt. And prompt is
28:10 another almost intimidating word. A string of text that describes what you
28:14 want this thing to do. Okay? We took that prompt and gave it to agent force.
28:18 Then a day was pretty good. So, you will if you can do one of these, it'll be
28:21 really hard. It'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier. And then
28:25 you're going to be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it
28:27 yourself. But if you're waiting for people on your team to do it, if you're
28:32 waiting for an agency to do it, I think you're going to be out of a job.
28:37 Right? So this is like everyone comes to us as an experts. We're not we're only
28:41 experts because we did it 20 times. >> I think what might be helpful here
28:45 actually is to do a a tour kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've
28:47 built and what they do, which ones have been most impactful. And then as you do
28:52 that, what products you use, what what powers these agents that that you like
28:56 and maybe don't like. If any if anyone goes to saster.ai/agents,
29:00 we'll you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out. You can copy us
29:04 and I'll walk you through it. But two two caveats or things at the top. I
29:07 built a lot of stuff in Replet. We can talk about it for fun. I'm like a top 1%
29:11 user. I love it. None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it
29:15 yourself. You're not Versel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer
29:19 that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same
29:23 idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these
29:28 products are expensive. They're not so expensive. It's worth and then
29:32 maintaining the pace of innovation is so fast. Even if you can hire someone to
29:35 build it internally, it will become obsolete if you're not careful in a
29:39 couple months. So, we've built a lot of stuff. We could talk about um uh I we I
29:43 built a a calculator to do startup calculations, used 800,000 times in 90
29:46 days >> for valuation, right? >> Yeah. For valuations. I built a pitch
29:50 deck reviewer that's reviewed almost 3,000 pitch decks. Lots of fun stuff,
29:53 but none of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. None of it. So, just a
29:56 caveat, don't build it yourself unless you're Verscell, unless you have a
30:00 reason. That was a great pod. It was wonderful. Don't do it. Don't do that.
30:03 >> Basically, if unless you have a awesome go to market engineers
30:06 >> for and they really want to do it. They're really are chomping at the bit
30:11 to do it. Um, don't do it. So, I started and this is not where other folks would
30:13 start, but there's some learnings. I started there's an app called Deli,
30:18 which makes digital clones. And, um, you used it for the Lenny bot a long time
30:21 ago. I saw you do it. What's that? Yeah. Lenny.com. Yeah. Check that out.
30:25 >> I saw it a long time ago. It was interesting, but I I I did it didn't
30:28 click. And then Brian Halligan, who's the founder chairman of HubSpot, did one
30:32 too. Uh there's Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia, so he helped
30:35 them early on. And then I kind of had a magic moment and this is the way it
30:38 works in AI when I saw the combination of the two. So yours was really like
30:42 people should love moneybot because it's got it's if folks haven't tried it, try
30:46 it. It is ingested. I know a scary term for some. It is ingested every single
30:50 interview you've ever done, right? Every word of content you've written. So, and
30:54 it can combine them all together. It can combine the Verscell story and the and
30:58 and and and uh what what you did with at with Dylan at Figma and can synthesize
31:02 the knowledge and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. What I liked about Brian's
31:07 better than yours though was that it was Brian and Lennybot is kind of Lenny, but
31:11 it's also kind of all your guess, right? I think that's the superpower of it,
31:14 right? That's the way I think about it is not just my intelligence. It's the
31:17 the lessons of every single person I've had on this podcast.
31:19 >> So, it's great. But, I thought, hey, maybe I could finally do one that's
31:23 that's in between the two. Like I I've been a founder and I and I've written
31:27 10,000 pieces of content. So, that's a little bit like Brian, but I have more
31:30 than Brian and I'm not Lenny in terms of productivity, but I've got a lot of
31:33 voices. So, I'm like, I'll try it. I used Deli. I instantly broke it because
31:36 I had too much data to ingest. It took about a week to get going. Um, and it
31:40 worked. people and it's just like you people some people spend hours a day on
31:44 digital JSON in another browser and they don't do what they do with Lenny but
31:47 they'll they'll ask about their sales wos and what to do with their sales team
31:50 and they'll and they'll upload LinkedIn and ask if they should hire people
31:55 and then a curious thing happened which is that because we do these events
31:57 people started to use it for questions for the events hey how do I get a refund
32:02 hey can I get a discount hey where is the Sanonteo County Fairgrounds Jason
32:05 Liz is really in the San Francisco Bay area like who's speaking or and and like
32:10 there's endless questions Right. And we used to use prefin intercom and we're so
32:14 busy we would answer like two weeks later like it was ter worst support ever
32:18 and the the agent just started doing support on its own and then it did this thing where it sold
32:26 sponsorship on its own right so so start you can start with so one place to start
32:31 if you haven't started is in support okay and you don't have to buy Sierra
32:35 and you don't have to buy decacon necessarily and you don't have to buy
32:40 Finn but one potential place to start is is your support like can you do great
32:45 24/7 support? Can you most most apps can't in fact some of the worst
32:48 offenders are AI leaders they they have no support at all on their website. So
32:52 that's one place to start. Um and then the next place we started so for us the
32:56 long game for the next place we started is hey we want to try outbound. Okay
33:01 because we don't have 1.2 million names like you have but we have like 400,000.
33:04 Okay. And we have data on them. So we wanted to say hey come come back to our
33:09 SAT event. So we didn't know what to use and I'll tell you some learning. So we
33:12 picked a YC company called Artisan. They've gone like from like nothing to
33:15 10 million this year. Um we picked them but this is important why they were at
33:19 they were a sponsor at Saster. We didn't know and they offered to help us the
33:23 most. This is the critical insight. We didn't know if Artisan was the I have
33:27 opinions now. We hadn't deployed them but another vendor argued with us. He
33:33 said I need 100K up front before I help you. Okay. Another one said they were
33:38 scared of Saster. They didn't want bad PR if it failed. Fair.
33:41 >> Oh, be Yeah, certain company. >> We don't want to be your first. Okay.
33:46 And Artisan said, "We'll do it." And uh we had nothing. And here's the
33:49 interesting thing about Agentic stuff. It's like support. If you have nothing,
33:53 like it doesn't have to like change the world. If you're literally doing nothing
33:57 and you start to do something that's high ROI, like you're going to get
34:02 return, right? So, we did that one. We trained it. It's great. We did about
34:07 60,000 emails. Um saw pretty high rates. Um then we said, well, we'll try
34:12 inbound. We like we don't want to have this depressing experience where a
34:15 salesperson quits and it's two weeks later until they talk to. So we used
34:19 this vendor called Qualified, which was founded by the XMO of Salesforce that
34:22 does a lot now, but mostly focus on qualified stuff. That immediately
34:26 worked. Like we had someone at 11 p.m. on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor
34:30 and they sponsored and it worked and it and it worked great. Um, but again they
34:33 helped us >> and this is an agent that is emailing with prospects selling them on a
34:37 sponsor. >> Well, it's literally if you go to sasterannual.com and anyone should buy a
34:41 product like this. It doesn't have to be qualified but but and they'll be the
34:46 bubble the intercom like bubble is tuned to to qualifying inbound prospects.
34:50 Folks that say, "Hey, I want to sponsor Lenny's podcast. Sorry, we're sold out
34:54 through 2028, but if you want to be on the wait list, sign up here, okay?"
34:58 Okay. Or or even better for us, it would qualify folks out that weren't a good
35:02 fit, right? It would save so much time and it would do it 24 hours, then it
35:05 would just set up the meeting. So, the reason that was a great second one was
35:08 because no one was willing to do that. No human was willing to pick up the
35:12 phone and talk to these people. So, it was such lowhanging fruit. Um, but the
35:18 key to the first two and and if you're going to pick an agent is they they
35:23 offered to help the most. You're I at the end of the day, Lenny, these are all
35:27 running on cloud 4. They're all basically using a bunch of APIs mashed
35:30 together. That's not new to software, right? Mashing a bunch of APIs under the
35:34 hood. But deep down, I don't want to get anybody trigger anybody. Many of these
35:39 leader the leaders in AI GTM, they're more similar than different. They're
35:42 more similar than different under the hood. It doesn't mean the features are
35:46 are parody. So, because you have to train them because it takes a month, the
35:51 world's best software with no help training you is not one 99% of people
35:57 should buy. So today in the old days we would qualify the best software. We
35:59 would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare
36:02 features and do it. You got to do another column which is your forward
36:05 deployed engineer or solution architecture your SE and talk to them
36:10 and say who is going to help me and before you write a check get on the
36:13 phone with Lenny and see if Lenny's really going to do deployment and if
36:16 Lenny rocks and the other vendor is better and won't help you don't do it.
36:20 And that's why we've had so much success is the first two we did. Yeah, they were
36:24 startups, right? So they worked harder, but Artisan and Qualified just did the
36:27 work with us. And we're not stupid, but it was work. We needed help, right? And
36:32 so that's what I learned is you you have this partner, the FD and the vendor. And
36:36 um and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think
36:38 they can help you. The best ones turn away a lot of business today, which is
36:41 interesting, right? An interesting learning from this for folks is um a lot
36:46 of folks say and they would say it to you if you use these lender they say you
36:50 have too much data. Saster is not like us. We're a startup. We're tiny. You
36:53 have 400,000 people in your database. Lenny has 1.2 million. It's not like
36:58 that's I I got I I I only have 300 customers. Okay. Or 200 customers. What
37:04 I've learned is um that's wrong. If you have 300 customers, how many folks have come to your website
37:11 ever? 30,000. How many leads do you have? How many folks in your database?
37:14 How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing.
37:17 And then they all of a sudden they have the aha moment like, "How many folks do
37:20 you have in your HubSpot?" Right? How many folks do you have in your CRM? They
37:24 look it up. 31,000. Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero. You
37:28 don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these agents work.
37:33 You need you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic,
37:37 but not as much as you think. So all the learnings we have a lot of folks that
37:40 honestly they don't want to do the work. They're like well Saster has a lot of
37:43 scale. They have a lot of years. It's not true. And it turns out to also be
37:47 like true with the training. I'm sure you've seen it with Lenny. Like I
37:50 thought having 12 years of content made the difference. Nah. It's having like a
37:54 couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that. But you don't
37:59 need as deep training and as much as you think. You just need a bit to be really
38:03 good. So anyone that has any scale whatsoever, even a couple million
38:07 revenue and up can benefit from these products, right? So we did hor general
38:12 general bot got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR then for outbound then
38:16 we did inbound and then we did agent force really early with Salesforce and
38:19 we didn't know what to do with agent force at first, right? Um but we decided
38:25 we would reactivate the folks that sales decide was not worth their time.
38:30 folks that reached out to sales. And this is true at every startup. We even
38:34 just talked about some of the AI leaders where a human says, "You know what? I
38:37 don't think this is enough commission. I'm kind of busy. I got a $4 million
38:43 deal with meta going." We just took Asian Force just on those. Okay. And we
38:47 trained it on very similar prompt. It had 70% response rate.
38:52 Those are people that were dying to interact with us. 70% is so good at and this is something
39:00 humans were not willing to do. It wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds
39:02 critical and maybe I'm going to trigger some sales folks. But the reality is if
39:07 you know if you're in a lead rich environment, okay, and there and I I I
39:10 think there's lead rich and lead poor environments for for even big companies,
39:14 but startups like there's not enough. But you eventually you become lead rich,
39:18 okay? Reps just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature.
39:22 It's even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let
39:26 in, right? Do you hum Do you pick up the phone with all of them?
39:29 >> Uh I reply to all of them and then we just sell them. We're we're full. But
39:32 >> yeah, but you see the point, right? Even your scale, you see the point, right?
39:34 >> Yeah. Yeah. It gets challenging. >> Um and let's imagine all of a sudden you
39:38 had six months of inventory available. I bet if you spooled up an agent and
39:40 emailed all those folks back automatically, you'd fill up you'd fill
39:44 up the docket, right? Mhm. >> So, anyone can do these sorts of You
39:48 think you can't um unless you're so small >> that you have sufficient humans to talk
39:53 with every potential lead, every person that touches your website, every person
39:57 that clicks with anything, you can So, that was kind of our journey and
40:04 then we've done a lot of other niche stuff. I'll tell you at the end that the
40:08 where we are today this is a maybe this is almost too much learning is we're at
40:12 the point where maybe we can't do one more because right now when we when we did
40:18 deli in the beginning when I copied you with deli even me I spent almost an hour
40:23 a day training it in the beginning because when we started to use it for
40:27 support it had an initial it started telling people the wrong dates okay and
40:30 we could talk about why so I had to fix it and it made some mistakes and so when
40:33 people started to use it I had to spend an hour each morning firing up Deli
40:37 reviewing the issues and answering them. I don't have to do it anymore. It's well
40:41 trained. Um we have so many agents going in so many emails that Amelia has to
40:47 spend, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week reviewing the outputs and it's
40:50 exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on
40:53 Christmas. It's a big issue, right? This is not being the orchestrator or the chief AI
40:59 person is not a good job for lazy people because the agents never sleep, right?
41:04 So it is so much time now to manage these 20. This is just interesting. We
41:07 can't I don't know when we're going to do the 21st. We may be full. And for
41:13 folks that are startups, this is a reason to go harder because everyone was in market this
41:19 year. Okay, everyone. And it's going to keep happening. But business process
41:23 change remains an issue for business software. Business process change at the
41:27 end of the day. And so many founders get this wrong. And 99% of sales folks, they
41:30 don't care about business process change. in sales works, they just want
41:32 to get their commission. Doesn't really matter what you pay for an app for for a
41:36 customer as long as it's fair. It's all the work to do to change the way you do
41:40 your business, right? And so we're even we're at the point where we're
41:44 overloaded, right? And so just be aware if you're if you're a startup or even
41:48 Salesforce or HubSpot, maybe maybe close those deals in the next 12 months
41:51 because the window may close where people say, "Listen, that's the coolest
41:54 agent I've ever seen. I'm exhausted from the last five. I had to do five last
41:58 year. I just can't literally cannot bring one more app into my enterprise.
42:02 And so that's going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has
42:05 tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted
42:10 for having so many agents. Exhaust, man. Okay. There's so much to to learn
42:15 from in what you just shared. Something I definitely want to ask about as people
42:19 hear this uh agents sending off emails, agents talking to your clients. Uh we
42:24 get I get a ton of emails that are terrible. >> Yes. H what have you learned about
42:30 making these outbound emails good and not just you know noise? How do you make
42:33 these conversations high quality? How do you >> It's a really really really good
42:36 question. >> So the two maybe the two biggest learnings um
42:42 take your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have, take their email
42:49 copy and use that as a template for your AI. If you the the the the terrible
42:53 mistake people make people all everyone in 2024 said these products didn't work.
42:57 There were two reasons they didn't work. It was before cloud 4, right? Replet
43:01 didn't work. Lovable didn't exist. Gamma didn't really work before 2025, right?
43:06 Before CL like the LMS reached this point where they would work for these
43:09 use cases. So that was one threshold. The other thing that happened in 2024 is
43:14 the vendors kind of lied and said uh just turn the product on. It'll get you
43:17 revenue. No no need to train it, no need to do anything. we'll just do everything
43:21 as this magic AI savant. It's not it's not the way it works this way. What you
43:25 do is an a an agent will be successful in go to market in sales today. If you
43:28 take what works for your best person, train I know this seems like a scary
43:33 term, but it's not. Upload that text. Okay? Train the agent on it and let it
43:37 iterate an AB test from that. Agents are really good at AB testing. They're
43:40 really good at creating variants. AI like you ask Claude or or chat for a
43:44 variant of your best email. Say, "Give me three versions of my best email."
