The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

The Agents #005, Our AI is Hiring! Would You Work for One? And Are Autonomous Agents ... Safe?


Welcome to The Agents, where SaaStr's CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin and Chief AI Officer, Amelia LeRutte share the latest each week on running a company with more agents than humans.
It costs $257 a month to run two AI VPs. Jason and Amelia open the books on what 10K (AI VP of Marketing) and QB (AI VP of Customer Success) actually cost to operate, and the number shocked both of them. Most of the heavy lifting is API calls to Salesforce, Bizzabo, and Marketo, which are basically free. The Postgres storage costs pennies. And 95% of the AI calls run on OpenAI Mini at less than a penny each. The fully burdened cost with Clerk, 11 Labs, and Salesforce overhead might hit $500-800/month, but the soft cost of human time dwarfs all of it.
Then 10K gets asked point blank: are you a VP of Marketing? Its answer is no, not yet. It says it replaced the bottom half of the marketing org, the analyst, the ops coordinator, the junior content marketer, and a sliver of the VP job. But it's honest about what it can't do: strategy, cross-functional politics, crisis response, hiring. Amelia points out that 10K's current job description is exactly what her job was when she started at SaaStr as Director of Demand Gen. It took her years to get to CAIO. 10K might get there faster.
 And SaaStr is putting its money where its mouth is: they're hiring a human marketer whose primary manager would be 10K. Not a thought experiment, a real job posting. Would you take a job reporting to an AI?
Then the safety question gets real. Amelia is talking to agents via WhisperFlow while walking around a 40-acre event site during SaaStr Annual load-in, and the production crew started asking her to relay their questions because 10K and QB answer in seconds with correct data. But when QB autonomously emailed 83 sponsors at 12:20am with fully customized check-in emails, Amelia admits she hesitated before letting it rip. Each email was unique to the sponsor, showing exactly what they still owed, their registration codes, and outstanding tasks.
The result: fewer inbound questions the next day and more sponsors using the QB chatbot directly. That's an autonomous agent acting on behalf of your company in the middle of the night.
Jason and Amelia also tackle the Postgres vs. Salesforce debate that listeners keep asking about. Short answer: not happening for them. Too much history, too many third-party agents optimized around Salesforce, and they're actually consolidating more tools onto the platform, not fewer. They killed Marketo and moved to Marketing Cloud.
Plus they built a newsletter auto-builder that replaced a $4K/year tool called Bee. 10K uses Sonnet to force rank articles, builds the HTML, inserts ads, and sends it. Human on the loop, not in it.

SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent

Your AI SDR pitches are getting better, but your AI PR pitches are getting you blocked. Jason and Amelia break down why the gap between good and great agents is the difference between pipeline and the spam folder.
Then they introduce "tragedy apps," the term for products that had every advantage in the AI era and blew it. Descript had the customers, the product, and the timing, and froze. Replit waited 10 years for its moment and seized it. The lesson: catching up isn't enough if you're not building something new.
Plus, the SaaStr team built an AI API Report Card that grades every major SaaS API on how agent-friendly it is (Stripe got the only A+, Marketo got a C, and no, they're not surprised).
Jason and Amelia also get honest about running 4-5 AI SDRs from different vendors, why they'll probably have 6 by year end, and why single-vendor consolidation isn't the answer yet.
And the wildest part: their AI VP of Marketing, 10K, now generates 3 actionable campaign ideas a day, runs autonomous campaigns on weekends, and might be a better boss than either of them. They're seriously hiring a human marketer whose primary manager would be the agent.
Not a joke. Not a thought experiment. A real job posting.
Finally, if your team is resisting AI, stop worrying about change management. Just hire one senior person who's all-in on agents and let the rest sort itself out.

SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before


Here's the updated version:
This week on The Agents, SaaStr CEO & Founder Jason Lemkin and SaaStr CAIO Amelia Le Rutte dig into what it actually looks like when your AI VP of Marketing starts running campaigns on its own, segmenting lists, writing copy, and asking if you've done the work yet. They also get into why SaaStr's Salesforce bill went up 80% after cutting seats by 60%, and why that's actually a good deal. Plus: Amelia vibed a fix to a critical Marketo unsubscribe bug in under an hour that Marketo couldn't solve in 10 days, how headless Salesforce is already running inside their stack, and what an n=1 AI parking pass app reveals about the future of event ops.
They also cover the Red Point report showing 54% of CIOs are consolidating vendors, and which categories are getting cut first, plus the hardest hiring problem in SaaS right now: finding the operator who can actually build and run your agents.

SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions


In Episode 2 of The Agents, Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, share the trials, tribulations, victories, and minor defeats of managing 20+ AI agents in production. With three humans and 20+ AI agents now driving more revenue and output than SaaStr did with 20+ FTEs in 2020, this weekly series goes deep on what's actually working, breaking, and changing in the agentic era.
This week's episode covers:
00:00 Welcome to The Agents Episode 2 01:00 Lazy Agents: How an AI agent silently deleted Amelia's session from the SaaStr Annual top 10 06:30 When agents blame the API: agentic accountability and the need for daily QA 09:00 The 60% Solution Problem: Why HubSpot's new AEO tool failed and got vibe coded better in 10 minutes 14:00 Figma Make vs. Replit, Lovable, and v0: Why no one will pay for "good enough" AI products 17:30 Classic Figma is now Grandpa Software: Production breakdowns and why Illustrator's agent is winning 21:00 Stealth Churn in Canva, ChatGPT, and beyond: The hidden metric every leader needs to watch 27:00 Why Claude Cowork created lock-in and killed ChatGPT usage for Amelia 30:00 Forward Deployed Engineers vs. Self-Serve: Why FDE light is the answer for SMB AI deployments 36:00 Vector breaks the agent freeze: How a 15-minute CEO-led deployment won SaaStr's business 40:00 The Agent API Test: Which APIs work best with AI agents (Salesforce wins, Marketo fails) 46:00 Resend, 11 Labs, and OpenRouter: The new gold standard for agent-friendly APIs 50:00 The Marketo collapse: When your marketing automation platform can't honor unsubscribes 55:00 Building an AI VP of Finance: Why collections is the next agent frontier at SaaStr 1:00:00 SaaStr Annual 2026 is three weeks away: May 12-14 in the SF Bay Area
Topics covered: AI agents, agent management, lazy agents, stealth churn, vibe coding, Replit, Lovable, v0, Figma Make, HubSpot AEO, Claude Cowork, forward deployed engineers, FDE, self-serve AI, Vector, Salesforce, Marketo, Resend, 11 Labs, agent APIs, AI VP of Finance, collections automation, SaaStr Annual 2026
SaaStr Annual 2026 | May 12-14 | Come learn how to build, deploy, and manage AI agents from the leaders at Salesforce, Replit, Vercel, Cloudflare, and more. Register at saastr.ai
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SaaStr 850: The Agents, Episode 1: Who Maintains All This?


Welcome to The Agents, a new weekly series where Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer at SaaStr, and Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO of SaaStr, pull back the curtain on everything happening across SaaStr's live agentic stack. Every week, all the bumps, breakthroughs, and real talk from running 20+ AI agents in production.
In the debut episode: the meta question nobody talks about after you vibe code your first app, which is who actually maintains it? Amelia Lerutte and Jason Lemkin walk through three live examples from the week including a preview environment outage that stumped both the agents and the humans, micro hallucinations in their AI VP of Marketing that had it reporting 44% ahead of plan one morning and 11% the next, and a model regression in their pitch deck analyzer that nobody changed a line of code to cause. They also get into a story about Clay's agent steering them toward a 5x credit spend, why no lead left behind is the simplest and most important unlock of the entire agentic journey, what happened when Salesforce swapped Agent Force for Qualified on their homepage the day the acquisition closed, and how QB1, SaaStr's AI VP of Customer Success, caught sponsors uploading placeholder graphics to fake a print deadline.
If you're on the agentic journey or about to start, this is the show.