SaaStr 798: The Top 10 Reasons to Come to 2025 SaaStr Annual May 13-15 in SF Bay with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

0:01Welcome to the official Sastr podcast where you can hear some of the best Sastr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Hey, Saster, do you know what would make your customer service help desk dramatically better? Dumping it and switching to intercom. But you're not quite ready to make that change. We get it. That's why FIN, the world's leading AI customer service agent, is now available on every help desk. FIN can instantly resolve up to 80 % of your tickets, which makes customers happier, and you get off the customer service rep hiring treadmill. FIN by Intercom, named the number one agent in G2's winner report.

0:34Learn more at inter.com slash SASTR. That's I-N-T-E-R.com slash SASTR. Hey, everybody. SASTR Annual is coming up. SASTR Annual 2025. It's May 13th to the 15th in the SF Bay Area, right on our 40-acre indoor-outdoor campus in San Mateo, right in between Palo Alto and San Francisco. It is going to be great. There'll be 10 ,000 of the best in B2B, SaaS, cloud, and AI, all sharing our playbooks. everyone from the COs of Snowflake and HubSpot and Dropbox and vertical SaaS leaders like Flock Safety and Clio to the best to heads of AI at Wiz and Databricks and more. Anyhow, it's going to be awesome. It is going to be awesome.

1:18It is a festival about building and scaling software together. And I wanted to give you 10 reasons, 10 great reasons to come to Saster 2025. Okay, Okay. Number one, networking. Listen, I don't know about you. I'm not the world's best networker. So I love to go to things like Sastra where I'm guaranteed to meet great people and we will help you. We will help you. If you're not the world's greatest extrovert and I am not, we have your solution at Sastra annual. A couple of things. First of all, one brand new, we've always had brain dates and meetups. And we'll talk about that. We'll have hundreds and hundreds of small group sessions where you can talk about hundreds of topics from how to hire a head of sales to how to scale customer success to how to add co-pilots.

2:01We'll have hundreds of these brain dates, but what we're adding is a brand new, who do you want to meet session? These are opt-in one-on-one meetings right in the dead center of Sastra annual, where we'll have over a thousand of these curated one-on-one meetings. If you've signed up and you are a B2B executive, you will be able to join. Who do you want to meet through our dedicated app? It's on the app store. You'll be able to sign in and you will be able to meet great folks on double opt-in meetings. It's cool. It's new. It's going to be great. Two, we just talked about this, but our brain dates and workshops will have hundreds of these.

2:34You can sign up if you are a cloud executive and do your own. You can join hundreds. Many folks come to Sastra and they just spend all three days in these brain dates, learning and meeting folks in these small groups. They're anywhere from two-person sessions to a hundred-person workshops, and they're all on targeted niche topics. So come and sign up for those brain dates. They are great. Three, we have C-level events and networking, and you can benefit as founders. We have four summits at Sastor Annual. We have a invite-only CMO summit with 200 of the best CMOs and VPs of marketing and growth.

3:12We have 300 of the best chief customer officers. We have about 150 CFOs. These are invite-only just for them. But at the end, after them, we have open networking for CEOs that are attending. So if you're the CEO of a B2B company post-revenue, you can join these networking sessions, these cocktail parties with the best CROs and VPs of sales, CMOs, CCOs, and CFOs. And for CROs especially, we have a CEO, CRO poker night. And if you are, again, a CEO in a software company. You've got to be at software. You can't be a service provider or selling stuff. You've got to be a CEO or a founder of a B2B company.

3:51But if you are, you can come out and play poker for two hours with the best heads of sales in the industry. It was great. It was off the charts last year and everyone is already looking forward to it. So join our summits, join our poker night and join the cocktail parties and meetups afterwards. Finally, and boy, the list of networking is endless. You will network as much as you possibly want. We have our 10th annual meet a VC program. It's pretty great. There are a bunch of things you can do to meet the almost 800 VCs that will be at Sastra annual this year. We have a formal meet a VC program.

4:24Once you get your ticket to Sastra annual, you can apply right on the Sastra annual website or in the app, submit your deck, your metrics and others, get all the detail and it will be distributed to every single VC attending and they will be able to reach out to you and set up meetings if you want. This always works. Look, if you're not growing, if you're struggling, you probably aren't going to get any meetings. But if you're in the zone, you will generally find that dozens and dozens of VCs will reach out to you through this program. And we have so many stories of folks getting funded at Sastra Annual and Sastra Europa through it.