43:46 They'll be pretty good. That's all the agent has to do is take your best email
43:50 you ever sent and stick it through an API and go it's it's I I'm I'm making it
43:55 sound simpler than it is, but but not by too much. So train it and then what and
44:00 then what it'll do and then give it some data sources and the data source could
44:04 be as simple as Salesforce. Okay? And and and then if it has any
44:09 data on Lenny, it can pull data and it can lightly personalize that email.
44:14 Okay? And even better, if a lot of these products track all the visitors to your
44:18 website, so they can see what's happened and they use other APIs and so they can
44:23 personalize your emails more. And so what ends up happening is the emails
44:28 that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's
44:31 a poorly trained product from a bad vendor. You should be getting emails
44:35 when you get them and you're like, "This isn't as good as Jason said on Lenny's
44:40 podcast, but it's pretty good." Okay, that's what AI can do today. And the
44:43 magic is if a human isn't even doing that or if your mediocre humans are
44:50 worse. And I'll tell you, you know, one of the first lessons I learned when my
44:53 last startup was acquired by Adobe. Sam Blonde was one of our sales leaders.
44:57 Then he became CRO of Brex and others. And he we inherited a bunch of reps from
45:00 Adobe. We didn't ask for them. And he's like, "My god, I never read everyone's
45:03 emails before. These are the worst emails that I've ever read." So the AI
45:09 can do better than that. the AI can do better than than that. And so you just
45:12 train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. And so so you just haven't
45:17 seen a well-trained agent. And then what I learned and then another question
45:20 folks ask is, "Okay, Jason, that email was pretty good. It wasn't as great as
45:23 you said on stage, but it was pretty good." But do you do you tell people
45:28 it's an AI or do you or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending
45:30 hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. people. We're we're we're we're we're in
45:38 an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they
45:41 know they're going to get an instant response. We've tried both. We've tried
45:43 to say, "Hey, it's digital Amelia or digital Jason." We've tried to fake it.
45:47 And what we've learned is now we just send it. We We just send it and no one
45:51 cares. And sometimes we'll get especially founders will get an email
45:53 back. They'll be like, "Haha, I can tell this is NI but it's pretty good. Can I
45:57 do a meeting?" That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Mhm. So, we're worrying
46:03 we're creating issues as excuses to not do the work. >> Your point about how sale human sales
46:10 people's emails are not great already is really powerful because all we're
46:13 looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying okay but humans
46:16 they're not actually that much better if you actually look at them. My god,
46:20 they're not the be listen the best outbound emails you've ever gotten. Um
46:25 like for example, I know you've done a bunch of investments a lot of them are
46:27 inbound to you. They want Lenny involved. Right. >> That's right.
46:30 >> Some of them are just so good you can't believe it. Right.
46:33 >> A few. >> Yeah. >> How many are that? But but a lot of them
46:35 aren't. Right. >> Right. >> So like the best founders and the best
46:41 sales execs and the best SDRs will spend two hours researching an email. Okay.
46:45 Who exactly did IBM should I reach out to? What did IM? Who else exactly is a
46:49 competitor that's using them? Exactly what was the ROI? They'll give you a
46:52 perfect story. Like you get the world's best story. Here's your competitor.
46:55 Here's how they use it. Here's exactly when they bought. Here's the ROI. Here's
46:59 the case study. That's gonna that's a great email, right? How many 21-year-old
47:04 STRs do that. No, they they use a to an automation tool whether it's Outreach or
47:08 Gong or Salesoft or Mixmax or an AI based, but they do no work. It's not
47:12 going to be that great. It's not going to be that great. So, that's why for for
47:17 people get a little confused. The bar for good enough for AI GTM is not as
47:23 high as we think. It's just like uh you know a a fimile of your best person
47:27 reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your midpack person. It's going to
47:30 beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.
47:34 >> Is this is this an opportunity for humans to continue to thrive this layer
47:38 of much better emails. Uh this came up when we had Jen Ael on the podcast. She
47:41 I asked her like what tools do you use? What do you use? She's like nothing. I
47:46 just write it out artisally. Uh and it works really well because everyone's
47:49 sending AI emails. Is this just like where go to market sales people still
47:54 can exist that's much better email or is that also >> for for if you have a high performing
48:01 human team hunting high dollar value logos and when this is classic stuff
48:05 Lenny and I and Jen are in a in a conference room we put a whiteboard of
48:09 the 50 best folks that we want to sponsor Lenny's podcast there's only 50
48:13 okay and we write notion and we write linear and we write rap there's only 50
48:17 it's a and we're all trying to sell them these new sponsorships They're they're
48:20 they're half a million bucks for two years. Take it or leave it. Okay. And I
48:24 give we divide them up and we say Lenny's best at this, Jason's best is
48:29 Jen and we each take 15 or 17. >> Dude, no need for AI there, is there?
48:33 >> Agreed. No need for AI today >> because the ROI is really high.
48:36 >> Yeah. And we're and we're great and and we know that the three of us are we're
48:39 different. The three of us are really different. It's going to crush and we
48:42 don't need any Maybe one of us will take our emails and run it through Claude
48:44 real quick just to make it better, right? or or what I do is I do it for
48:48 more research. Like I write the world's best email and then I say, "Claude, how
48:51 could I make this better? Do a little research. It will still be better." So
48:54 that's an AI boost Jen should be doing. I love Jen, but she should be she should
48:58 at least be making it better. But for our 45 50 best ones, we don't need it.
49:02 What if it's 5,000? Her approach just doesn't work. So yes, a lot of the stuff
49:07 we're talking about lends itself to higher volume sales. But as everyone
49:12 gets bigger, it's all higher volume. It's all there's just so much volume as
49:16 you scale, right? So, yes, if you're tiny and you have three prospects and
49:20 you're you're just getting into Y Combinator, maybe you don't need these
49:24 tools, but we we graduate out of that more quickly. And and the bespoke thing
49:29 for Jen, I think, will work for high dollar value enterprise, but is outside
49:37 of that, I don't know, man. Uh it's uh you just can't touch enough people.
49:40 Humans can't touch enough people, and humans don't want to do the work. They
49:44 don't want to talk to the mediocre leads. They literally don't. I'll tell
49:49 you an like when I was in London, I wanted to buy a $10,000 product. Okay?
49:53 And I'm literally in London. I and we're doing SAS. I don't have any time, right?
49:57 And I get confused with the time zones, Lenny. I don't know if you do. I don't
49:59 even know what time it is in the Bay Area. So, I just emailed this rep at the
50:02 end of the year. I'm like, just send me the contract. I want to buy it, but I
50:05 have two questions. I have two questions I want answered. I told him these two
50:08 questions. And they weren't even about price. took him three days to get back to me
50:13 and he introduced me to someone else on his team. It wasn't worth his time. 10
50:16 grand wasn't enough because not enough commission for him, right? So, he
50:19 introduced someone else to me and the other guy said, "I can't answer your
50:21 questions unless you'll get on the phone." And I said, "I'm in London. I'm
50:27 traveling. If you will," ordinarily, I would have ended this, but I'm I'm It's
50:29 a journey. I'm like, "If you answer my two questions, I will buy your property
50:32 for 10K." He's like, "I need to get on the phone." Like, AI is better than
50:37 that. This is not Jen's in the whiteboards thing of doing it. So, um,
50:42 it will at least it will fill the even if Jen's process is right, AI can fill
50:47 all the gaps. What about all the sponsors we the leads we didn't follow
50:51 up with and we got a 70% response rate, right? I mean, the gens are diamond in a
50:55 rough and whatever the expression, the diamond. There's not that many of them.
51:00 There's not that many of them. So, uh, I I love her and I love what she says and
51:06 I agree with 99% of it. But here's a po a related point. Most of us are don't have the hottest
51:14 brands and we don't have the most elite CRO running them. So we end up settling
51:20 for not the best sales team. That's the truth. Most 99% of the best
51:25 sales reps want to work just at the hottest brands. And the minute you're
51:29 not the minute your star fades just a little bit, they don't want to work.
51:32 They they immediately want to jump to the next one. It's just there's a lot of
51:37 reasons why. So bear in mind 99% of of the world cannot attract a team of gens
51:42 or better. It's just pract even I can't even you could Lenny you're so great but
51:45 even a lot of folks that would want to go work for you if you want to hire
51:48 someone they'd be like well I love the but what do I have to do? I've got to
51:52 sell newsletter sp like no no no no no no no I want to be CRO at lovable I love
51:57 Lenny but is that really going to get me there? Right. >> Yeah.
52:03 >> So we AI can AI can beat those. But AI can't beat the enterprise thing.
52:07 AI I I have no idea how AI is going to do inerson sales. I someone smarter than
52:13 me is going to have to answer that. But um a lot of I you know you have such a
52:16 huge audience, Lenny, but I still think most of your folks are in tech and doing
52:20 tech sales. Tech is the largest segment of our economy and growing, right? So
52:24 for the most part, these tools will work for tech sales. Tech sales is over the
52:28 Zoom, over the phone, over email. We're not We should knock on more doors. We
52:32 should do more in person. All the data I've ever collected shows everything
52:35 closes at a higher rate if you go in person. It's just not. But in tech, it's
52:38 basically as much automation as we can get away with in GTM.
52:41 >> What I think might be helpful is just like let me zoom out for a second and
52:45 describe what you've gone through here. So you used to have I love this visual
52:49 you had of the desks of the sales folks in your office uh where you had inbound
52:54 STRs, you had outbound SDRs, maybe a support person >> and three or four AES account.
52:59 >> Okay. three or four AES who kind of take these leads and then close the deal.
53:04 >> And so now in just like instead of humans, there's an agent doing each of
53:07 these jobs. Yes. >> You have this inbound this outbound uh
53:11 agent that's just sending emails trying to find potential leads. Uh an inbound
53:16 agent that's talking to people that are interested, trying to get them uh more
53:21 excited. And then is there an AE agent or I forget what that?
53:24 >> We have that's what I'm still learning. We have one full-time AE plus
53:30 >> 20% of Amelia's time, so it's 1.2 doing what five or six AES do.
53:32 >> I see. >> And no SDR BDRs. >> Got it. So basically all the top of
53:39 funnels is AI. Yes. >> And there's one human now that takes all
53:42 this all the great stuff and just closes the deals, negotiates pricing, things
53:45 like that. >> Yeah. Maybe 1.2 just to say it. But but yeah, let's call 1.2.
53:50 >> Yeah. So that's where I wanted to go. So Amelia, so that feels really important.
53:53 just somebody, not necessarily full-time, but just staying on top of
53:56 these agents, watching the emails, making sure quality is high, making sure
53:59 they're running correctly. Talk about just like how important that part is to
54:02 this whole operation. >> It It's critical. It It's critical. And,
54:07 you know, people are posting on LinkedIn that they want to hire these GTM
54:11 engineers or I don't think that role exists today. I I I worry when I see these roles. I
54:17 think today, and listen, if we get together in 18 months, we'll we'll
54:20 update this because the world's changing so fast, right? I think today 95% of 100
54:24 you've got to promote someone internally. It's got to be a nerd,
54:28 someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant. You know, a lot of BTOC
54:32 people are frankly good at this stuff because in B toc sales and marketing are
54:36 kind of the same thing, you know, but someone that's a nerd that loves to sit
54:39 in front of data for a couple hours a day and and route data and manage these
54:45 agents and uh they come out of product, they could come out of marketing, but
54:49 maybe they could come out of RevOps, but they better be nerdy. Odds they come out
54:55 of regular sales approach zero. So, I would find someone on my team that
54:59 raises their hand and says, "I've already done this." Okay, I I've already
55:02 I've already written 10 apps in Replet and I and I and I love Verscell and I
55:05 did this and I've already tried these ones on my own. Can I please manage
55:09 these for you? And then have them be your chief orchestration officer. But it
55:15 is a new skill set. It it really is. And and ultimately finding someone that's
55:18 going to spend an hour or two a day to manage these agents is the new new
55:22 frontier for us to figure out. Um they they do not they they operate
55:27 autonomously but not without constant oversight and iteration. That's the
55:31 confusing part. It and and you just if you just buy one of these products and
55:35 disappear, you will have zero ROI. So maybe too long of an answer, but that's
55:39 critical. And I just think unfortunately >> you're going to you have to grow this
55:43 resource at home today. You have to even within versel that basically grew the
55:47 resource in home, right? We're not all versel, but I just haven't seen it.
55:53 Everyone's hosting for this job. Um but we need veterans. We don't have veterans yet, right? And
55:58 going back early in the conversation, if that is you, you're going to be super
56:02 employable next year. You're going to have so many job offers,
56:04 you're not going to know what to you're going to have to beat them off.
56:08 >> And when you think of is Amelia, would you describe as a go to market engineer
56:11 or do you is that a different role? Chief I would say officer.
56:13 >> Yeah. Okay. >> But she knows the product's cold
56:19 >> she knows how the all the quirks work, how all the agents work in and here's a
56:24 this is this is a a complicated issue, but an interesting one. If you're
56:28 running multiple agents, okay, someone's got to segment which of the base the
56:32 agents are working with or they're going to have tons of conflict, you need
56:37 someone smart enough and any like really nerdy demand genen marketer that loves
56:40 data can do this. But you've got to segment your base >> otherwise it just becomes a mess. There
56:45 are no people on X and the internet talk about these master agents that can
56:48 manage agents that can manage agents. We're not there yet. Okay m maybe like
56:51 I'm excited for it but we're not there yet. So just even figuring out how to
56:56 segment your base so you can do inbound, retargeting, remarketing, new marketing,
57:02 like so so that that is complicated, but most badass marketers kind of
57:06 understand that. They're already doing AB testing, segmenting their bases. This
57:10 is not new, is it? >> No. >> No. Yeah, >> it's Yeah,
57:14 >> but turning it on with zero work is a F. Like it's just it's just no chance.
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7:13 followed it and then maybe I'm rambling a little bit the interesting thing the
7:18 aha moment that happened to us is going into May of this year we had one AI
7:21 agent in production called Deli that we both use for digital lending and digital
7:26 Jason really interesting learnings and we went into our 10,000 person event
7:29 this year with with an eight you know a seven figure budget and eight figure
7:34 topline and two folks on the sales team who are were paid high end of market I
7:38 have many flaws, but paying well and being loyal are not one of them. And two
7:41 of them just quit at the event. They just quit on site. Okay. And I this is
7:46 like the third time I've done this, like the eighth team I've built. And and I
7:49 turned to Amelia, our chief a officer, and I said, "We're done with hiring
7:53 humans in sales. We're done. We are going to push the limits with agents.
7:57 We're going to p even if it doesn't quite work." Okay? And I knew from this
8:02 deli, this general agent, that it would sort of work because going into annual,
8:06 this general agent, this digital Jason closed a 70k sponsorship on its own. So
8:12 when I saw that a horizontal agent, not trained for sales, not trained for GTM,
8:16 could close one deal, like let's deploy a couple of these apps. We have time and
8:23 I just can't pay a junior SDR $150,000 a year to quit. I just can't like
8:27 criticize me, but I just couldn't do it one more time. I just couldn't do it one
8:30 more. And I actually think this is an when I talk to CEOs at leading AI
8:34 companies, they kind of don't want to do it either. They want to have the
8:38 smallest sales teams they can as much for cultural reasons, right? Even if
8:43 even if Replet only goes from zero to 200, it could have been 220 with a
8:46 smaller sales team. I think John's okay with it, right? So, it's an enduring
8:50 thing. But anyhow, so we push the limits and now if you walk into SAS's office,
8:55 it's kind of funny. We have 10 desks that used to be go to market people.
