CRO Confidential: 0 to $600M in Under 4 Years. The ElevenLabs GTM Playbook with Carles Reina (Partner @ Baobab Ventures and Former VP of Revenue at ElevenLabs). Hosted by Sam Blond, CEO and Co-Founder of Monaco

Carles Reina was the fourth employee and first GTM hire at ElevenLabs. Four years later, the company hit $600M ARR and an $11B valuation. In this episode of CRO Confidential, Carles breaks down exactly how they built it.

He covers the distribution-first strategy that drove 0 to $100M in 20 months, the grants program that pulled demand away from every competitor in the market, and the 20X quota model that had reps hitting 300-600% attainment. He also gets into what he'd do differently — why sales enablement and senior sellers should come earlier than most founders think — and how ElevenLabs wired AI into their GTM motion before most companies were even asking the question.

If you're building go-to-market from scratch or trying to figure out what "AI-native" revenue looks like in practice, this one is required listening. This episode of the SaaStr podcast is brought to you by Monaco:

If you're using AI in your go-to-market or you wanna get going, then you need to try Monaco. We're on it, SaaStr's on it, we love it. We use it for outbound, but you can use it for everything, actually. It's everything you need all in one place. At Monaco, it's the all-in-one revenue platform and your system of record. It builds your TAM, runs outbound, captures every interaction, and manages pipeline in one place, all in one great unified platform. Go to monaco.com to learn more.

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.

SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013

The agents are writing data faster than any human ever could - and systems of record aren't ready for it.

This week on The Agents, Jason and Amelia dig into the biggest meta-theme of 2026: what happens when your AI agents become the primary user of your CRM, your MAP, and every other system you've built your business on?

Together, they unpack the ServiceTitan vs. Podium blowup, where an agentic lead gen tool slowly became a competing system of record until ServiceTitan shut them off with 30 days' notice, and why this is just the first of many fights like it coming across SaaS.

Then Amelia pulls back the curtain on how SaaStr actually runs Salesforce headless through 10K, what it means that their agents have written 40 gigabytes of data into Salesforce without either of them logging in, and why the storage math is going to force a reckoning for every vendor jacking up API prices right now.

Plus: the renewal agent Amelia built that generates a fully custom, hyper-personalized pitch deck for every single customer, using headless Salesforce, Gamma, social data, podcast mentions, and Gmail. And why Clay plus ZoomInfo plus Cowork turned out to be the best enrichment stack their agents have found yet.

If you're building on top of systems of record, selling to companies that are, or just trying to figure out how agents change the economics of SaaS data, this one is essential listening.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

02:00 - ServiceTitan cuts off Podium: what happened and why it matters

10:00 - 40 gigs in Salesforce and neither of us logged in

16:00 - The API pricing reckoning coming for systems of record

22:00 - How SaaStr runs Salesforce headless with 10K

30:00 - The renewal agent: no account left behind

42:00 - Narrative-first pitching: getting the agent to sell

50:00 - Clay + ZoomInfo + Cowork: the enrichment stack that actually worked 58:00 - What comes next: agentic inbound proposals

SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.

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.

Before AI, Klaviyo had an insight that changed e-commerce marketing forever: don't show merchants how many emails they sent, show them how much money those emails made. That single shift helped Klaviyo capture 80% market share, earn a cult following among Shopify merchants, and IPO in 2023 with $1.4B in revenue.

Now Andrew has to do it again.

In this session at SaaStr AI Day, Klaviyo's co-founder and CEO breaks down how he's rebuilding a dominant pre-AI company for the agent era, including some of the most practical AI-at-scale lessons we've heard from any founder this year.

What's inside:

The Dark Factory. Klaviyo's internal agent system inspired by "lights-out manufacturing," where a team of agents decomposes a product prompt into specs, writes software interfaces, runs tests, handles load testing, and raises a flag only when it's genuinely stuck. One weekend, one agent team, one full prototype.

The Tom Brady Rule. Andrew's mental model for LLMs: treat them like a great all-around athlete. They'll never be elite without coaching. The "harness" you build around the model, the domain-specific data, feedback loops, and scoring, is what makes the difference between a POC and a product that works for 200,000 customers.

Agents skip onboarding entirely. Unlike human users who take months to learn a product, agents land as power users on day one. Andrew's team now asks their own agents, "What's holding you back?" and uses the answers to build their product roadmap. (One example: the agent discovered AMP interactive email on its own and immediately asked Klaviyo to build the missing APIs.)

Agents training agents. For customer-facing agents, Klaviyo takes a feed of real support cases, classifies them, then runs an agent loop that trains another agent on the platform, without any human FDE or SE required. It ships at 50-70% resolution out of the box.

APIs are the new UI. Whether your software is brand new or a decade old, if your internal and external APIs are great, agents will figure out the rest. The companies that win the agent era won't be the ones with the best interface. They'll be the ones with the best infrastructure.

