"Dead AI Startups Keep Landing On My Desk!" | CEO @ Clari + Salesloft, Steve Cox
About this episode
Steve Cox discusses the current state of AI startups and the SaaS industry, emphasizing the importance of retention and the integration of AI into revenue systems.
Steve Cox, CEO of Clari + Salesloft, joins Sam Jacobs and Asad Zaman to argue that SaaS is far from dead. Steve took the CEO role in December 2025 to merge two of the biggest brands in go-to-market tech into what he calls the world's first predictive revenue system. Topics include the narrative war pushing investors to bet against SaaS-era companies, his one non-negotiable hiring trait, and how to merge two former rivals without one culture eating the other. Plus, a Quiz Pro Quo on go-to-market headcount across US tech and a Bulls and Bears round to close. Key Takeaways: - The AI-native startup boom is already hitting a retention wall, and Steve is watching it arrive deal by deal. As Steve Cox, CEO of Clari plus Salesloft, put it: "the amount of AI native companies that come across my desk now that... are up for sale, you know, they've run out of funding... they grew to 2, 3, 4 million of ARR pretty quickly and then struggled with retention." His read is that everyone knows AI exists now, so driving real adoption "has become more important than ever." - Steve reframes the AI hype cycle as the next layer of infrastructure the industry will absorb, the way it absorbed cloud and big…
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