8:58 They're all just labeled with our agents. Reply for replet, quali for
9:03 qualified, arty for artisan. Agent Force needs a nickname. Maybe we can make one
9:06 up with Salesforce. There's Amelia's corner office at one end. I'm in the I'm
9:09 in the back of the office and it's just agents. It's the quietest office. And
9:14 netnet Lenny, it's about here's the metalarning for when we when we're
9:17 recording this. The pro the net productivity is about the same. It's not
9:25 better. It's not worse. Um, but it's so much more efficient and it scales
9:30 because software scales. So, and uh we can talk about what we've
9:35 learned. I think it's important that it takes time to train these agents. They
9:39 don't work out of the box. Um, but when you dial them in, when you take your
9:44 best person or your best script and you train an agent with your best person and
9:48 best script, that agent can start to become a version of your best
9:52 salesperson, your best person. And that's what we've learned and how to
9:56 perfect it. And I just think because and criticize me, anybody, you or anyone
10:00 watching or listening, maybe it's not cool. I didn't want to hire my 28th rep
10:04 that was going to quit that. But I just couldn't do it one more time in the age
10:07 of AI. I'm like, it's time to go to the bleeding edge and just see what we can push the limits
10:12 here. >> Okay. I I I love all the directions we're already heading. Okay. So just to
10:18 help people totally understand what your business is. Basically these people are
10:23 selling sponsors for your conference is >> they're selling two things to because
10:26 it's just relevant to the deep dive. They're selling sponsorships which
10:29 average about 70 to 80k >> and then they're also selling tickets
10:32 which is the high volume for this is like the the self-s serve version.
10:35 They're selling tickets that are anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to
10:38 if you're a VC that comes the night before could be two grand. Okay. No no
10:42 no gifts for VCs that decide the night before. founders that decide early get
10:46 get it at about 10 20% of cost and and and it's work to sell these tickets,
10:51 right? And so you can just post an email like you do and you probably fill up
10:55 Lenny Summit, but if you want to max it out, you got to do work. You got to do
10:58 drip campaigns. You got to reach out to people. You have to reactivate folks
11:02 that came to Lenny Summit, you know, three years ago, but you want them back
11:05 because they're good people. And that just requires work. And as your base
11:09 scales, you know, you have how many people subscribe to Lenny's newsletter
11:12 now? 1.2 two million or something. >> 1.2 million roughly.
11:15 >> Okay. How many as how many of those is a human willing to reach out to
11:19 >> approaching nuns? >> 2,000. Yeah. >> Imagine you hired a 21-year-old SDR
11:24 fresh out of junior college and said, "Here's my list, 1.2 million people.
11:29 Start calling them. >> I want him to come to Lenny Summit." But
11:33 anyhow, so we have this low-end version, which is tickets, right? Which is four
11:36 or five million a year. And then we have this higherend sales cycle. And they're
11:40 very different. And actually, they have different agents. And then we have a
11:43 different agent to get people to come back. Laps people. So we have lapsed
11:47 high-end and low-end agents. And they have different workflows and we actually
11:51 use different vendors for now. For now we use different vendors.
11:55 >> Okay. And so uh previously before this future world, how many SDRs did you
11:59 have? How many salespeople in the >> We would have two to three SDRs and up
12:03 to five AES. >> Okay. So like eight, nine people full-time working on Saster. Yes. to
12:10 bring in sponsors and to bring in tickets. >> Yes. Although yes, a lot of it is
12:16 inbound and renewals but not but yes to manage that business to manage the sales
12:20 management and go to market. Let's call it 8 to9 and go to market. Now we have
12:24 1.2 >> uh 1.2 >> humans >> human 1.2 humans
12:30 >> 20 agents AI agents >> 1 point what is a 0.2 human?
12:34 >> Amelia who's our chief a officer who who runs everything. She spends 20% of her
12:39 time managing the agents, orchestrating the agents. >> Okay.
12:41 >> Which is something I think people don't Let's get into that. They talk about,
12:44 but they don't actually understand what that means. >> Yeah. Okay. I definitely want to spend
12:48 time there. Uh Okay. So, you used to have about 10 people full-time. Now you
12:53 have 1.2 humans and you said 20 agents. >> 20 agents. Yeah.
12:55 >> Okay. And what you're describing is the business is doing very similarly to what
13:00 it was when you had 10 humans. Now you have 20 agents. The business doing the
13:02 same. >> Yeah. Now listen, if I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't
13:07 get me wrong, and this is true of every fast, I would hire them tomorrow, okay?
13:12 And and if you go if you go to Verscell, if you go to Replet, if you go to
13:14 they're all going to tell you the same. I was literally in London when we were
13:18 just at our abundant event. We with with Maggie who's in the leadership of
13:21 OpenAI. She said they just can't hire enough enterprise reps now. Okay. And
13:24 but what what it is replacing are the midpack and below. The ones that don't
13:30 really understand what linear does. The ones that don't really know what a pull
13:35 request is or exactly how replet works. The AI can do better. Not than the best,
13:39 right? So I would love to have more humans, but I'm not going to hire
13:43 someone that after their third month in the job doesn't know what Saster does. I
13:47 just can't do that one more time. And you don't need to. I don't think you
13:50 need to. So we're not doing This is the thing. AI is replacing the jobs people
13:55 don't want to do today and it is displacing the media the midpack and the
13:59 mediocre. They are their jobs are at risk. They are at risk. The best humans
14:04 it is true that they will get superpowers from AI but I'm not sure the
14:08 rest will. It's a it's a cautionary but I would love to have more than one but
14:12 at the end of the day and 1.2 humans is plus 20 AI agents is doing about what 10
14:17 human GTMs is. >> Wow. Okay. I want to spend time on the
14:20 different agents you've built, but first of all, just kind of zooming out, having
14:25 gone through this experience. How do you see the world of go to market changing
14:31 next year in the coming years? All the plays work. It's the playbooks that are
14:35 kind of broken in the age of AI. All the plays work. Outbound still works.
14:39 Webinar still works. Podcasts still work. Okay. Events still work. All this
14:44 stuff works. All this stuff works. Why is 11 Labs out doing a road show, right?
14:49 It works. Why? Why do they go on Lenny's podcast? It works. So, the plays all
14:54 work. It's just the playbooks are broken because at at for folks that aren't in
14:59 the age of AI, growth has decelerated so much that nothing seems to work. Okay,
15:03 it's working. It just works so much worse than 2021, but the plays still
15:07 work. They just they don't have enough ROI. There's not enough budget for old
15:12 school SAS from 2021. the ones that are blowing up, right? The Verscels, the
15:17 Replets, the 11 Labs, they have so much demand, so much demand that, you know, that
15:24 they're still running the plays, but they're they're doing them differently.
15:26 They're doing them from a hyper PLG focus because there's so much demand and
15:30 they're often picking and choosing which prospects to talk to to to contact. So,
15:35 like, for example, Bolt is probably a distant number three behind Rep and
15:37 Lovable, right? But one of my old sales guys runs sales there. And I talked to
15:41 him when they went from 0 to 50 million in like six months. He's like, "We
15:45 honestly just have so many leads. We just are half our job is picking which
15:49 ones to respond to, right?" And he's like, and he also is like, "We closed a seven figure deal we
15:54 stole from Lovable because no one called them back at lovable." So your
15:57 traditional B2B SAS company, even ones at billions of revenue, even the
16:02 HubSpots and the and and and uh all of them, they don't have so many great
16:06 leads, they don't call them back. So that is a different world um not easy
16:09 different world and then this this world where nothing seems to be working is
16:14 just because the demand has evaporated right so both ends have an incentive in 2026 to
16:22 push the limits for AI for go to market the ones that are hyperrowing can't
16:26 touch everybody they can't do everything not everyone like Versell will build
16:30 their own internally we can talk about why most folks should not build they
16:34 should buy for the same reasons it's always been true in software or we can
16:37 talk about it. At the low end, you still need humans, but ruthless efficiency is
16:41 going to be the name of the game for 2026. So, anything where AI works, the
16:45 demand is inexhaustible. So, everyone's either looking for more efficiency or
16:49 they just can't service the massive amount of inbound they have. Um, and so
16:53 maybe that doesn't totally answer your question or I got a little bit off
16:56 track, but that's how the world's changing. Like, when we first did this,
17:00 which wasn't that long ago, in a way, pre the AI explosion, all B2B companies
17:04 were kind of the same. like they grew at somewhat different rates. Some blew up
17:08 faster like a Samsara. Some took longer like a UiPath, but come on. They were
17:12 all they all kind of grew the same way for the same ACV for the same deal size.
17:16 Now, just like in venture and everything else, it's wildly bifurcated, right?
17:19 You've got the low end, which is all about price increases and forcing things
17:24 onto the base. And at the high end, we have something we've never seen since
17:28 2020, which is everyone in the market at once. Everyone in the market at once. This is
17:33 something that people don't understand. Why why are why are these companies
17:36 doing so well? Why are they blowing up? Because they're it's not just at the
17:39 software. We we love this stuff, Lenny, right? All these new tools. We love
17:43 them. But it's not one law firm looking at Harvey. It's everyone. It's everyone,
17:48 right? It's not a few folks looking at video on the internet. It's everyone
17:51 trying to make video on the internet >> because there's a lot of push from the
17:54 top of like we need to adopt AI. We need to be more productive. Now, everyone,
17:58 not the traditional, like the traditional metric was in most
18:02 categories, 3 to 5% of prospects would be in market a year. >> So, you'd send a trillion emails and you
18:08 do cold calls and you'd hope maybe 2026 was the time they're willing to dump
18:12 Salesforce for your new product. So, add all that up, 5%. In many categories,
18:17 we're north of 50% in market. So, that just totally changes. The plays
18:21 still work. showing up in person, actually knowing what the hell you're
18:24 selling, knowing how to get through procurement, all of those are work. But
18:28 other than these weird windows, artificial windows in 2020, we've never
18:31 had so many people in market at once. >> And this is for AI products specifically
18:34 or >> Yeah. that that have massive ROI. >> Yeah. Productivity.
18:40 >> I want I I need to bring a Vibe Code tool into my company, Lenny. Okay. Go
18:44 out and do the work. Compare Replet, Lovable, and whoever else and buy one.
18:49 Okay. Harve like why are Harvey and the others in Lagora doing so? I mean
18:52 they're great tools but everyone's like we need to automate how we review
18:56 contracts and documents with AI now. They want a leader and they're going to
19:00 do it and that will slow down like not everybody can be in market every year.
19:04 It it's exhausts an enterprise. So this this is a version of the AI bubble that
19:08 will end and we will revert in some ways to old school but when everybody's in
19:12 market it just it just changes how you run the whole thing. So the so the
19:16 fastest growing ones and the slowest growing ones both have incentives to use
19:20 AI here just for different reasons. >> How about the sales profession
19:24 specifically? Are SDRs going to be replaced fully AES? How do you see the
19:27 future of the sales profession? >> The classic SDR junior kid that is hired out of
19:37 college to send emails and respond to respond to inbound emails and maybe get
19:40 back to them later that day or the next day. We don't need them. We're not going
19:45 to need most of them. SDRs that knock on doors in a lot of industries aren't
19:49 going to be displaced, right? The emailbased cadence SDR will be 90%
19:56 displaced by AI next year. The people have different nomclature. I call BDRs,
20:00 folks that qualify leads coming in. The contact mess that we see, we have no
20:04 need for them today. They should be extinct next year. There is no reason in
20:08 the age of AI I have to hit contact me, wait two a day or two for a 21-year-old
20:13 that doesn't know what linear does to say, "Hey, what do you do? How much are
20:17 you willing to pay me? Maybe I'll set up a call with Lenny later this week."
20:21 There is no need to do that with AI. The AI, our AI alone, one of our agent fully
20:25 qualifies everybody on the website so they don't even know they're being
20:27 qualified. It just sets up the meeting with the salesperson. So this SDR, this
20:33 email-based SDR and this human qualifying leads, which is not good for
20:36 the customer. It doesn't feel good to be qualified, does it? They will be mostly
20:41 extinct next year. I'm guessing with your now the AE, the classic human doing
20:46 the sales, most of the tools aren't there yet for the most part. I think 70%
20:52 of their jobs will be safe by the end of next year, but I think it will decline
20:56 to 40 or 50. I don't think there's any reason what we're seeing in other
21:00 categories, a great agent can't close a deal too. If there's not a lot to
21:04 negotiate in price and the agent knows the product better than a human, at
21:08 least for folks like you and me. I mean, do you like to talk to a human in sales
21:12 >> sometimes? Uh I'd rather I'd rather just chat chat with a Yeah. a really smart
21:15 AI. >> Yeah. So, that's all in progress now. But the classic and the tough part and a
21:21 lot of folks ask this question, Lenny, they say, um, okay, Jason, I I see that
21:26 in your data. How are we going to build the sales profession if there's no
21:30 entry-level jobs in SDRs and AES? And that's a meta question across all of AI.
21:35 We're already seeing AI concentrate strength in sort of mid-tier folks,
21:39 isn't it? And we're already seeing lots of folks cut back on entry-level hires,
21:43 you know, Shopify and others aside, where they'd rather have the six or
21:46 seveny old engineer that's a cursor machine rather than train some kid. It's
21:51 just more efficient today, right? I'm sure you see that across a lot of folks
21:54 you talk to. It's gonna happen in sales, too. So the folks that know how to
21:58 manage an agent, work with an agent, the folks that know their product for real,
22:02 they're going to become more valuable and the rest are going to become less
22:04 valuable. >> It's interesting because I'm an investor in a bunch of startups as are you and
22:10 I'm actually seeing a lot of asks for go to market people, sales people. Do you
22:14 think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand, they're
22:16 like, "Oh, we need people to help and then this will start to become more AI
22:20 over time or are they just looking for these really senior people that you're
22:23 talking about?" Well, listen, whether you're managing humans or orchestrating
22:28 agents, you need leadership. We've yet to produce an autonomous CEO.
22:33 I know folks talk about how on on Twitter that will AI will replace the
22:36 CEO, but I don't know that that's literal as much as figurative, right?
22:39 So, we're still going to need the seuite. We're still going to need VPs. I
22:44 mean, it's become so much work to manage a million leads, right? A half million
22:49 leads. We we need these leaders whether the the question is and I've seen your
22:53 call out there and I saw your tweet on it. The question is how many of the
22:58 folks that had the current playbooks are the right folks for the future. I'm
23:04 thinking maybe 20%. of the folks I talked to 20 for are still panicking
23:09 about AI and and I'll tell you how to not how to be in the 20% if you want to
23:14 know but I think very few like the Janine from Verscell are going to make
23:18 the jump so we'll see there will be huge organizations right like Denise just
23:22 went from Slack and Salesforce after 14 years to be CRO open AAI she's working
23:26 going to be pretty high level right so she may not know how to need to know how
23:30 to implement the agents but most of the folks your companies want to hire I
23:35 would just make sure they could they really want to roll up their sleeves and
23:40 do the job of 2026 2027, right? Um just because they worked at Slack does not
23:43 necessarily mean they have the skills at your startup. >> You said that you had some tips for
23:47 folks to actually be this 20%. What are some If someone's listening to this
23:50 like, "Oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on?"
23:53 >> It's going to sound simple. It will work and most almost nobody's doing this.
23:59 Pick a tool, an agent, an agentic tool to solve one of your problems. It
24:03 doesn't almost m just one that's the most painful or the one that's most
24:07 acute. It could be support. It could be SDR. It could be inbound qualification.