Three years from now, every business will have an agent you can reach through a URL, a phone number, or an email. The question is who builds the infrastructure underneath it.

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.

$0 -> $100M ARR. How Gamma Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team

100 million in ARR. A team of 50. Zero sales reps.

Grant Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Gamma, shares the exact playbook behind one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in SaaS - from pitching investors out of a London kitchenette to going viral with a single tweet that got Paul Graham throwing shade.

In this session, Grant breaks down four lessons:

1. Product-market fit isn't a checkbox. After winning Product of the Day on Product Hunt and watching signups plateau, Gamma went back to the drawing board. They gave themselves three months to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical - and word of mouth did the rest (5K signups/day, then 10K, then 50K, zero marketing spend).

2. Creator marketing only works if you've done it yourself. Grant went through "Cringe Valley" to understand what creators actually need - then used that to manually onboard every creator partner and build something that felt authentic, not transactional.

3. Community-led growth is literal. At 50M users, Gamma flew power users to SF, visited customers in Seoul, London, and São Paulo, and created a Gambassador Slack where early feedback shapes the product roadmap. Your users are not a faceless entity.

4. Dogfooding the future builds conviction. How Gamma killed their virtual office idea after six months and went all-in on presentations - and why testing your own product is the fastest path to knowing what to build next.

If you're building a product-led company and wondering whether to invest in marketing or go back to the product - watch this first.

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.

SaaStr 869: The Agents #010: How Agents Will Steal Your Customers. Plus: The $10K App Our Agent Replaced in an Hour and the $14 Migration.

Agents aren't just automating your work. They're about to start stealing your customers.

In this episode, we get into what happens when agents can migrate a customer off your platform for $14 and replace a $10,000 app in an hour - and what that means for how you build, sell, and retain in the age of AI. Plus, Jason goes hands-on as AI VP of Product, using Claude MCP into Replit to ship real features. And we talk about something nobody wants to admit: agent burnout is real.

You'll learn:

• Why the $14 Marketo migration is a wake-up call for every SaaS vendor
• How a HeySummit customer's $10K app got replaced by an agent - without anyone asking it to
• What it actually looks like to use Claude as your AI VP of Product in Replit
• Why agents are creating a new kind of burnout, and what to do about it

SaaStr 868: Software Isn't Dead. It's Gotten Harder with Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll

When you've spent 30 years making money in software, "is software dead?" feels like a personal attack. Rory O'Driscoll, who has been a software investor since before most of the companies in this room existed, decided to actually answer the question.

He went back through his portfolio. About 10% of pre-2022 companies were DOA the moment ChatGPT launched, solving problems that foundation models made trivially easy overnight. Another 30% are genuinely threatened and need to move fast or die. The rest are either insulated, made stronger by AI, or sitting on opportunities that didn't exist before.

The answer is not that software is dead.

The answer is that the standard deviation of what you're dealing with has gone way up, and most founders haven't figured out which category they're actually in.

In this episode, Rory lays out the framework he and his team have been wrestling with in real time: where defensibility actually lives, what the $688B in AI CapEx vs $110B in revenue means for everyone in the room, and when AI is genuinely the new sales and marketing versus when it's just a cost you can't afford.

You'll learn:

• Why we're spending half a trillion dollars more than we're making in AI, and what that means for software founders and investors over the next five years
• The breakdown of what actually happened to pre-GPT software companies, and how to honestly assess where your company sits
• The six types of defensibility that Rory believes can survive the foundation model companies rolling over you
• Why the trillion dollar question is how enterprise chooses to consume AI, and what it means for who captures the value
• When compute intensity is a feature and when it's a death sentence, and the heuristic for telling the difference
• What T2D3 means now that SaaS multiples have collapsed and the growth bar has moved

SaaStr 867: $0 to $500M ARR in 13 Months. Inside Higgsfield's Viral AI Growth with Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO Most companies take years to get to $10M ARR. Higgsfield got there in eight weeks, then kept going. In 11 months they crossed $300M with 120 people and no traditional sales team.

Jason Lemkin has been a customer since near the beginning, using Higgsfield to build every video asset for SaaStr, and in this session he sits down with co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov to get the real story behind the numbers: what actually drove the growth, what they built that nobody else had, and what they got wrong along the way.

The answers are more surprising than the headline. Seventy percent of their revenue comes from the creative agencies they're disrupting. Their biggest product bet was camera controls, something no one asked for. And they've reoriented the entire company three times in under a year, each time based on a signal most founders would have missed.

You'll learn:

• How Higgsfield went from zero to $10M ARR in eight weeks and what the specific product unlock was
• Why 70% of revenue at a video AI company comes from agencies, and what that says about how disruption actually works
• How they think about being "a wrapper" and where the real margin and defensibility comes from What $1,000 ACV looks like vs. Canva's $200, and how they keep marching customers up the value stack
• How a team of 80 engineers and 70 in-house creatives building together is actually a competitive advantage
• What ARR honestly means for a company like this, straight from the founder