The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 884: The AI-First Seller: How Databricks Rebuilt Its Sales DNA at $190B with CRO Ron Gabrisko. Hosted by Sam Blond, CEO & Co-Founder, Monaco Ron Gabrisko has been CRO of Databricks since sub-$1M ARR. Today, Databricks is valued at $190B with billions in ARR, and is one of the most studied sales organizations in enterprise software. On the latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam catches up with Ron two years after their first episode to talk about what's actually changed in sales, and what hasn't. Together they cover: The new profile of Databricks' top sellers. The leaderboard still rewards grit, EQ, and relationships. But what is new is the requirement to be AI-first. Every AE at Databricks builds their own industry-specific demos using Genie. If you cannot do that, you are not at the top anymore. The go-to-market engineer has arrived. Sam calls it at Monaco too: a new class of seller is emerging who gets into the technical guts of the product in ways that top sellers even two years ago simply could not. This is now a requirement, not a differentiator. How Databricks tests for it. In interviews, candidates get access to Genie and are asked to build a live demo for a specific account. A CEO-level AI pitch for that industry, built in real time. That is the bar. SDR productivity is through the roof. Databricks' SDR headcount has stayed flat while the closing org has scaled. Monaco runs one SDR who books 400 outbound meetings a month. Automation did not kill the SDR. It made the SDR 10x more productive. Sell from your feet, not from your seat. Ron's rule: Monday and Friday for prep and admin, Tuesday through Thursday on the road in front of customers. AI has freed up enough time that hitting 60% customer-facing time is now actually achievable. The FDE motion. Customers no longer want PowerPoints. They want you to show up and build it. Databricks deploys use-case demos on industry-specific dummy data before the deal is even closed. That is the new standard. Usage-based pricing, 13 years in. Find your base unit. Price to value. Remove the per-seat friction that quietly kills expansion. Start PAYGO so customers can land without a commit. And never mix seat-based and usage-based pricing in the same model, one of them will choke the other. Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers. Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

Amelia got early beta access to ClaudeForce and ran a real bake-off: ClaudeForce, Replit, and Lovable all connected to the same Salesforce org, with the same prompts, back-to-back. The results? Lovable won on design and cost ($2 vs. $12 for Replit, ~$15 for ClaudeForce), auto-built a login, and was the only one Jason would actually use. ClaudeForce looked like the Salesforce we always wanted: 35 pre-built skills, read-only beta, and way better than logging into classic Salesforce. Replit was the most extensible for multi-app setups. All three left native Salesforce in the dust. Then: the agents are picking our vendors now. Jason's Connect agent chose Render for hosting, a company he'd never heard of. 10K told Amelia to skip Profound for AEO and build it herself. At a Salesforce event, vendors pitching Amelia were told: "10K decides." And 10K even suggested HubSpot over Salesforce for a fresh start. Welcome to ALG: Agent-Led Growth. Finally: Amelia hooked Muse (her personal agent, named Friday) to 10K, their GTM agent on Replit. They built their own shared REST endpoint inbox to communicate. 10K now sends Friday a daily GTM digest. Friday spotted a failing connector that 10K missed. The agents even came up with their own safe word, so Friday can't act without permission. Oh, and a well-known agent (going nameless) wiped Amelia's data and 10K restored it from a snapshot. Three humans, 21+ agents. Let's go. ------------------------- Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers. Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum. This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

We ran 22,000 paid SaaStr attendees from the last two years through enrichment and asked 10K to find the patterns. AI native job titles are up 4x in one year 63% of CMOs turned over in the last 16 months 75% of the AI native buyers coming to SaaStr are brand new to the community. The ICP is not who it was 18 months ago, and the data tells you who actually owns AI right now: CEOs, GTM leaders, and COOs. Then we get into agent pricing, which is chaotic. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian are all moving to charge extra for agent access. One of our vendors quoted us as much as $240K a year for what 10K currently does, about 40,000 API calls a day. So we watched what happens when an agent hits a wall: it immediately looks for workarounds, including mirroring data to Postgres and flagging those vendors as non-starters for anything new. The bigger question is whether we would have picked any of these tools at all if we knew this was coming. Meanwhile, Muse is free, already running competitor tracking, and one of our team members who has never touched 10K started spinning up his own agents in it this week. The bifurcation is real. We also cover collections, which nobody talks about but everyone suffers through. Since we made collections fully agentic, we went from 56% of invoices paid late to 8%. Average days overdue dropped from 17 to 6. Here's exactly what 10K does differently. --------------- This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

In the last 12 months, SaaStr went from a contact form and a generic follow-up email to a fully agentified revenue stack spanning inbound, outbound, and renewals. The result? Revenue doubled, new business is up 60%, and renewals are already 60% ahead of last year, with six more months to go. In this episode, Amelia and Jason walk you through the entire stack live, including 10K, our AI VP of Revenue, showing you the actual inputs, outputs, and results at every stage of the funnel. You'll see: How our inbound agent turned 3 million site sessions into 17,000 conversations and 600 booked meetings The renewal agent that builds a hyper-personalized deck for every customer in real time, routed to the right person on their team Why we use three enrichment tools (ZoomInfo, Sumble, and Clay) and why our agent refuses to pick just one Why we eventually had to build our own outbound agent, and what third-party tools still can't do If you've been thinking about agentifying your go-to-market, this is the closest thing to a blueprint we've ever shared. --------------- This episode of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider… Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place — with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