24:11 Pick one. Pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. Okay? We can talk
24:15 about how to pick a vendor, but pick a leading vendor that treats you well that
24:21 you like and do it yourself. Train the agent. Ingest the data. Do the
24:28 iterations. Understand how this damn thing works. Okay. The folks that are
24:33 lost today have never done it. We literally we've turned into a consulting
24:37 shop. Lenny, it's kind of crazy. I I don't know what I think about it, but we
24:40 literally just did a job. Amelia, our chief A officer, and and Mia, she she
24:44 she drove it. We did a call with a public B2B company worth well over 10
24:48 billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay? Okay. And we did a call
24:51 with their team and they're like, "We're Okay. One, no chance. Two, we asked
25:05 them, "How much of this have you done yourself?" Like, "Have you have you done
25:07 it yourself?" And it was just crickets on this call of 20 people. No one had
25:10 done it theirel. So, they thought they could take an untrained agent with no
25:15 training and just magically give it to a bunch of young 20-year-old SDRs and and
25:19 this magically would sell on its own. It doesn't work that way, right? So, the
25:25 way all these agents work is you there's a lot of jargon which is intimidating.
25:30 Ingestion, orchestration, training. It's not that hard, guys. It's just
25:34 different. It's the same B2B stuff we've been doing for over a decade. You go to
25:38 a website, okay? You give it a URL of your website. You give it a URL of what
25:41 your wiki is. You give it a URL of your training docs. Maybe you upload your
25:45 perspectus. You upload a few documents. It ingests the data. And ingesting means
25:49 it uploads. It means it processes the data and it does some other stuff you don't really
25:54 need to know. Some ragging, some vectoring, it really doesn't matter. You
25:59 you upload some stuff and it kind of knows it and isn't great at it. And then
26:03 it will turn it into ideally it will turn it into questions and you answer
26:06 these questions and it they will be get the more you answer and train it.
26:09 Training is just answering questions and getting better and better. So, first you
26:13 upload a bunch of your stuff. Then you spend hours training it, often with the
26:17 help of a vendor, someone called a forward deploy engineer, which is a
26:19 scary term. It means someone that's going to help you do this. You upload
26:23 your stuff, you try to get it right, and then you basically have to make sure
26:29 it's right. QA testing. And every day when that AISDR sends out emails and do
26:33 practice emails, they will say some dumb things. Maybe it's hallucinations. It
26:37 really doesn't matter what the technical term is and you correct it and each and
26:43 if you do this for 30 days and every day you spend an hour or two correcting
26:47 those mistakes by the 30th day it's going to be pretty good and this is
26:51 anyone can do this that has been in B2B or SAS anyone can do what I just
26:54 described it is not that different than other things we've done it's just
26:58 sequenced differently but nobody does this everyone's panicked and if you if
27:01 you can go do this pick any tool pick pick uh agent force pick qualified pick
27:05 artisan pick whatever you want If you can go do this and get it live into
27:09 production, you're hyper employable. All the companies you talked about that need
27:13 a GTM person, they will hire you. You could be imaginally be their chief
27:18 agentic GTM officer because but almost anyone can do this if they want to. It's
27:21 just going to take a month of your time and it might take you 50 or 60 hours
27:25 plus qualifying the vendor, right? And in the old days, like when we diverted
27:30 our podcast, you'd hire an agency and disappear. That's how you do this stuff.
27:33 Don't It don't work that. The agencies don't know how to do this. you've got to
27:37 do it yourself. But if you do, man, you will rock. You will just you will just
27:41 rock and you will learn, right? You will learn um and you will learn the limits
27:46 and you will learn the agent can what it can do and where it can't do. And then
27:49 you will learn how to do the next one, right? So like we're pretty far on agent
27:53 force, which is Salesforce's one, which Mark talks a lot about, but we're we're
27:55 probably one of the only organizations of our size on it. I will tell you a
27:59 cheat code which is pretty interesting. So, we've got we had three of these
28:03 agents working for sales. After training it and learning it and
28:06 spending months time to learn it, we got it down to one prompt. And prompt is
28:10 another almost intimidating word. A string of text that describes what you
28:14 want this thing to do. Okay? We took that prompt and gave it to agent force.
28:18 Then a day was pretty good. So, you will if you can do one of these, it'll be
28:21 really hard. It'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier. And then
28:25 you're going to be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it
28:27 yourself. But if you're waiting for people on your team to do it, if you're
28:32 waiting for an agency to do it, I think you're going to be out of a job.
28:37 Right? So this is like everyone comes to us as an experts. We're not we're only
28:41 experts because we did it 20 times. >> I think what might be helpful here
28:45 actually is to do a a tour kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've
28:47 built and what they do, which ones have been most impactful. And then as you do
28:52 that, what products you use, what what powers these agents that that you like
28:56 and maybe don't like. If any if anyone goes to saster.ai/agents,
29:00 we'll you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out. You can copy us
29:04 and I'll walk you through it. But two two caveats or things at the top. I
29:07 built a lot of stuff in Replet. We can talk about it for fun. I'm like a top 1%
29:11 user. I love it. None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it
29:15 yourself. You're not Versel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer
29:19 that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same
29:23 idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these
29:28 products are expensive. They're not so expensive. It's worth and then
29:32 maintaining the pace of innovation is so fast. Even if you can hire someone to
29:35 build it internally, it will become obsolete if you're not careful in a
29:39 couple months. So, we've built a lot of stuff. We could talk about um uh I we I
29:43 built a a calculator to do startup calculations, used 800,000 times in 90
29:46 days >> for valuation, right? >> Yeah. For valuations. I built a pitch
29:50 deck reviewer that's reviewed almost 3,000 pitch decks. Lots of fun stuff,
29:53 but none of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. None of it. So, just a
29:56 caveat, don't build it yourself unless you're Verscell, unless you have a
30:00 reason. That was a great pod. It was wonderful. Don't do it. Don't do that.
30:03 >> Basically, if unless you have a awesome go to market engineers
30:06 >> for and they really want to do it. They're really are chomping at the bit
30:11 to do it. Um, don't do it. So, I started and this is not where other folks would
30:13 start, but there's some learnings. I started there's an app called Deli,
30:18 which makes digital clones. And, um, you used it for the Lenny bot a long time
30:21 ago. I saw you do it. What's that? Yeah. Lenny.com. Yeah. Check that out.
30:25 >> I saw it a long time ago. It was interesting, but I I I did it didn't
30:28 click. And then Brian Halligan, who's the founder chairman of HubSpot, did one
30:32 too. Uh there's Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia, so he helped
30:35 them early on. And then I kind of had a magic moment and this is the way it
30:38 works in AI when I saw the combination of the two. So yours was really like
30:42 people should love moneybot because it's got it's if folks haven't tried it, try
30:46 it. It is ingested. I know a scary term for some. It is ingested every single
30:50 interview you've ever done, right? Every word of content you've written. So, and
30:54 it can combine them all together. It can combine the Verscell story and the and
30:58 and and and uh what what you did with at with Dylan at Figma and can synthesize
31:02 the knowledge and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. What I liked about Brian's
31:07 better than yours though was that it was Brian and Lennybot is kind of Lenny, but
31:11 it's also kind of all your guess, right? I think that's the superpower of it,
31:14 right? That's the way I think about it is not just my intelligence. It's the
31:17 the lessons of every single person I've had on this podcast.
31:19 >> So, it's great. But, I thought, hey, maybe I could finally do one that's
31:23 that's in between the two. Like I I've been a founder and I and I've written
31:27 10,000 pieces of content. So, that's a little bit like Brian, but I have more
31:30 than Brian and I'm not Lenny in terms of productivity, but I've got a lot of
31:33 voices. So, I'm like, I'll try it. I used Deli. I instantly broke it because
31:36 I had too much data to ingest. It took about a week to get going. Um, and it
31:40 worked. people and it's just like you people some people spend hours a day on
31:44 digital JSON in another browser and they don't do what they do with Lenny but
31:47 they'll they'll ask about their sales wos and what to do with their sales team
31:50 and they'll and they'll upload LinkedIn and ask if they should hire people
31:55 and then a curious thing happened which is that because we do these events
31:57 people started to use it for questions for the events hey how do I get a refund
32:02 hey can I get a discount hey where is the Sanonteo County Fairgrounds Jason
32:05 Liz is really in the San Francisco Bay area like who's speaking or and and like
32:10 there's endless questions Right. And we used to use prefin intercom and we're so
32:14 busy we would answer like two weeks later like it was ter worst support ever
32:18 and the the agent just started doing support on its own and then it did this thing where it sold
32:26 sponsorship on its own right so so start you can start with so one place to start
32:31 if you haven't started is in support okay and you don't have to buy Sierra
32:35 and you don't have to buy decacon necessarily and you don't have to buy
32:40 Finn but one potential place to start is is your support like can you do great
32:45 24/7 support? Can you most most apps can't in fact some of the worst
32:48 offenders are AI leaders they they have no support at all on their website. So
32:52 that's one place to start. Um and then the next place we started so for us the
32:56 long game for the next place we started is hey we want to try outbound. Okay
33:01 because we don't have 1.2 million names like you have but we have like 400,000.
33:04 Okay. And we have data on them. So we wanted to say hey come come back to our
33:09 SAT event. So we didn't know what to use and I'll tell you some learning. So we
33:12 picked a YC company called Artisan. They've gone like from like nothing to
33:15 10 million this year. Um we picked them but this is important why they were at
33:19 they were a sponsor at Saster. We didn't know and they offered to help us the
33:23 most. This is the critical insight. We didn't know if Artisan was the I have
33:27 opinions now. We hadn't deployed them but another vendor argued with us. He
33:33 said I need 100K up front before I help you. Okay. Another one said they were
33:38 scared of Saster. They didn't want bad PR if it failed. Fair.
33:41 >> Oh, be Yeah, certain company. >> We don't want to be your first. Okay.
33:46 And Artisan said, "We'll do it." And uh we had nothing. And here's the
33:49 interesting thing about Agentic stuff. It's like support. If you have nothing,
33:53 like it doesn't have to like change the world. If you're literally doing nothing
33:57 and you start to do something that's high ROI, like you're going to get
34:02 return, right? So, we did that one. We trained it. It's great. We did about
34:07 60,000 emails. Um saw pretty high rates. Um then we said, well, we'll try
34:12 inbound. We like we don't want to have this depressing experience where a
34:15 salesperson quits and it's two weeks later until they talk to. So we used
34:19 this vendor called Qualified, which was founded by the XMO of Salesforce that
34:22 does a lot now, but mostly focus on qualified stuff. That immediately
34:26 worked. Like we had someone at 11 p.m. on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor
34:30 and they sponsored and it worked and it and it worked great. Um, but again they
34:33 helped us >> and this is an agent that is emailing with prospects selling them on a
34:37 sponsor. >> Well, it's literally if you go to sasterannual.com and anyone should buy a
34:41 product like this. It doesn't have to be qualified but but and they'll be the
34:46 bubble the intercom like bubble is tuned to to qualifying inbound prospects.
34:50 Folks that say, "Hey, I want to sponsor Lenny's podcast. Sorry, we're sold out
34:54 through 2028, but if you want to be on the wait list, sign up here, okay?"
34:58 Okay. Or or even better for us, it would qualify folks out that weren't a good
35:02 fit, right? It would save so much time and it would do it 24 hours, then it
35:05 would just set up the meeting. So, the reason that was a great second one was
35:08 because no one was willing to do that. No human was willing to pick up the
35:12 phone and talk to these people. So, it was such lowhanging fruit. Um, but the
35:18 key to the first two and and if you're going to pick an agent is they they
35:23 offered to help the most. You're I at the end of the day, Lenny, these are all
35:27 running on cloud 4. They're all basically using a bunch of APIs mashed
35:30 together. That's not new to software, right? Mashing a bunch of APIs under the
35:34 hood. But deep down, I don't want to get anybody trigger anybody. Many of these
35:39 leader the leaders in AI GTM, they're more similar than different. They're
35:42 more similar than different under the hood. It doesn't mean the features are
35:46 are parody. So, because you have to train them because it takes a month, the
35:51 world's best software with no help training you is not one 99% of people
35:57 should buy. So today in the old days we would qualify the best software. We
35:59 would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare
36:02 features and do it. You got to do another column which is your forward
36:05 deployed engineer or solution architecture your SE and talk to them
36:10 and say who is going to help me and before you write a check get on the
36:13 phone with Lenny and see if Lenny's really going to do deployment and if
36:16 Lenny rocks and the other vendor is better and won't help you don't do it.
36:20 And that's why we've had so much success is the first two we did. Yeah, they were
36:24 startups, right? So they worked harder, but Artisan and Qualified just did the
36:27 work with us. And we're not stupid, but it was work. We needed help, right? And
36:32 so that's what I learned is you you have this partner, the FD and the vendor. And
36:36 um and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think
36:38 they can help you. The best ones turn away a lot of business today, which is
36:41 interesting, right? An interesting learning from this for folks is um a lot
36:46 of folks say and they would say it to you if you use these lender they say you
36:50 have too much data. Saster is not like us. We're a startup. We're tiny. You
36:53 have 400,000 people in your database. Lenny has 1.2 million. It's not like
36:58 that's I I got I I I only have 300 customers. Okay. Or 200 customers. What
37:04 I've learned is um that's wrong. If you have 300 customers, how many folks have come to your website
37:11 ever? 30,000. How many leads do you have? How many folks in your database?
37:14 How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing.
37:17 And then they all of a sudden they have the aha moment like, "How many folks do
37:20 you have in your HubSpot?" Right? How many folks do you have in your CRM? They
37:24 look it up. 31,000. Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero. You
37:28 don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these agents work.
37:33 You need you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic,
37:37 but not as much as you think. So all the learnings we have a lot of folks that
37:40 honestly they don't want to do the work. They're like well Saster has a lot of
37:43 scale. They have a lot of years. It's not true. And it turns out to also be
37:47 like true with the training. I'm sure you've seen it with Lenny. Like I
37:50 thought having 12 years of content made the difference. Nah. It's having like a
37:54 couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that. But you don't
37:59 need as deep training and as much as you think. You just need a bit to be really
38:03 good. So anyone that has any scale whatsoever, even a couple million
38:07 revenue and up can benefit from these products, right? So we did hor general
38:12 general bot got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR then for outbound then
38:16 we did inbound and then we did agent force really early with Salesforce and
38:19 we didn't know what to do with agent force at first, right? Um but we decided
38:25 we would reactivate the folks that sales decide was not worth their time.
38:30 folks that reached out to sales. And this is true at every startup. We even
38:34 just talked about some of the AI leaders where a human says, "You know what? I
38:37 don't think this is enough commission. I'm kind of busy. I got a $4 million
38:43 deal with meta going." We just took Asian Force just on those. Okay. And we
38:47 trained it on very similar prompt. It had 70% response rate.
38:52 Those are people that were dying to interact with us. 70% is so good at and this is something
39:00 humans were not willing to do. It wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds
39:02 critical and maybe I'm going to trigger some sales folks. But the reality is if
39:07 you know if you're in a lead rich environment, okay, and there and I I I
39:10 think there's lead rich and lead poor environments for for even big companies,
39:14 but startups like there's not enough. But you eventually you become lead rich,
39:18 okay? Reps just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature.
39:22 It's even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let
39:26 in, right? Do you hum Do you pick up the phone with all of them?
39:29 >> Uh I reply to all of them and then we just sell them. We're we're full. But
39:32 >> yeah, but you see the point, right? Even your scale, you see the point, right?
