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

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

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

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

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

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

SaaStrFund.com investments include:

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

Jason M. Lemkin

Possibly the biggest mistakes folks make joining a smaller startup for the first time is this:

You Gotta Know -- It's Not About You

Not trained?
No processes?
Not clear how it works?
Things you disagree with?

Figure It Out.  It's not about you.  It's about the mission.

SaaStr AI 2026 is May 12-14 in SF Bay!! See You There!!

How do founders that have never done it before scale to $10m, $100m, $1B in ARR?

They hire people better than them

This is the mistake most Stretch VPs make. They don’t hire folks better & later more experienced than them as their managers

And they hit a wall at the next stage

1️⃣ Very first month -> 
🔥 72% open rate ->
🚀 Deals already closed from leads that were previously ... ghosted.

I'll join Marc Benioff on Salesforce’s upcoming earnings call TODAY to share how SaaStr Ai deployed Agentforce in just weeks to re-engage 1,000+ missed leads and turn forgotten pipeline into millions of won-closed revenue.

Tune in at 2pm PT: https://lnkd.in/gvNvhynQ

AI reduced SaaStr headcount from 20+ to 3. 

Revenue went from -19% to +47% YoY. 

I'm not telling you to fire your team. 

I'm telling you to be honest about what the next version of your company actually looks like.

"Autonomous agents are here. The guardrail infrastructure isn’t. Every enterprise is about to face this problem: powerful, cheap agents that can do real damage if deployed without security infrastructure." with Harry Stebbings Rory O'Driscoll + me

Meet Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll LIVE at SaaStr AI 2026, May 12-14 in SF Bay!! 10,000 of the Best in AI + B2B!! See. You. There

Open article: 20VC x SaaStr: Anthropic Raises $30B, The B2B Software Gravity Well, and Why Corporate America Is Willing AI Into Existence by Jason M. Lemkin • 15 min read

20VC x SaaStr: Anthropic Raises $30B, The B2B Software Gravity Well, and Why Corporate America Is Willing AI Into Existence

We had an AI agent stop ingesting data four months before we noticed. 

No errors. No alerts. 

Just stale outputs wearing the mask of something functional. 

You can't train an AI agent and then just … go away.

Zach Harris

Grayscale Investments

- Launched ~ $7 billion in digital assets to private and public capital markets on Grayscale.com
- Managed four sprints ($150K / monthly value) - ui/ux, dev shop, cms migration, content publishing 
- Responsible for end-to-end release management from planning through delivery, with cross-functional dependencies from legal, compliance, regulatory, and security

Product Lead

Mañana

Select Clients Include: 

– Amazon: Worldwide Stores Storytelling – Global Diversity Equity And Inclusion Team
– Axon Enterprises: Strategist and Go-To-Market Lead - Launched First Responders Network
– FLOC*: NA Product and Brand Strategy Lead - Award-Winning Web3 Boutique Collective
– GoPro: Research and Creative Tooling Roadmap - Enabled team to accelerate deliverables
– Grayscale: Product lead for Grayscale.com - Launched billions to capital markets
– Huddle: Brand and Product Lead – Software Lifecycle Development for Early Stage Startups
– Twill Health: Strategy and Research Lead - Multi-Purpose Strategist, Led Brand Health Research
– Verizon Media: Innovation Consultant - Trendspotting for Yahoo! Content and Commerce teams

Consultant – Product, Innovation, Go-To-Market

Le woof Brand

🐺  🌿  🍂   🐾   🫧  🧼  🐩

Advisor

Outlier Ventures

Office Hours: Branding In Public for OV Wormhole Cohort

Mentor

Cornell Tech

FLOC*

Brand Strategy Consultant

Huddle

Brand & Product Lead

A.Team

Builder in Residence

Forum Ventures

Operator Network

Twill

Strategy & Operations (Brand Studio)

Consultant, Advisor, Coach • Growth Strategy, Product & Marketing, Strategic Partnerships

I am a senior leader with over 15 years of experience scaling revenue-generating products and streamlining efficiencies on creative, business and technical teams. I’m passionate about technology led disruption and the democratization of tooling. 

Effectiveness stems from depth of expertise, agility in evolving business and economic climate, and talent for building trusted relationships with colleagues, clients, and business partners. I take an object-oriented approach that is considerate, data-driven, and iterative yet biased for action. 

My strengths are navigating ambiguity, pivoting when project requirements evolve, deep multi-disciplinary collaboration, strong stakeholder management, and driving measurable results.
 
https://www.zachharris.xyz

Founder | Managing Partner

Mañana is the brain child of Zach Harris, an army of one, who helps executive leaders execute their product strategy & approach to marketing innovation at the highest levels.

I empower leaders with the boldest hot takes and most robust growth strategies for traditional and decentralized teams across product, marketing, and partnerships through better words, commitments, and actions. Sometimes also with dad jokes. 

Clients: Amazon, Yahoo!, Verizon, GoPro, Google, Axon, Twill Health (fka Happify), Apax (Port Co)

Most people still talk about “#ItalianStartups” with a kind of resigned shrug: amazing talent, impossible bureaucracy, permanent brain drain – in short, it is a hostile landscape. 

That’s why what Dorian Lazzari and the Cubish team are doing has been stuck in my head since he came on my radar…

Italy is the country that gave us the #Brunelleschi dome, #daVinci machines, and the #Michelangelo touch – radically ambitious engineering and art stacked on top of fragile, very human institutions. Iconic cultural engineering. 

Today, it’s also a place where launching a serious tech company means wrestling with red tape, fragmented incentives, and a culture that still quietly encourages the best people to leave. A good metaphor is the anti-Swiss rail. 

Against that backdrop, #Cubish is a wild outlier:

✔️ They’ve spent four years building a 5.1‑trillion‑cube spatial web, turning the Earth’s surface into addressable “Cube Domains” for geolocated content, services, and interactions.
✔️ They filed what’s been described as one of the most complex software patents ever submitted in Italy for a location‑based CMS that can layer immersive, merit‑ranked digital spaces on top of the physical world.
✔️ They did it with 26 co‑founders (including two companies), all remote, work‑for‑equity, selected via hundreds of interviews, with explicit governance around transparency, representation, and merit instead of vibes.

In a country where “it’s impossible to run a startup” is almost conventional wisdom, that’s not just a product story. It’s a coordination hack and a cultural hack.

It reminds me more of #Renaissance #Florence or imperial #Rome than of a typical 2020s seed‑deck narrative: discretizing the planet the way Roman engineers discretized roads and aqueducts – except the stones are digital cubes and the arches are protocols; hand‑rolling a mini‑constitution so 26 founders can hold the sky up together, instead of tearing the cap table apart, or fighting over airspace… But, I digress. 

Whatever happens next for Cubish, it’s already proof of something important:

You can bend Italian startup physics without breaking the team – if you’re willing to carry Atlas‑level load for a while to give everyone else a new layer to stand on.

I’m curious who else is quietly doing this kind of “Renaissance in hostile conditions” work – in Italy or elsewhere. 

Please post other world class #builders, #founders, or world #shapers that should be on my radar... I'll go first! 

(See comments below)

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The Battle

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