4:54Also on May 15th, we have our second annual Founder VC Brunch. It's another great two and a half hour chance in our founder lounge to just meet with all the VCs that are there. It's a great informal way to network and meet with some of the best. So be there. If nothing else, come to the founder VC brunch if you want to meet hundreds of the best VCs in B2B. Okay, point two, why come? Look, this has been true since 2015, but we will have the best speakers in the world. The list will be almost endless by the time we get to kickoff, but already we have the CEOs of Snowflake, the CEO of HubSpot, the CTO and founder of Rubrik, the CEO of Descript that I'm doing this video on and that we run, the CEO of$3 billion Clio and Legal, the CEO and the CRO of Flock Safety, the CEO of Own, who Salesforce just bought for$2 billion, the CRO of Service Titan, the CMO of Databricks, the CCO of Canva, the CCO of Build, the CCO of GitHub, the CCO of Calendly, and I will be doing an AMA.

5:51They're just hundreds and hundreds of sessions. And choose your own adventure. Choose who you want to learn from. And again, they'll go from big, massive sessions with a thousand people at them to hundreds of these brain dates where you literally can do small, tiny sessions with the best practitioners and learn. But the best of the best in cloud, SaaS, and AI will be there. Three, getting funded. And again, listen, you've got to have the numbers to get funded. No one, for better or worse, than VC wants to fund anyone that's not seeing VC levels of growth. But if you are, this is the place to meet VCs.

6:26And not only do we have the Meet a VC program that we just chatted about, not only do we have the founder VC brunch, but this year we have something really cool. We have the VC AI pitch stage. So what this will allow is all day at Saster Annual, we will allow short pitches and demos from the best built AI B2B applications. You can sign up right on the Saster Annual homepage. They're short. They're two-minute pitches, but they'll be in the center of the main hall. They'll be in the center of anything they'll be running. Hundreds of folks will see it. Anyone can pitch on the AI demo stage that has a product in production and revenue.

7:04We don't need any pre-revenue folks. SAS Daniel isn't the place for them in general. But if you're coming anyway, this is not a place to pitch your demo air. If you only have design partners, that's not the right place for this demo stage. But you don't have to be a raw startup. You can be Asana. You can be Salesforce. You can be whomever. If you've got something that you're just releasing in production, want a demo, you just have to have paying customers. Come show us what's cool. Come get in front of everybody at our new AI demo stage. And for the startups, for the ones that have not raised material capital, Mayfield Fund is sponsoring this.

7:37And they will write a check of$500K and maybe even up to$5 million to the number one startup that pitches. We'll grade them. And then on the 15th, there will be a demo off and the winner will get a check from Mayfield Fund for 500K and maybe even up to 5 million, depending on their stage. AI VC demo stage. It's going to be awesome. Sign up on sastranual.com. Point four, and we alluded to this, but number four reason to come to Sastranual, maybe this is the best reason. Meet your next VP. Meet your next VP or CXO. we will have almost over 800 top tier CROs, VPs of sales, CMOs, VPs of marketing, CCOs, VP of customer success, as well as finance leaders all coming to our VIP summits.

8:26And we do these VIP summits for a whole bunch of reasons. They're great. They're core to what we do. But then those C-level executives come to the meetups and the cocktail parties after, and they're all over Sastr. So if you're in the market for a VP of sales, come to our CRO CEO summit. If you're in the market for a head of marketing, come to the meetup after the CMO brunch. Like they're there, they're in the agenda and you will meet hundreds of C-level executives. And I think it's harder and harder to these days to find the right match. There are actually more VP level and above candidates day than ever because cloud has gotten bigger and it's been many years and folks move on.

9:05And so there's more actual candidates than ever, but it's harder and harder to get to know them. You're going to meet them over Zoom. You're going to hire them before barely meeting them. Come to Sastranial and meet them for real. It can be profound. You can find your next management team member at Sastranial. Just come to the events. Come to the networking that we have. You will find them. Okay, five, we briefly hit it, but we've got this AI demo stage. It's new. we'll have maybe 200 folks being able to pitch their AI applications. So if nothing else, honestly, this is worth it. If you want to get your AI app, you're in front of 10 ,000 of the best in B2B, just again, go to sastranial.com and apply for the Sastra AI demo stage.

9:48This alone is probably worth it. Point six reason to come to Sastra Annual. This one's probably in the top two really, which is along with finding an executive, which is bring your team. I honestly think this is the number one highest ROI thing you can do from Saster as founders is don't just come yourself. Don't let just meet founders like you or a stage or two ahead. Don't just find your VP of sales or your VC, all important stuff. But man, we get isolated as teams, especially your team. Even if you as founders are networking all the time, even if you're right in the SF barrier, What about your team?