39:34 >> Yeah. Yeah. It gets challenging. >> Um and let's imagine all of a sudden you
39:38 had six months of inventory available. I bet if you spooled up an agent and
39:40 emailed all those folks back automatically, you'd fill up you'd fill
39:44 up the docket, right? Mhm. >> So, anyone can do these sorts of You
39:48 think you can't um unless you're so small >> that you have sufficient humans to talk
39:53 with every potential lead, every person that touches your website, every person
39:57 that clicks with anything, you can So, that was kind of our journey and
40:04 then we've done a lot of other niche stuff. I'll tell you at the end that the
40:08 where we are today this is a maybe this is almost too much learning is we're at
40:12 the point where maybe we can't do one more because right now when we when we did
40:18 deli in the beginning when I copied you with deli even me I spent almost an hour
40:23 a day training it in the beginning because when we started to use it for
40:27 support it had an initial it started telling people the wrong dates okay and
40:30 we could talk about why so I had to fix it and it made some mistakes and so when
40:33 people started to use it I had to spend an hour each morning firing up Deli
40:37 reviewing the issues and answering them. I don't have to do it anymore. It's well
40:41 trained. Um we have so many agents going in so many emails that Amelia has to
40:47 spend, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week reviewing the outputs and it's
40:50 exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on
40:53 Christmas. It's a big issue, right? This is not being the orchestrator or the chief AI
40:59 person is not a good job for lazy people because the agents never sleep, right?
41:04 So it is so much time now to manage these 20. This is just interesting. We
41:07 can't I don't know when we're going to do the 21st. We may be full. And for
41:13 folks that are startups, this is a reason to go harder because everyone was in market this
41:19 year. Okay, everyone. And it's going to keep happening. But business process
41:23 change remains an issue for business software. Business process change at the
41:27 end of the day. And so many founders get this wrong. And 99% of sales folks, they
41:30 don't care about business process change. in sales works, they just want
41:32 to get their commission. Doesn't really matter what you pay for an app for for a
41:36 customer as long as it's fair. It's all the work to do to change the way you do
41:40 your business, right? And so we're even we're at the point where we're
41:44 overloaded, right? And so just be aware if you're if you're a startup or even
41:48 Salesforce or HubSpot, maybe maybe close those deals in the next 12 months
41:51 because the window may close where people say, "Listen, that's the coolest
41:54 agent I've ever seen. I'm exhausted from the last five. I had to do five last
41:58 year. I just can't literally cannot bring one more app into my enterprise.
42:02 And so that's going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has
42:05 tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted
42:10 for having so many agents. Exhaust, man. Okay. There's so much to to learn
42:15 from in what you just shared. Something I definitely want to ask about as people
42:19 hear this uh agents sending off emails, agents talking to your clients. Uh we
42:24 get I get a ton of emails that are terrible. >> Yes. H what have you learned about
42:30 making these outbound emails good and not just you know noise? How do you make
42:33 these conversations high quality? How do you >> It's a really really really good
42:36 question. >> So the two maybe the two biggest learnings um
42:42 take your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have, take their email
42:49 copy and use that as a template for your AI. If you the the the the terrible
42:53 mistake people make people all everyone in 2024 said these products didn't work.
42:57 There were two reasons they didn't work. It was before cloud 4, right? Replet
43:01 didn't work. Lovable didn't exist. Gamma didn't really work before 2025, right?
43:06 Before CL like the LMS reached this point where they would work for these
43:09 use cases. So that was one threshold. The other thing that happened in 2024 is
43:14 the vendors kind of lied and said uh just turn the product on. It'll get you
43:17 revenue. No no need to train it, no need to do anything. we'll just do everything
43:21 as this magic AI savant. It's not it's not the way it works this way. What you
43:25 do is an a an agent will be successful in go to market in sales today. If you
43:28 take what works for your best person, train I know this seems like a scary
43:33 term, but it's not. Upload that text. Okay? Train the agent on it and let it
43:37 iterate an AB test from that. Agents are really good at AB testing. They're
43:40 really good at creating variants. AI like you ask Claude or or chat for a
43:44 variant of your best email. Say, "Give me three versions of my best email."
43:46 They'll be pretty good. That's all the agent has to do is take your best email
43:50 you ever sent and stick it through an API and go it's it's I I'm I'm making it
43:55 sound simpler than it is, but but not by too much. So train it and then what and
44:00 then what it'll do and then give it some data sources and the data source could
44:04 be as simple as Salesforce. Okay? And and and then if it has any
44:09 data on Lenny, it can pull data and it can lightly personalize that email.
44:14 Okay? And even better, if a lot of these products track all the visitors to your
44:18 website, so they can see what's happened and they use other APIs and so they can
44:23 personalize your emails more. And so what ends up happening is the emails
44:28 that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's
44:31 a poorly trained product from a bad vendor. You should be getting emails
44:35 when you get them and you're like, "This isn't as good as Jason said on Lenny's
44:40 podcast, but it's pretty good." Okay, that's what AI can do today. And the
44:43 magic is if a human isn't even doing that or if your mediocre humans are
44:50 worse. And I'll tell you, you know, one of the first lessons I learned when my
44:53 last startup was acquired by Adobe. Sam Blonde was one of our sales leaders.
44:57 Then he became CRO of Brex and others. And he we inherited a bunch of reps from
45:00 Adobe. We didn't ask for them. And he's like, "My god, I never read everyone's
45:03 emails before. These are the worst emails that I've ever read." So the AI
45:09 can do better than that. the AI can do better than than that. And so you just
45:12 train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. And so so you just haven't
45:17 seen a well-trained agent. And then what I learned and then another question
45:20 folks ask is, "Okay, Jason, that email was pretty good. It wasn't as great as
45:23 you said on stage, but it was pretty good." But do you do you tell people
45:28 it's an AI or do you or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending
45:30 hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. people. We're we're we're we're we're in
45:38 an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they
45:41 know they're going to get an instant response. We've tried both. We've tried
45:43 to say, "Hey, it's digital Amelia or digital Jason." We've tried to fake it.
45:47 And what we've learned is now we just send it. We We just send it and no one
45:51 cares. And sometimes we'll get especially founders will get an email
45:53 back. They'll be like, "Haha, I can tell this is NI but it's pretty good. Can I
45:57 do a meeting?" That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Mhm. So, we're worrying
46:03 we're creating issues as excuses to not do the work. >> Your point about how sale human sales
46:10 people's emails are not great already is really powerful because all we're
46:13 looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying okay but humans
46:16 they're not actually that much better if you actually look at them. My god,
46:20 they're not the be listen the best outbound emails you've ever gotten. Um
46:25 like for example, I know you've done a bunch of investments a lot of them are
46:27 inbound to you. They want Lenny involved. Right. >> That's right.
46:30 >> Some of them are just so good you can't believe it. Right.
46:33 >> A few. >> Yeah. >> How many are that? But but a lot of them
46:35 aren't. Right. >> Right. >> So like the best founders and the best
46:41 sales execs and the best SDRs will spend two hours researching an email. Okay.
46:45 Who exactly did IBM should I reach out to? What did IM? Who else exactly is a
46:49 competitor that's using them? Exactly what was the ROI? They'll give you a
46:52 perfect story. Like you get the world's best story. Here's your competitor.
46:55 Here's how they use it. Here's exactly when they bought. Here's the ROI. Here's
46:59 the case study. That's gonna that's a great email, right? How many 21-year-old
47:04 STRs do that. No, they they use a to an automation tool whether it's Outreach or
47:08 Gong or Salesoft or Mixmax or an AI based, but they do no work. It's not
47:12 going to be that great. It's not going to be that great. So, that's why for for
47:17 people get a little confused. The bar for good enough for AI GTM is not as
47:23 high as we think. It's just like uh you know a a fimile of your best person
47:27 reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your midpack person. It's going to
47:30 beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product.
47:34 >> Is this is this an opportunity for humans to continue to thrive this layer
47:38 of much better emails. Uh this came up when we had Jen Ael on the podcast. She
47:41 I asked her like what tools do you use? What do you use? She's like nothing. I
47:46 just write it out artisally. Uh and it works really well because everyone's
47:49 sending AI emails. Is this just like where go to market sales people still
47:54 can exist that's much better email or is that also >> for for if you have a high performing
48:01 human team hunting high dollar value logos and when this is classic stuff
48:05 Lenny and I and Jen are in a in a conference room we put a whiteboard of
48:09 the 50 best folks that we want to sponsor Lenny's podcast there's only 50
48:13 okay and we write notion and we write linear and we write rap there's only 50
48:17 it's a and we're all trying to sell them these new sponsorships They're they're
48:20 they're half a million bucks for two years. Take it or leave it. Okay. And I
48:24 give we divide them up and we say Lenny's best at this, Jason's best is
48:29 Jen and we each take 15 or 17. >> Dude, no need for AI there, is there?
48:33 >> Agreed. No need for AI today >> because the ROI is really high.
48:36 >> Yeah. And we're and we're great and and we know that the three of us are we're
48:39 different. The three of us are really different. It's going to crush and we
48:42 don't need any Maybe one of us will take our emails and run it through Claude
48:44 real quick just to make it better, right? or or what I do is I do it for
48:48 more research. Like I write the world's best email and then I say, "Claude, how
48:51 could I make this better? Do a little research. It will still be better." So
48:54 that's an AI boost Jen should be doing. I love Jen, but she should be she should
48:58 at least be making it better. But for our 45 50 best ones, we don't need it.
49:02 What if it's 5,000? Her approach just doesn't work. So yes, a lot of the stuff
49:07 we're talking about lends itself to higher volume sales. But as everyone
49:12 gets bigger, it's all higher volume. It's all there's just so much volume as
49:16 you scale, right? So, yes, if you're tiny and you have three prospects and
49:20 you're you're just getting into Y Combinator, maybe you don't need these
49:24 tools, but we we graduate out of that more quickly. And and the bespoke thing
49:29 for Jen, I think, will work for high dollar value enterprise, but is outside
49:37 of that, I don't know, man. Uh it's uh you just can't touch enough people.
49:40 Humans can't touch enough people, and humans don't want to do the work. They
49:44 don't want to talk to the mediocre leads. They literally don't. I'll tell
49:49 you an like when I was in London, I wanted to buy a $10,000 product. Okay?
49:53 And I'm literally in London. I and we're doing SAS. I don't have any time, right?
49:57 And I get confused with the time zones, Lenny. I don't know if you do. I don't
49:59 even know what time it is in the Bay Area. So, I just emailed this rep at the
50:02 end of the year. I'm like, just send me the contract. I want to buy it, but I
50:05 have two questions. I have two questions I want answered. I told him these two
50:08 questions. And they weren't even about price. took him three days to get back to me
50:13 and he introduced me to someone else on his team. It wasn't worth his time. 10
50:16 grand wasn't enough because not enough commission for him, right? So, he
50:19 introduced someone else to me and the other guy said, "I can't answer your
50:21 questions unless you'll get on the phone." And I said, "I'm in London. I'm
50:27 traveling. If you will," ordinarily, I would have ended this, but I'm I'm It's
50:29 a journey. I'm like, "If you answer my two questions, I will buy your property
50:32 for 10K." He's like, "I need to get on the phone." Like, AI is better than
50:37 that. This is not Jen's in the whiteboards thing of doing it. So, um,
50:42 it will at least it will fill the even if Jen's process is right, AI can fill
50:47 all the gaps. What about all the sponsors we the leads we didn't follow
50:51 up with and we got a 70% response rate, right? I mean, the gens are diamond in a
50:55 rough and whatever the expression, the diamond. There's not that many of them.
51:00 There's not that many of them. So, uh, I I love her and I love what she says and
51:06 I agree with 99% of it. But here's a po a related point. Most of us are don't have the hottest
51:14 brands and we don't have the most elite CRO running them. So we end up settling
51:20 for not the best sales team. That's the truth. Most 99% of the best
51:25 sales reps want to work just at the hottest brands. And the minute you're
51:29 not the minute your star fades just a little bit, they don't want to work.
51:32 They they immediately want to jump to the next one. It's just there's a lot of
51:37 reasons why. So bear in mind 99% of of the world cannot attract a team of gens
51:42 or better. It's just pract even I can't even you could Lenny you're so great but
51:45 even a lot of folks that would want to go work for you if you want to hire
51:48 someone they'd be like well I love the but what do I have to do? I've got to
51:52 sell newsletter sp like no no no no no no no I want to be CRO at lovable I love
51:57 Lenny but is that really going to get me there? Right. >> Yeah.
52:03 >> So we AI can AI can beat those. But AI can't beat the enterprise thing.
52:07 AI I I have no idea how AI is going to do inerson sales. I someone smarter than
52:13 me is going to have to answer that. But um a lot of I you know you have such a
52:16 huge audience, Lenny, but I still think most of your folks are in tech and doing
52:20 tech sales. Tech is the largest segment of our economy and growing, right? So
52:24 for the most part, these tools will work for tech sales. Tech sales is over the
52:28 Zoom, over the phone, over email. We're not We should knock on more doors. We
52:32 should do more in person. All the data I've ever collected shows everything
52:35 closes at a higher rate if you go in person. It's just not. But in tech, it's
52:38 basically as much automation as we can get away with in GTM.
52:41 >> What I think might be helpful is just like let me zoom out for a second and
52:45 describe what you've gone through here. So you used to have I love this visual
52:49 you had of the desks of the sales folks in your office uh where you had inbound
52:54 STRs, you had outbound SDRs, maybe a support person >> and three or four AES account.
52:59 >> Okay. three or four AES who kind of take these leads and then close the deal.
53:04 >> And so now in just like instead of humans, there's an agent doing each of
53:07 these jobs. Yes. >> You have this inbound this outbound uh
53:11 agent that's just sending emails trying to find potential leads. Uh an inbound
53:16 agent that's talking to people that are interested, trying to get them uh more
53:21 excited. And then is there an AE agent or I forget what that?
53:24 >> We have that's what I'm still learning. We have one full-time AE plus
53:30 >> 20% of Amelia's time, so it's 1.2 doing what five or six AES do.
53:32 >> I see. >> And no SDR BDRs. >> Got it. So basically all the top of
53:39 funnels is AI. Yes. >> And there's one human now that takes all
53:42 this all the great stuff and just closes the deals, negotiates pricing, things
53:45 like that. >> Yeah. Maybe 1.2 just to say it. But but yeah, let's call 1.2.
53:50 >> Yeah. So that's where I wanted to go. So Amelia, so that feels really important.
53:53 just somebody, not necessarily full-time, but just staying on top of
53:56 these agents, watching the emails, making sure quality is high, making sure
53:59 they're running correctly. Talk about just like how important that part is to
54:02 this whole operation. >> It It's critical. It It's critical. And,
54:07 you know, people are posting on LinkedIn that they want to hire these GTM
54:11 engineers or I don't think that role exists today. I I I worry when I see these roles. I
54:17 think today, and listen, if we get together in 18 months, we'll we'll
54:20 update this because the world's changing so fast, right? I think today 95% of 100
54:24 you've got to promote someone internally. It's got to be a nerd,
54:28 someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant. You know, a lot of BTOC
54:32 people are frankly good at this stuff because in B toc sales and marketing are
54:36 kind of the same thing, you know, but someone that's a nerd that loves to sit
54:39 in front of data for a couple hours a day and and route data and manage these
54:45 agents and uh they come out of product, they could come out of marketing, but
54:49 maybe they could come out of RevOps, but they better be nerdy. Odds they come out
54:55 of regular sales approach zero. So, I would find someone on my team that
54:59 raises their hand and says, "I've already done this." Okay, I I've already
55:02 I've already written 10 apps in Replet and I and I and I love Verscell and I
55:05 did this and I've already tried these ones on my own. Can I please manage
55:09 these for you? And then have them be your chief orchestration officer. But it
55:15 is a new skill set. It it really is. And and ultimately finding someone that's
55:18 going to spend an hour or two a day to manage these agents is the new new
55:22 frontier for us to figure out. Um they they do not they they operate
55:27 autonomously but not without constant oversight and iteration. That's the
55:31 confusing part. It and and you just if you just buy one of these products and
55:35 disappear, you will have zero ROI. So maybe too long of an answer, but that's
55:39 critical. And I just think unfortunately >> you're going to you have to grow this
55:43 resource at home today. You have to even within versel that basically grew the
55:47 resource in home, right? We're not all versel, but I just haven't seen it.