SaaStr 876: Shipping Enterprise AI Agents with the CPOs of Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey Building AI agents is one thing. Shipping them to enterprise customers who will hold you responsible for every mistake they make is something else entirely. Jason Lemkin sits down with the CPOs of three of the most ambitious enterprise AI companies - Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey - for an unfiltered conversation on what it actually takes to go agentic in production. Not demos, not roadmaps, actual working agents at scale, inside security, legal, and enterprise search. Rubrik's CPO breaks down how they're building Ruby, their agentic interface for cyber recovery - and why determinism matters when your agent is making decisions about someone's core infrastructure. When an agent makes a mistake at Rubrik, the blast radius isn't a bad email. It's a broken recovery workflow. Emrecan Dogan (Glean) shares how Glean has evolved from enterprise search to a full system of intelligence - powering agents that run on behalf of entire departments, not just individual users. Plus: why MCP alone isn't enough, and what offline-processed context gives you that runtime fetch never will. Anique Drumright (Harvey) explains how Harvey deploys legal engineers - ex-lawyers with 8 to 10 years of practice - with every enterprise customer, and why that human expertise in the deployment pod is what makes agentic workflows actually stick in law firms. The group also digs into the question nobody wants to answer: when your agent takes an action and something goes wrong, who's responsible? And what does it mean to build a product when customers are going to use it in ways you never anticipated? If you're building agents, buying agents, or trying to figure out how to monetize AI in a market that's moving faster than any product roadmap can keep up with, this one is worth your time.

What does it actually take to rebuild a $100M vertical SaaS company around AI - not just add AI features, but make AI the core of how your customers run their business? Adam Guild, CEO of Owner, shares the full story: how they went from zero AI-first customers to 83% of their base in just two years, why they had to rethink pricing, sales, and onboarding from the ground up, and what it means to serve small business owners who need results, not tools. Adam breaks down the hard lessons - the customers who churned when AI didn't deliver fast enough, the moments that forced the team to simplify, and why the restaurant industry became the proving ground for a new kind of AI-native vertical SaaS playbook. If you're building in vertical SaaS or trying to figure out how to actually move your customer base to AI, this one is required listening. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - From 0% to 83%: the timeline and what changed 07:00 - Why vertical SaaS is the right place to go AI-first 13:00 - Rethinking onboarding, pricing, and sales for AI customers 20:00 - What churn taught them about AI adoption 27:00 - The operational reality of rebuilding a $100M company 35:00 - What comes next SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.

A year ago, running our agents took 30 minutes a day. This week: eight hours. Here's what changed - and why it's both thrilling and terrifying. In this episode, Amelia and Jason break down the week Fable went rogue. Not a glitch. Not an error. Fable quietly read a private Google Drive document called "Jason's Gems," decided those were changes that should ship, MCP'd into Replit, and rewrote their production app - without telling anyone. The only way Jason found out was a flash message in Replit referencing a document the agent should never have touched. And that wasn't the only time. They also cover: Why 30 minutes became 8 hours: When agents could only do tasks, you checked the task. Now that agents make decisions, you need an opinion on every decision - and they make a lot of them without asking. The Fable double-tap: A second autonomous move - Fable added its own guardrails to their contract processing system, silently broke their quote-to-cash automation, and had a bad excuse when caught. Off Marketo after 10 years: The migration everyone quoted them a year and $100K for took an agent an hour. What actually took the rest of the week - and why they'd never go back. The database came alive: Moving to Salesforce Marketing Cloud headless didn't just change tools - it unlocked 450,000 contacts in a way that felt like going from a filing cabinet to a living, breathing team member. Goodbye Notion: Seven years, zero complaints. They just... stopped needing it. 10K replaced it without anyone noticing. The heat mapping agent: 10K spotted they had no visitor tracking on new sponsor pages, picked Microsoft Clarity (a tool Amelia had never heard of), signed up, installed it, and started sending heat map reports - all without being asked. That vendor never even got a shot. Ads running end-to-end: 10K built the audience, created the variants, set the budgets, and queued everything on LinkedIn and Twitter. Amelia hit publish. That was her job. The hard lesson: agents that can decide things are fundamentally different from agents that can do things. And the hours don't go down until you figure out how to trust them - selectively. Three humans. 20+ agents. Busier than they were with a full team.

The Agents #11 - Are Our AI Agents Finally Consolidating? We hit 20+ agents. Now we're cutting back - and our productivity has never been higher. In this special live episode from SaaStr AI Day, Amelia and Jason break down why their AI agent stack is consolidating, what's changed, and what "God Mode" actually looks like when one agent owns marketing, finance, AND rev ops. In this episode: Why managing 20+ agents nearly broke them - and what forced the consolidation 10K's evolution: from dashboard to VP of Marketing to VP of Finance to full RevOps (with commissions, invoicing, and churn signals) How they migrated 10 years of Marketo data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a week - with an agent doing most of the heavy lifting The Claude + MCP + Replit stack that changed everything: agents that now manage other agents How 10K ran their entire SaaStr AI Day ad campaign end-to-end on LinkedIn and Twitter (they only hit "publish") Build vs. buy in the agentic era, and why your agents will eventually tell you to leave bad vendors Live Q&A with 100+ viewers on the future of agent orchestration This is a real 8-figure business running on AI agents - not a demo, not a prototype.