10:23How many of their peers do they meet? Never enough. And they get isolated and they don't have a sense of what is state of the art and they don't have a sense of whatever anyone else is doing. So goodness, we have these team packs for a reason. They're heavily discounted at sastranial.com. So if you can, don't come yourself, bring two or three people from your team. I almost always hear that. Yeah, it was great for me. I got funded. I hired this person, but I brought three of my executives and it was transformational for us. Um, bring your team, bring your team. Point seven. Look, we'll have a hundred sponsors and vendors.

11:00And in fact, we'll have a brand new this year. We're going to have a whole YC, Y Combinator demo area where 20 of the top recent AI startups from YC are going to be demoing their products. So if you want to meet with the newest startups, if you want to meet with the best sponsors, if you want to meet with the Ripplings and the Artisans and Google cloud and other leaders, IBM, see if IBM's AI is the right source for you. DigitalOcean, so many. You can meet with them. The best of all the leaders in SaaS, one way or another, will be on site to meet with you. So figure out if these vendors are right for you.

11:31Figure out if the best of the best are the right application for you. SaaSter Annual is the place to do it. Number eight, and sometimes this can kick you in the arse a little bit, but SaaSter Annual is the place to be honest and benchmark yourself. Listen, if you are in the SF area and you're going to meetups and you're meeting with other founders that are growing 20 % a week, you probably already have an inferiority complex, as I do, as I think that almost all of us have some of this imposter syndrome inferiority complex. But a lot of folks, once you get outside of the SFB area, they don't know.

12:06They don't know. And some complacency can set in and some misunderstanding. You may even think that things are tougher than they are. Look, it's competitive today. My God, AI has exploded competition. But if for some reason you think you're still in a downturn or something, come to Sastor and you'll see how the best are doing it. Meet with them. Have your arse kicked. We don't want our, we can't have our arses kicked every day, folks. It does. It is tiring, but come be challenged to do even more so you can set the right goals for yourself and know what you really can and cannot pull off. Point nine, just being inspired, just being inspired.

12:49Look, so much has changed at Sastra over the years. When we started doing this, there were no great podcasts. There was no content in the industry. So going to Sastra Annual was like seeing folks we'd never heard before. At our first Sastra Annual, we had Aaron Levy and Stuart Butterfield, founder of Slack, and David Sachs, and no one had ever heard these people before. Now you can just fire up YouTube and you can hear from all of them. There's actually no reason to come to events just to hear anybody talk. We're constantly talking all the time. There's a thousand podcasts today versus zero when we started the first Sastra podcast with Harry Stebbins.

13:22But there's something about talking and interacting with the best. We'll have AMAs. The CEO of Calendly and I are just going to do an AMA. There's no content. We're just going to take questions for an hour. Want to really talk to Tope and understand how it's going? Want to really meet and interact with Yamini, the CEO of HubSpot? This is your time. It is different to be in the real world with folks that inspire you like Topan Yamini and to experience it. You will come out inspired and with a new perspective that you just don't get listening to a podcast on the run. And part 10, again, you will meet hundreds of practitioners.

14:01So if nothing else, come sit in these brain dates for all three years, meet with VPs of sales, VPs of demand gen, VPs of growth, whoever you want in your niche, in your industry, they will be there in small groups. They will be teaching you things you cannot be taught anywhere else and that you cannot learn even on sastra.com, even on the best videos and podcasts, they will sit down and answer your questions and talk to you through hundreds and hundreds of brain dates. It is special. Get actionable strategies. Come to Sastra annual with your top three list of issues, things you're struggling with, sit down and then match it to 10 or 20 or 30 speakers or brain dates or workshops and come with your questions.

14:39Help me, Jason. Help me, Karen. Help me, Kyle. How can I solve this one issue I have in my funnel, the one issue I have with my team? You will meet with folks that can solve your problem. It will be great. Again, May 13th to the 15th, unparalleled networking, unparalleled access to C-level executives, unparalleled access to the best in SaaS and cloud and AI. Grab your tickets now at sasterannual.com. And if you want, use my code Jason100, Jason100 to save$100 before prices go up again. That's Jason100 at sasterannual.com. See you in May, May 13th through 15th in the SF Bay.

15:17Hey, Saster, do you know what would make your customer service help desk dramatically better? Tumping it and switching to intercom. But you're not quite ready to make that change. We get it. That's why FIN, the world's leading AI customer service agent, is now available on every help desk. FIN can instantly resolve up to 80 % of your tickets, which makes customers happier and you get off the customer service rep hiring treadmill. FIN by Intercom, named the number one agent in G2's winner report. Learn more at inter.com slash saster. That's I-N-T-E-R dot com slash saster.