55:53 Everyone's hosting for this job. Um but we need veterans. We don't have veterans yet, right? And
55:58 going back early in the conversation, if that is you, you're going to be super
56:02 employable next year. You're going to have so many job offers,
56:04 you're not going to know what to you're going to have to beat them off.
56:08 >> And when you think of is Amelia, would you describe as a go to market engineer
56:11 or do you is that a different role? Chief I would say officer.
56:13 >> Yeah. Okay. >> But she knows the product's cold
56:19 >> she knows how the all the quirks work, how all the agents work in and here's a
56:24 this is this is a a complicated issue, but an interesting one. If you're
56:28 running multiple agents, okay, someone's got to segment which of the base the
56:32 agents are working with or they're going to have tons of conflict, you need
56:37 someone smart enough and any like really nerdy demand genen marketer that loves
56:40 data can do this. But you've got to segment your base >> otherwise it just becomes a mess. There
56:45 are no people on X and the internet talk about these master agents that can
56:48 manage agents that can manage agents. We're not there yet. Okay m maybe like
56:51 I'm excited for it but we're not there yet. So just even figuring out how to
56:56 segment your base so you can do inbound, retargeting, remarketing, new marketing,
57:02 like so so that that is complicated, but most badass marketers kind of
57:06 understand that. They're already doing AB testing, segmenting their bases. This
57:10 is not new, is it? >> No. >> No. Yeah, >> it's Yeah,
57:14 >> but turning it on with zero work is a F. Like it's just it's just no chance.
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58:38 That's data hq.com/lenny. I'm looking back at some notes I took as
58:42 you were talking of just like advice for each function almost of how to be
58:45 successful in this future that you're seeing. So I try to summarize briefly.
58:50 So your advice for sales people is use the agents, build one yourself, try to
58:55 train it, help it run, run alongside you so that you understand these tools and
58:59 be the person within the sales or that's uh >> for for leadership. I advise that
59:02 >> for leaders, >> I don't know that if your average SDR or
59:05 junior salesperson is going to get budget for their own agent. If they do
59:10 run with it, the problem, Lenny, is that all these agents that work today, they
59:13 have forward deployed engineers, they have training, so they're all like 50
59:17 grand and up. 50 grand, 80 grand. I mean people pay more don't get me wrong but
59:21 kind of the entry level point for these is sort of like 50 grand plus 25k for
59:27 the FDE or 75 like they want even clay I think starts at 100k a year so if you're
59:31 a bigger organization that's cheaper than a human right it's it's a tall but
59:37 but there are no $99 a month uh products which has a lot of it they're trying and
59:40 I think it's going to come they don't autotrain yet particularly well and so I
59:45 don't know that junior folks are going to have access to 100k budget
59:49 unfortunately right so that advice is for the VPs the folks that are worried a
59:53 lot of them are worried that I'm obsolete right that I'm obsolete that I'm not
59:58 going to get that role at Verscell or OpenAI um so keep keep going my the
60:05 advice for the junior folks is to embrace it you if you whatever tools your
60:12 organization is using become the best person at working with that agent and
60:15 you will automatically get more Yeah. Is it annoying that that you walk
60:20 into work and the agent set up four calls for you and maybe you only wanted
60:24 to do two of them? Embrace it. Embrace it because you'll be twice as
60:28 productive. Right. I was literally talking yesterday. There's a company I'm
60:31 on the board of called owner.com which is kind of like AI for restaurants are
60:34 crossing 100 million in revenue going really quickly. He's got 100 folks on
60:39 the sales team. Kyle does. With AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million
60:43 in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar
60:50 company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more
60:54 efficiency. Still 100 reps, right? 100 reps. Uh he's going to need more to hit
60:58 the number for next year, but 3 to 5 million per rep. So, if you're that guy
61:02 that can work with those tools, you become more valuable. But if you fight it, if you don't want
61:08 to do that extra meeting, if you fight it, um there's a there's a there's a
61:14 tool, another tool we use for RevOps. There's two we use. One's called
61:18 Momentum, one's called Attention. They're both great. They're very
61:20 similar. And what it does is every single thing a human does is
61:23 automatically tracked in your CRM instantly. Every comm real time. There
61:27 have been tools that have done some of this before, but literally everything.
61:31 And and when we rolled it out, and it happened with a few other folks I know,
61:34 one of the folks on that old team quit that day. Quit the day we rolled out the
61:39 the AI RevOps. You know why? He hadn't done anything in 30 days.
61:42 >> The gig was up. >> Oh wow. >> Every day he would show up to our
61:45 standup and he said, "Yeah, I'm doing outbound and I'm really working on that
61:49 deal with Versel >> and nothing would close." And then we
61:53 said, "Oh, we're" and he quit that day. So my point is he didn't lean into it,
61:57 right? Lean into it. Now you're going to have full total transparency on your
62:00 day. You know, granola is, you know, a side example for everything. But but AI
62:04 is going to track everything you do. Like if you want to fight it, you want
62:07 to fight the future, good luck to you. But embrace it and you will you will
62:10 leap ahead of your peers that aren't embracing this. Embra embrace all the
62:14 transparency, all the leads, all the work it makes you do. Because you can't
62:17 close 10 times as much doing the same amount of work, can you?
62:20 >> Nope. >> We do more work with AI. I'm working the
62:24 hardest I've ever worked. That's with all these agents and all the
62:27 output they create and Ameilia does a lot of it but even I am working the
62:31 hardest but but it but it's better but it's not less work it's the it's more
62:35 work the agents are so productive you have to keep up so I so sorry to
62:39 interrupt for the for the for the managers buy an agent deploy it yourself
62:43 don't have someone else do it do everything from training to ingestion to
62:46 orchestration and those terms will be less scary to you for the junior folks
62:51 be the guy the gal the person that loves these tools and that is the first person
62:55 to embrace whatever it is. Don't fight it. >> Awesome. Okay. For founders in startups,
63:01 what I'm hearing is the um be that forward deployed engineer, have that
63:04 person, that sales engineer that's sitting there helping companies. This is
63:09 basically an opportunity to to uh compete with bigger players where you're
63:12 actually there helping them set things up. Like all the companies you
63:14 mentioned, none of them are big companies. They're all startups, which
63:16 is really interesting. >> It is true. I will say it is working
63:21 with Salesforce the way we are. It's the way I haven't worked with Salesforce
63:24 since it was the first product I bought. I mean, 20 years ago, dude. Um, when I
63:29 bought Salesforce 20 years ago, I got everything was hands-on. I bought two
63:32 seats. I remember back in the day talking to my rep. I'm like, "Don't talk
63:35 to me. You don't have time. You work at Salesforce. I'm buying two seats." He's
63:39 like, "No, no, no. This is what we do. I'm here for you. I'm going to help you
63:42 get your app on the app exchange. We're going to do all that." And that went
63:44 away. It's kind of back, right? And Mark's got 2,000 folks doing this at
63:48 Salesforce now. So, we have a forward deployed engineer. I'm not even sure it
63:51 makes economic sense. And maybe in two years someone like you or I would not
63:56 get an FDE, but but but the big companies are figuring it out. But yes,
64:00 pick a vendor that will make you a success with with an FDE, right? And and
64:04 um people throw this term out, but again, it's just someone that's going to
64:07 make sure you get trained and onboarded with your product for real. But yeah, so
64:11 start startups have a motivation to do this in a way that maybe some of the
64:15 incumbents really are still figuring out, right? >> Which is a big opportunity for startups
64:19 to actually do this. And this actually resonates uh very uh closely to what Jen
64:24 suggested for startups which is sell services initially just like do work for
64:28 them solve their problem not with software to get things started to grow
64:31 that into a massive contract with them that is software. >> You mean the mean land and expand start
64:36 with a smaller deal and grow it. >> Start no like like a for like a person
64:41 sitting there doing this work with them. Essentially what you're describing don't
64:44 just like we have software go try using it. It's like we will have someone on
64:48 our team helping you figure this out and and maybe there's not even software yet
64:51 to do all these things, but we'll have them do it for you and then the software
64:55 will take on more and more of that work over time. >> I think that's always been great advice
64:59 and startups have always been great at this like in the early days you the CEO
65:03 does it is is doing support and co's on boarding you. I think what's different
65:08 today is the agent will fail without training and onboarding this product. It
65:11 it it will fail like it will never it will never work. So it it becomes an
65:15 imperative if you want to win like you need I I you this term has been bandied
65:20 about too much but you need a team of humans we can call them forward deployed
65:23 engineers that make a 100% sure that when the agent is turned on it's awesome
65:28 that's your job as a founder make sure it's awesome versus in the old days that
65:33 even when I built one of the first e signature services that was so easy to
65:36 use we'd have some customers take them two years to go live big customers
65:40 that's just not okay in the age of AI >> right >> yeah And these forward to deploy
65:44 engineers is that just another name for sales engineer or is that a different
65:46 sort of background? >> It can be and I think all this nomclature is confusing man all this
65:52 orchestration and ingestion. I think we're we we're conf like Palunteer is
65:56 obviously the single most successful public B2B company at the moment right
65:59 maybe maybe data bricks and a few others will beat them in the next wave of IPOs
66:03 but their idea for forward deployed engineers is similar but these are nine
66:06 figure deals. Most of us aren't doing hundred million dollar deals. So the
66:09 idea that you'll have Gary Tan and an army of folks out in the office for 6
66:14 months getting the software to work that that that sort of inspires the idea but
66:17 it's really sure it could be a sales engineer or solution architect but the
66:21 difference is the sees that a lot of us worked with in the days were resources
66:27 and often like there was also a classic resource of like eight sales reps to one
66:30 SE. So the eight reps would there'd be a pod and one SE would be responsible and
66:34 you'd kind of have to fight to get Jason or Lenny's time to help the eight reps.
66:39 This is inverted. The FDE's number one job is to make the customer a success.
66:43 Okay. I was literally the other day doing a presentation, an AI leader that
66:50 closed a $3 million deal. Um, the FTE did it all themselves. Sales wasn't even
66:54 involved in the deal. They went on site, they got the deployment going, they
66:57 tuned it everything. All sales did was manage it through the procurement
67:00 process. Okay, that's pretty different than a guy answering some questions for
67:03 the humans, right? So it is a combination of customer success and SE
67:09 or whatever but it is it is really I mean frankly it's just being a a classic
67:15 consultant that gets the product done on day one on on day one. That's the
67:19 difference is that when you go live it works. When you go live it works. That's
67:24 what that and it's a fancy name for a bunch of folks on your team that when it
67:28 goes live the AI agent actually works. So you have a 100% success rate instead
67:33 of like the 5% rate of 2024. So those people, but they do need to be tech
67:36 technical. I don't know if they need to be engineers. It can really vary based
67:40 on, you know, I love it when they're kind of like mediocre engineers that are
67:44 like in love with the product. That's my favorite type of FD. Like they're only
67:47 they don't really want to code much anymore, but they did code and they like
67:53 just love your product. Um but uh I don't think it can be someone with no
67:56 product chops but it could all different folks can work but they they've got to
68:00 know the product cold but um yeah I would startups like I mean the term is
68:03 thrown around you need four folks that will just make sure that on go live the
68:07 product works your agentic product works that's what you need
68:11 >> I think what might be useful to close out this conversation is to kind of go
68:15 through what are the things that are changing like maybe a handful of things
68:19 that that are changed that are now going to be different in the world of sales go
68:21 to And what are a few things that are just going to stay the same?
68:25 >> Yeah, let's go through it. Obviously, support is the first one to have
68:28 changed. It's our obviously permanently changed with AI, right? Whatever vendor
68:32 you look at, 50 to 80% of support is done by AI. And we don't always think
68:37 about support as GTM, but it is it's the start of a customer journey. It's very
68:39 important to the customer journey. So, so if you're skeptical, go look at, you
68:43 know, support has changed permanently. So, that that train's left the station.
68:48 Really, as we record this, not much has changed in sales. I mean, I do think the
68:51 stuff we've talked about is the bleeding edge. I do think the classic
68:58 cadencebased SDR running campaigns through a through a tool him or herself
69:02 will be mostly extinct with 12 months. There is no reason AI can't do a better
69:07 job than that role. The classic qualifier qualifying inbound leads,
69:11 which is a crappy experience for customers, should be similarly extinct
69:18 within mostly extinct um in 12 months. the rest we're we're going to wait and
69:23 see. I think what we do know for reps, for sales reps, everyone wants to be
69:26 even more efficient in the next 12 months. There's a lot of reasons people
69:30 want to be again at the bottom end, it's it's it's cost, it's profitability
69:33 pressures. At the high end, it's cultural. We just don't want 200 reps
69:38 running around Verscell or Rep. Everyone at just the company owner, 3 to
69:42 5 million per rep is a lot different than 3 to 500,000. So, you have to
69:47 adjust as a rep. you still there's still every AI leader can't hire enough reps
69:50 like we talked about, but you're going to have to adjust to being geometrically
69:55 if not exponentially more productive with help from AI. So, you have to
69:58 embrace these tools for real. And everyone, a lot of folks, a lot of old
70:02 school GTM leaders are like, you know, AI isn't going to hurt sales reps. It's
70:05 just going to make them give them superpowers. The best ones, yes, the mediocre are
70:13 just going to be like more mediocre, right? Um, so I think the AE is we will
70:19 always have salespeople, but being a people person is not enough anymore.
70:23 You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson, Lenny? >> You ask them what they're really good
70:28 at. I'm a people person, Lenny. You know how you can you know you know how you
70:32 you know how good I am, Lenny? I I I'm on text with 10 of my best customers.
70:35 I'm a people person. >> Um, what are the toughest technical
70:38 objections you have at your product? What what they don't they don't know, but
70:43 they're a people person. you know, this is like golf 3.0. It just it's not
70:46 enough. Like it's it's it's insufficient. So people people are
70:52 becoming obsolete in sales. Um field sales, no idea how AI is going to impact
70:57 that if you're out in the field. I mean, you know, the enterprise leaders are
71:00 hiring more field sales people than ever. Salesforce is hiring more than
71:04 ever. Um and knocking on doors still works, man. So don't don't know the
71:09 answers there. But the office worker and the work from home worker, AI is going
71:13 to take as much of your job or make you as much better as it can and you got to
71:17 embrace it. So that that's a I would say from support to knocking on doors. You
71:21 know, we're going to go from 80% to 0%. Uh >> what about phone calls?
71:26 >> You know, it's a great question and we should have hit it. Obviously, there's
71:30 there's plenty of robocall and regulatory issues around it. Um
71:33 certainly a lot of startups are breaking the rules anyway. I would say this.
71:38 Listen, there are there's phone calls and there's even SMS. There's limits to how
71:43 much SMS you can automate, right? A lot of old school businesses don't even
71:47 check emails, right? I mean, you're working in the shop floor. So, those are
71:51 unanswered questions. People are breaking the rules. Open AI still breaks
71:55 the rules, right? Um, now it's licensing Disney content. It used to just borrow
72:01 Disney content. We will see. Um, so I don't I don't know the answers to that.
72:04 I think in in Europe it'll certainly be much slower than in the US, but startups
72:07 are going to push the limits. They're going to push the limits on what we can
72:12 do with AI calls, AI enhanced, whether a human's kind of on the line, but AI is
72:16 doing all the work. Maybe that maybe that's legal, right? Getting more
72:20 consent for SMS than we typically get. So to think that the typical barriers to
72:25 roboc calling in SMS is gonna that startups aren't going to bend the rules
72:29 in the age of AI, I I'm I'm dubious, but it's a good question. It's harder to do.
72:33 The one thing I will add is um and it's a good objection to all of this and and
72:38 I'd love to get Jen's thoughts too, but if you talk to the startups you'd invest
72:43 in, uh Lenny, fewer of them are good at outbound phone calls than you'd think,
72:48 right? We had um we had multip of the heads of uh revenue at um Ripling Speak
72:53 at Saster, the old CRO worked on my team and others. They were late to develop uh
72:58 cold calling because we never did it back in the the CRO was on my team. So,
73:02 we had to you had to bring in someone that had worked with Sam Blonde at Brex
73:06 who had done it. It is a real art to pick up the phone and close business. It
73:10 is a specialized skill. And so, if you if if that's your specialized skill and
73:13 there's no way for AI to benefit, so be it. But I don't think for most tech
73:17 calls that that is as impactful as we pretend it is. I don't think most of the
73:21 startups you and I work with and most of the folks listen to this do not close
73:25 the majority of their revenue with cold human cold calls. It's it is a it is a
73:30 craft that works but man it you got to be good at it. >> You have this line somewhere that if you
73:34 can close on a text message AI can close it. >> Yes it is. I'm being facitious in the sense
73:42 that people say that I think have weaker relationships with customers. This is
73:45 why a is people have weaker relationships with their customers than
73:49 they think. Yeah. And if it's so easy to close a deal on a text message, and
73:53 we've done hundreds of thousands of these and found it, folks don't mind if
73:57 it's an AI. If it's a good AI, why won't it close it on the text message? Right?
74:03 AI can be people people, too. It really can't. If you don't believe
74:06 me, folks, go to Lennybot. Is that the URL? Lennybot.com. >> Lennybot.com.
74:09 >> If you don't think AI can be people people, go spend hours on Lennybot,
74:13 don't they? >> Yeah. And uh the best part is you could
74:16 talk to talk to Lennybot uh with voice. There's a voice feature that sounds
74:19 exactly like me. It's unbelievable. >> Yeah. So, and and one a meta reason to
74:25 go use Lennybot. Go in with a learning a learning mind. Don't go in bias. You
74:30 will find that AI can be people people. People spend hours. Our best who are our
74:33 best therapists today as we record this chat. GPT is our best best therapist on
74:37 planet Earth. It's a people person. I mean, it sounds silly, but if if that is
74:42 your best defense in sales that you're a people person, uh you you're the the
74:48 sands are the sands are sinking beneath you right now. It's it's not enough of a
74:52 skill. It's people person is great when people buy enterprise software that's
74:55 going to take two years to roll out and they have no idea how it works and it's
74:59 a hope and a prayer when you expect the agent to work during
75:08 the pilot before the big check comes people person is insufficient
75:13 terrific talk tell me the person that's going to launch my agent train it and
75:17 get into production for me before I even pay you it was you know it is this is
75:21 the dream when he this is maybe this is one of the biggest changes of all
75:26 when I talk with Mark Beni off and Salesforce is the biggest right it's 44
75:29 billion it's the biggest ship to to turn right he's like the number one thing I
75:34 envy in Palunteer one is their high deal sizes he made that joke in all the media
75:37 and all the press but the other thing is I wish he said I wish I could I can't
75:41 today I wish every Salesforce customer now could go live before they pay
75:47 that is so different from how we've been trained in many ways to almost rip off
75:51 the customer to get them to buy the product. Uh try first try to avoid a
75:55 pilot, then have the smallest pilot we can, then roll it out over years to
76:00 different people. AI has upped the bar in terms of what customers expect. And
76:03 that's why the best ones are blowing up because the the ROI is so high. Um and
76:09 so you you've got to deliver the ROI before the document is e- signed today.
76:14 That will people that haven't fully embraced that are at public companies
76:20 growing 8%. They're still trying to play games. >> What are some other things that you
76:24 think are going to change that people may not be thinking about that's going
76:27 to change the way we do sales in the next couple years? >> Net net, we're going to need more sales
76:33 and go to market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so
76:37 quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human
76:42 beings than ever. I I I I we'd have to put together a spreadsheet to see the
76:46 crossover point. Obviously, many folks are shrinking headcount. Microsoft's
76:49 already said they're past peak employee. They will never they'll never going to
76:52 be bigger. You're we're seeing this all across the companies we work with. They
76:54 don't want to be they want to be as lean as they can. But AI is such a huge part
77:00 of our economy already, right? And it's such it's such a force of nature and
77:04 everyone is, you know, everyone eventually goes enterprise. Everyone
77:07 eventually has a sales team. Everyone eventually does it. It's happening
77:11 faster. You know, 11 Labs um 50% of their sales is through enterprise now,
77:16 right? I mean, I don't know everybody. Um, the fact that Verscell just added
77:19 Janine means they're going more enterprise by definition, right? I think
77:23 Replet just added a sales team a couple months ago for real and now they've
77:26 added another CRO. So they got to 10 and something million with no traditional
77:30 sales team, but at a billion it's going to be flooded with salespeople. So if
77:36 you get great at this stuff, if you go buy an agent today, when you listen to
77:40 this and deploy it yourself and do the hard work and train it and ingest it and
77:43 iterate it every day and get ahead of it and then get two agents, then three and
77:47 then four, you may become more valuable, have a better experience in DTM, and I believe
77:54 I hope actually be better paid. Like I've talked about that we should have
77:59 $250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Versel, they'd be managing 10 agents,
78:03 not 10 people. then they're worth 250 grand instead of 80 grand or 90 grand.
78:08 It's it's not that much, is it? So there is a great world coming. These are the
78:11 best of times, aren't they, Lenny, for product and business, right? Just it's
78:16 not evenly distributed. So you want to be you want to have if you have those
78:20 skills, even though we're not going to need these SDRs and even though we're
78:23 not going to be BDRs, even though we can get rid of half of AES, there is so the
78:27 amount of revenue and growth in AI leaders is so phenomenal, right? Not not
78:31 just at the startups at the Google clouds at everywhere the the Azour there
78:37 they're hiring so many humans that netnet it's a positive for the
78:41 profession but not for the way we've done it in the past you're at risk
78:45 >> that is really interesting that we're still hiring and and and and this is
78:48 what I've seen too just like everyone's hiring sales people go to market people
78:51 do you think there's like going to be this peak in the next couple years of
78:54 just okay now that AI is doing more and more of this or is it or is it just hard
78:58 to predict because who knows how big AI gets how big these companies
79:02 I mean it is over a trillion dollars. I don't see any re and it's accelerating
79:07 the amount of AI is is increasing the amount Gartner says next year will be
79:11 the fastest acceleration of money deployed into it and software in a
79:16 decade. It's reacelerated. That can that last forever? No. Eventually we we
79:20 consume 100% of the global GDP. There's no money left to buy. Like there there
79:24 are some some limits. But I I think for I don't think you and I and anyone any
79:27 of the millions of people that follow you, I don't think we got to think too
79:30 much more than three to four years out here. It's too much. There's too much
79:35 change. If you if you become a master of the universe and AI, you will be hyper
79:38 employable the next two to three years. And if you stay with a learner's mind,
79:43 that will just compound. And so you will you will have a a job that I think is
79:47 far more interesting, even if more tiring than than than we used to have.
79:52 But the days of working 20 hours a week and kind of phoning it in and getting a
79:57 few deals, uh, you know, I I think those are forever beh That That was a great
80:01 time. Um, even you had a little bit of that. You're I think you're working
80:04 harder than you used to, aren't you? >> I am. I am. >> I mean, the classic Lenny vibe at
80:10 100,000 subscribers was kind of leave me alone. I take a lot of vacations. I do
80:14 some good work. I mean, it's still part of your vibe, but I I think you're
80:17 working harder. >> I'm working incredibly hard. I am. The
80:21 original idea was create this like like chill newsletter life. I'm just going to
80:24 write a newsletter once a week. Life's gonna be good. >> And uh it was just it's just hard to
80:28 pass up on really cool opportunities and and do more, help it grow bigger. Like
80:33 it's just I couldn't resist. So yeah, I'm working. >> And that should be all of us though.
80:37 Like we should you should be feel if you're not feeling what you said or even
80:41 a version of what I said then then you're not you're not living you're not
80:44 in the right you're not living the AI dream today. It is more work. It should
80:47 be tired. It should be like it if nothing even if it's better in some ways
80:52 it is just more work. Um but but this is the most exciting time of our lifetimes
80:57 to be in software. I mean good god I'm like I can't even code Lety and I've
81:00 built 12 apps on replet in the last 150 days used by a million million times.
81:04 I've been waiting 10 years for some of these folks to build some of these apps.
81:08 I just did it myself, right? I literally just when I was in London, I built a
81:11 whole app where you can sell you can practice selling Harvey Cursor Replet
81:18 and ChatgBT Enterprise and it works like we couldn't this wasn't even
81:21 possible at the start of the year, was it? So, these are magical times and we
81:26 the fact that we can we can run an eight figureure business with three people and
81:31 20 agents. It's like, you know, get get excited or like go join one of these
81:37 really slow growing be like I I my advice is pick one of two paths today.
81:41 Either be working harder like even you and I are, right? We don't have to. Um
81:47 or honestly, I will say the truth is the the there were a thousand unicorns born
81:51 in 2021, right? 800 of them are growing pretty slowly, will never IPO, may not
81:56 have an exit, but they're okay with 8% or 15% growth. If you don't want to be
81:59 on the journey we talked about, I'm not judging. I get it. We're humans, right?
82:03 We have families. Not all of us are obsessed. I think I'm kind of obsessed.
82:06 I think you've become more obsessed. If that's not you, join join something more
82:11 slow growing. They still need people. Not as many. They still need people. But
82:14 I would pick I would pick a lane for next year. Don't pretend that there's
82:18 this middle path going to start because it don't exist in GTM. And I don't think
82:21 it exists in product or engineering either. >> I love just how excited you are about
82:25 this. just like you could tell on Twitter just how fun this is for you
82:29 just learning and sharing and uh and I love that you're sharing it, but I think
82:33 it's just a symptom of you're just so excited about what's happening and what
82:36 you're learning and it's just like you can't help but share it. I'm in the same
82:38 way. I'm just like, "Oh I just vibed this really cool thing. I got to
82:41 tweet about it." >> It's just it is just magical that our ability to build things that we
82:49 couldn't build before or build in ways and paces. It it's just
82:55 >> it it's and it's accelerating. It's so I mean we could talk about it forever, but
82:58 even for me for like I just picked Rep. I picked Replet because Twitter told me
83:00 to. I could have picked another tool. Like I'm not an investor and I'm not I'm
83:05 not even biased, but I'm in the top 1%. >> Just to double down what you said,
83:09 you're top 1% user of Replet. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Yeah. So it really didn't work well when
83:15 I started about 170 days ago. Then a V2 came out and it got better. the
83:19 hallucinations went away and then this is just like you got to get excited
83:22 about folks may not know this and other tools when V3 came out I don't know 45
83:27 days ago now it has agents talking to agents so what happens is when you when
83:31 you and I again I can't really code so when I have an issue and I'm trying to
83:35 figure out how to do something the agent calls in an architect or another agent
83:38 and they debate and argue with it and they come up with the right answer the
83:42 first time this happened I just fell out of my chair it's just so not only is it
83:46 magical I mean great you can do a prompt and build a crappy app it doesn't work
83:49 now like 150 days later you have agents debating how to build better code with
83:52 each other and you don't even need to know how to code I mean this is the
83:56 greatest the only greater time is going to be next year right I've been waiting I've been
84:03 waiting right um and uh you know and just that the things that you can build
84:07 today and the other I mean you know this but other folks I mean that's me
84:12 building without being able to code the other Captain Obvious thing you know if
84:15 you're building any why are folks so productive on all these tools I Every
84:18 bit of open source software in the world is in these tools. If you want to build something that's
84:25 been built before, it's so easy. The novel stuff's really hard, right? It's
84:29 not any easier, but man, it's just these are these are great. And so, and and
84:33 maybe may maybe and so for GTM for sales, it's it's it's a couple beats behind and
84:40 and and and um there's probably a bunch of reasons for it. Some of it is, I
84:44 think, ironically, is just where founders are interested. So marketing is
84:50 behind sales for AI. Like the AI SGR has exploded. I don't really know why. I
84:54 invested in a couple of PreAiI tools. Um I invested in Salesoft which was sold
84:57 for two and a half billion as like the last deal the 2020 ones like the seed
85:01 investment. No one wanted to be in that category. Now everyone in the world
85:04 wants to build an AISD AR CRM. But marketing is slower just because they're
85:08 really people don't really want to build the cursor for marketing. People say
85:12 they do but but you it's just not but it it will get there. But um the innovation
85:17 will just accelerate. It's just going to accelerate. So So don't be a skeptic on
85:20 this stuff. Like if you're not as excited as me, then here's my last bit
85:25 of advice on this for folks. If you're not if you don't feel what I feel,
85:30 here's my advice over the holidays. When you have a quiet moment when you're
85:33 having your mold wine or your hot chocolate or whatever, go fire up your
85:38 browser. Do it in incognito. Go to your app and do everything
85:44 with a fresh Gmail address. Try support. See how your support is. Try to contact
85:49 sales. Sign up for the newsletter. Do everything. Try your product. If you do
85:54 this quietly, your heart, you're going to cry about some of the things you've
85:57 seen. You're going to cry how bad your support is. You're going to cry how long
86:00 it takes sales to get back to you. You're going to cry about a couple
86:03 things. Pick the thing that makes you cry the most over your mold wine and go
86:07 buy that agent and fix it. and and then you will have the passion that we have
86:13 this I always counel people to do this it just wasn't as actionable before
86:19 but so many f you just get lost you forget about what these things you
86:21 forget about the onboarding workflow and you forget about support and you forget
86:25 how bad contact me and you're so lost in the strategic so you got it once a year
86:28 ideally once a quarter just do this incognito mode test and even for lady's
86:32 newsletter I bet we can find some part you forgot to touch >> nope not gonna happen I'm Just I'm just
86:37 joking. >> You like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I I didn't touch that since I launched the
86:42 Substack. It doesn't even go to the right that page just gets a 404.
86:47 >> I'm going to do this over the holidays." And I love that this like usually the
86:51 advice would have been, okay, email your product manager and tell them you found
86:54 all these bugs. What you're saying here is no, find an agent to take care of
86:58 this in the future. Like make this a much better experience for everyone
87:00 always. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if it's the one that makes you cry, it may motivate you to do
87:04 it. >> Yeah. And you don't it's not like you have to publish it to production. It's
87:08 not like you have to have your, you know, CEO approve this thing. It's just
87:12 like show them what you might be able to do. Here's what I did over the weekend.
87:15 Uh maybe we should explore doing this thing with our site. >> Yeah. The jaw is just my job.
87:19 >> Yeah. >> Oh man. Jason, I feel like I could chat
87:24 with you for hours, but uh I think it's this is a good point to to wrap things
87:29 up. Is there anything that you wanted to share or is there anything you want to
87:32 leave listeners with? One last thing maybe that comes up that I've learned
87:36 that that are on people's minds and we can break is a lot of folks are
87:39 concerned. Hey, this will impact people's jobs. What do I do? Like, okay,
87:43 I want I I did what you said. I did the incognito mode. I'm going to bring in
87:47 this this agent, this sales agent or this support agent. I've tried I've even
87:51 did but but I'm worried I'm going to get pushed back and people are going to lose
87:55 their jobs. Um I don't h I I don't have the perfect answer to this one, but I
88:00 think be honest about it. be be honest that for the best people it will make
88:03 them more productive. For the best people it it it will be even fun. For
88:09 the best people they will be better at their job. And if it is a threat to some
88:13 of the folks on the team, the future's coming anyway. We might as well embrace
88:18 it. So it's just when I hear I I I wouldn't I would be positive about it. I
88:21 would explain it helps the best people. Um but I I don't think dancing around it
88:25 is the right answer in your organization. it it will result in
88:29 change and if it if some jobs change from one world to the other that that's
88:32 life in the age of AI don't don't hide it I don't think it helps
88:35 >> I love that in your case and in uh Jean's case at Verscell it's not like
88:40 you let anyone go in your case the SDRs quit uh and in her case she moved them
88:45 from I believe from inbound to outbound or outbound to inbound she just kind of
88:48 reshuffled them to do to have higher impact somewhere else >> I think that's an important a really
88:53 important point this is another thing that I think the media creates too much
88:58 drama on I don't think AI is not I mean AI has led to some layoffs. Um but even
89:02 though most of the ones we read it's just a justification to do layoffs. It's
89:05 just it's just a reason to blame it on it. Um uh what's a much bigger issue is
89:11 that people just won't be backfilled with humans. We will use AI to
89:14 backfield. That's what we did. Like we didn't fire I've never fired anyone in
89:16 my whole career other than for inappropriate conduct a few times,
89:20 right? That's that you fired today for that stuff. But pretty much I've never
89:22 fired anyone that didn't do something inappropriate. they just when they go
89:25 this time we just said now it's the agents right and so that's a much bigger
89:29 force of nature than some random layoffs which probably aren't really new to AI
89:33 right it's probably not because you brought in 20 agents in 2025 it's
89:36 probably because you just want to downsize anyway and this is the excuse
89:41 um so it's not it's not a it's probably less of a threat to you than you think
89:45 AI um but it what it does mean is if you're not don't want to embrace it
89:49 Lenny maybe don't leave your current job >> yeah I was just
89:53 >> maybe don't leave your current top >> because the new place might not be
89:55 hiring for this role. >> Yeah, I have a God I have I have a a
89:59 sales exec who I love. I worked I'd known for many years and he went from a
90:04 100k job then almost an 800k job then down to a 200k job then left that one
90:09 because he didn't like it and now he can't get a job at all. He's back in
90:13 school. So maybe stay. >> We all maybe stay. >> No shame in staying is there?
90:19 >> Yeah, I like that. Well, with that, Jason, we have reached our very exciting
90:22 lightning round. This is your second time going through a lightning round, so
90:25 I'll make it uh I'll make it quick. First question, what are a couple books
90:30 you often find yourself recommending to other people? >> I was recently asked to write a forward
90:34 for a book from one one of the revenue leaders I have the most respect for in
90:38 the world. I read a little bit of it. I couldn't do it because as good as it
90:42 was, it was dated. It wasn't current enough in AI. And there's just I don't
90:46 know if we said it this it might have been before we started the pod. The
90:50 plays all work, but the playbooks don't really work as well. So, so many of
90:54 these GTM books are playbooks, especially folks selling courses and
90:58 stuff, but they're playbooks. Run from the playbooks. Embrace the
91:02 plays. And so, read all these go to market and sales books and take take
91:06 great items from them, which was always the goal from a book, right? Pick three
91:09 two or three things out of it. But uh I'm I I think I'm winging for the next
91:15 level of books in GTM in 2026 because everything I've read it's it's just too
91:19 backwards looking. So just be a skeptic. Grab the plays but don't adopt the
91:21 playbook. >> I just had the head of a growth from lovable Elena Ver on the podcast. She
91:26 had the same advice that all these playbooks that she's used over the last
91:29 20 years in growth just don't work anymore at AI companies. >> Uh next question. Do you have a favorite
91:36 recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed? >> What's this one called? What's it
91:40 called? Plurabus. Is that what it's called? >> Plurabus. Yeah.
91:42 >> Watching that. >> It's And and this is so it's a good
91:46 show. This is what I realized is why you should be excited about AI and GTM is
91:53 Pluribus because Plur in Pluribus there's like a hive mind, right? We're
91:56 all connect all the people except 11 people or 13 people. They're all
91:58 connected. People don't get this. This is why a right now the whole point when we're
92:03 doing this, maybe maybe we'll do a third one if I'm lucky. The whole point is
92:07 just get your AI agents to be almost as good as humans, but working 24/7 and at
92:12 scale, that's pretty damn good. If it can do 10 or 100 times more work 24/7,
92:17 as pretty good as your human, that's a resource you don't even have today. It's
92:20 not that complicated. When AI really is the hive mind, when it can share all of
92:24 the data across all of your agents and knows everything that happens, then
92:30 humans are at risk in GTM. They're going to be so much better when
92:33 they're the hive mind. right now our hive uh and and there's a bit of a
92:38 renaissance for Salesforce as a CRM. There's a bunch of reasons even though
92:41 it's old right it's founded in the 90s it has become the hub for these AI GTM
92:44 agents they all plug in so Salesforce has become the database for all these so
92:48 so that's a little hint of the plurabus hive mine but when all these agents can
92:52 talk with each other for real and share all their GTM data and all the customer
92:55 data and everything on the one next time we do it the 3.8 8 million people that
92:59 read Lenny's and all the agents can share data together. No human that
93:03 that's I don't mean to turn turn plurabus into an AIGTM show. But uh
93:08 there's my connection. But but it it's pretty good, right? >> I get it. I get it. Oh man, that show's
93:12 so good. I feel like every episode I get these pushes from Apple TV like there's
93:15 a new episode of Player Bus. I'm like I can't wait to go watch that. They just
93:19 leave the each episode ends and like oh I can't wait to see what happens next.
93:22 Okay. Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love
93:28 like an app or a gadget or clothing? >> Maybe not the last two weeks. I'll just
93:32 give a small one just just for GTM1. There is because everyone's about Sora
93:37 this and all of this and video and I love it. Um I get it. But there is an
93:43 app called Reeve. It used to be Reevar. It's for imaging and it is the folks
93:48 that build it built their own image LLM on their own. And the reason I bring
93:51 this up, I use it every single day. is because it can do a lot of cool things
93:55 with a prompt, right? But if you want to do cool stuff for marketing, if you want
94:01 to create a great image, I have a CMMO buying my product doing this, I don't
94:05 know a tool that is better for that kind of stuff. That stuff that we used to
94:08 torture, we used to fire up Canva and try to create things or even worse, wait
94:13 four days for someone to do it for you. I just you this is one of my cheat
94:17 sheets. I have a couple tool to tools that I use that people don't get, but um
94:21 now it's app.rei Revi, it changed its name, but it's just a simple prompt. Go
94:25 to it, type in whatever image you want to make. And for a lot of the boring B2B
94:30 stuff we like to do, uh, I find it's the best. >> And it's reve.com.
94:34 >> Yeah. Rev. >> I'm looking at it right now. Copy bar
94:37 delivering matcha through a quite moss garden. >> app.ve.com.
94:41 >> Yeah. Sweet. >> Oh, you're Oh, you're making the image.
94:43 You said >> I'm just like they're giving me examples here. Well, I'm on the website here.
94:47 Yeah, this is great. And you're saying this is better than like Nano Banana and
94:50 all these other >> for this use case. >> And you and I, we just want to do I want
94:55 to do a thumbnail. I want an image for my article. I want I just did I just my
94:59 niche thing content I just want to do. I've got to do it. I just don't think
95:01 there's anything better for for this use case. So >> I use it two or three times a day and I
95:05 use all this stuff. >> Okay. The alpha more alpha uh to to
95:10 share with the audience. Okay. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life
95:13 motto that you've often find yourself coming back to in work or in life that
95:17 you often maybe even share with other people? >> I'll just tell you one in the weird time
95:22 we're at. Um, this is probably your best >> Just talking yesterday with a friend of
95:30 mine, a startup just raised 20 million from a top two or three VC founder just
95:35 quit the next day. just on the call the other day yesterday, CEO of a company at 250
95:42 million just just just quit. Uh no success or know anyone to join a a hot
95:48 AI startup. M maybe maybe most of the time there are there are
95:52 times and places to just quit when you have customers when you have a million
95:54 or two million or five or 10 million in revenue but we we often think it's
95:58 easier to get back to get back to that 10 million of revenue to get back to 100
96:02 happy customers or 200. It might seem easier to quit in the age of AI, but I'd
96:08 rather take those 500 happy customers, build that badass AI product, and sell
96:12 it to 500 happy customers and go off to find them from scratch. Go have to find
96:18 that 10 or 20 million. So, that's I I literally had a third conversation with
96:21 a founder just crossing 100 million that wanted to leave and do a robotic startup
96:25 after 10 years. I'm like, I get it, man, but like this is, you know, you have
96:30 nine figures of equity in this company. Maybe go to the next level. So there's
96:34 so much going on. They're decelerating, accelerating. I just usually think the
96:38 best startup as f for founders, not not necessarily for everybody else, is the
96:41 one you're already working at. And if you're not happy, turn that into your
96:45 hot AI startup. It's not. Here's the thing. It's not too late, Lenny.
96:48 Sometimes it feels like it's too late on social media. Maybe it's too late to
96:54 build the next chat GBT on the cheap. Okay? But for most stuff, it's it's it's
96:58 not too late. It's so it's still so early. We don't even have great AI
97:02 marketing tools. We're really early on these AIS SDRs. The markets have not
97:06 hardened. Um, the LLMs are getting so much better. It is, dude, if you want
97:11 it, it's not too late. So, the best startup you're ever going to have
97:15 probably is the one you're working at today. Don't quit. Don't quit if you
97:19 have happy customers. Maybe that's how don't quit if you have happy customers.
97:22 They'll buy more from you. >> I love advice like that. That's uh
97:26 empowering and optimistic and and uh destresses people, I think, in a lot of
97:31 ways. So, uh, that is great. Uh, final question. How many, so how many sasters
97:34 have you done at this point? Like how many years of saster have there been?
97:39 >> Good god. Uh, we've done the first big, we did some meetups, you know that,
97:43 right? And then we did the first bigger one in 2015. So 2016,
97:48 uh, we did we did take a break in 2020, but we did in 2021. We're the only event
97:53 in the Bay Area in 2021. Um, so is that 12 of them? 12 years. It's a long time,
97:56 man. >> And then how many talks have there been across those? would you say total?
98:02 >> And and then we've done seven in Europe. So 12 in 12 in the US and seven in
98:04 Europe. >> Yes. So about 20. Okay. 20 events. >> 20 bigger events. Yeah.
98:10 >> Uh I don't know like the annual one probably if you count the smaller ones
98:13 300. >> So thousand 4,000 over the years. >> So then here's the question. Is there a
98:21 talk that you think is the one you like what's your favorite talk across all
98:24 those events? Is there one you're like, "Oh, this one really stood out. This is
98:27 one I always share with people. One that you think people might you'd want people
98:30 to check out if they were to check out one talk across all seaster.
98:34 >> It it's interesting. It's like a lot of things in B2B. Everything was pretty
98:37 much the same for 10 years and then all of a sudden everything's out of date.
98:41 Right. If you wanted to watch an older one, not that old, but old in internet
98:46 AI time that I think will change the way you think, watch the one I did with Ben
98:50 Chestnut um right after they got acquired because that's a magical time. It's called
98:55 Everything That Breaks on the Way to One Billion. It's only got 23,000 views.
98:59 That's nothing for Lenny, but for me, that's pretty good. Okay. And it's a
99:02 moment in time right after he sold a billion dollar company where he talks
99:06 about how the deal almost fell apart, where he challenges almost every B2B
99:10 metric we know, how what you know, running a profitable business at that
99:14 scale, not really caring about CLTV and CAC or any of these things, what really
99:18 matters for customers. Is Mailchimp as cutting edge as it was today? Right?
99:23 Maybe not. But that's one when I look at it cuz everything everything's kind of
99:27 the same. We don't we don't really get challenged in the way we think.
99:30 Everyone's talking their book, right? You're so good at getting people to not
99:35 talk their book. Um but but that one I think is a great one. And then if people
99:39 wanted to watch a GTM one, just some favorite ones. We did this one. It's a
99:43 recent one. Matt Pl because these guys were on my team. Matt Planku of Rippling
99:47 did one with Sam Blonde who was NCR of Brex. It's called Rippling Secrets to
99:51 Hyperrowth. It sounds like a commercial for Rippling, which is okay, right? But
99:55 because Sam was they worked together and now Sam's on the board and all like they
100:00 have a fluency of two CRO who are honest and have a learner a Lenny style
100:03 learners mindset. This one on the the revenue playbook from Ripling. It's it's
100:08 a it's a 14 for for GTM. >> I just uh had Matt McInness on the
100:13 podcast. Former COO, now CPO Y at Ripling. Uh so that would be a good
100:17 combo of those two. Uh Jason, I don't know if you know this, but you're you're
100:22 the perfect podcast guest because you have such deep uh experience in the
100:27 space that you just have answers to everything I ask. Plus, you're now just
100:31 living in this future that we're all heading towards and you're like hands-on
100:37 telling us here's how the future will be and here's how it works and here's how
100:40 you can get there and here's what you shouldn't do and here's what we'll
100:43 bring. So, I'm just so thankful that you're here sharing all this advice with
100:46 us. So, I'm excited for many more podcast conversations. So, uh, so thanks
100:49 for doing this. >> All right, Lenny, you're the best. I'm
100:52 I'm I'm just a super fan. I'm lucky to be here. So, thank you.
100:54 >> Uh, let me just ask you, how can listeners be useful to you? As a closing
100:57 question, >> the fun thing for me, we have we we have two websites, saster.com and SASI. Just
101:03 go to saster.ai, and just play with the tools we built. Play with the valuation
101:07 calculator we talked about. Play with the AIVC, play with any of our tools,
101:10 and and just have fun and share share any feedback. Um because I've waited 10
101:15 years to build tools for the Saster community. Now I want to build like 20.
101:20 So on a side, we've talked about tools you should go buy, but building your own
101:23 stuff is pretty fun, too. So try our tools and give me kind but critical
101:27 feedback, but but with some kindness. >> Okay. And it's s a str.ai.
101:33 >> Yeah, we're I'm still trying to figure out the AI versus the comm. We got a SEO
101:37 issue, so I can't really move it over, but uh >> it looks great. It works. It works. It's
101:41 shorter, too. It is shorter. >> Jason, thank you so much for being here.
101:44 >> All right, Lenny, you're the best. >> Bye, everyone.
101:48 >> Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe
101:52 to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also,
101:56 please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps
102:01 other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more
102:06 about the show at lennispodcast.com.
$

We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

@SaaStr 1:42:11 23 chapters
[AI agents and automation][solo founder and bootstrapping][marketing and growth hacking][developer tools and coding][market research and validation]
// chapters
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Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, the world’s largest community for software founders, and a veteran SaaS investor who has deployed over $200 million into B2B startups. After his last salesperson quit, Jason made a radical decision: replace his entire go-to-market team with AI agents. What started as an experiment has transformed into a new operating model, where 20 AI agents managed by just 1.2 humans now do the work previously handled by a team of 10 SDRs and AEs. In this conversation, Ja

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[AI agents and automation][solo founder and bootstrapping][marketing and growth hacking][developer tools and coding][market research and validation]