Jason Lemkin

And in order to really have said you've done this, you've got to put in the hours.

I mean, if we look at Jason Lemkin, who runs the SaaStr events, just to hear him speak on any of his podcasts around like quite how much time and effort they put-

Yeah

... into making these things work.

But again, we, we are early in this, right?

Yeah.

And certain people, and like Jason Lemkin is, you know, 12 months ahead of like everybody else, right?

Yeah.

This is 20VC and the only show that you need to listen to every single week.

Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin discussing the biggest news in tech.

This week, well, AGI has arrived according to Jensen Huang.

Next, we have OpenAI releasing GPT Astra.

You have examples both ways.

Yeah.

'Cause you're right, Jason, the, the LinkedIn scraping in the end, n- no business at scale ever gets built on that, and no business at scale ever gets built on breaking Google's terms of service.

On the other hand, Uber blustered their way through, broke the laws, and eventually it was so popular that politicians folded.

If you have a system of record that has some uniqueness and can integrate with agents, and so agents can find it very easy to work with, that is a different world.

But as Jason Lemkin has pointed out, when you look at the difference between, say, a Salesforce system of record with an interface and a Canva, who's not a system of record, but it is like a creative environment that you can connect to, his agents are not going to Canva at all.

And so if you believe that we are entering the agentic world and you have a product that agents either can't connect to or don't need to connect to, if you reverse engineer all the way back to, if you're a pure system of record with a human interface, and relying on humans to continue to use their fingers to get shit done, I think you're in trouble.

Yeah, in case in point for me, we had a subscription to a system of record solution and we ended up building our own out with Chord Code and into hosted in Vercel.

But then there was Saster, which took the whole SaaS field, which is subscription business, and built a podcast around it.

And Jason Lemkin.

Yeah, Jason Lemkin.

We've mentioned him a lot here on the podcast.

And we also did a whole series called Foundations about this whole SaaS business model.

But Marc had this bigger vision, and he said, "We're going after Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft." We didn't have the product set to go after those competitors, but he was such an incredible marketer that he created this perception in the industry that some of the largest companies in the world could adopt this technology, and that we would deliver on a roadmap that would satisfy the requirements over time, and he did.

You said the word roadmap multiple times in different contexts there, but I do a show every week with Jason Lemkin and Maria Driscoll.

It's very successful and popular, which is fun, but Jason said last week that if you are not well into your 2027 roadmap already, you are behind.

Are you seeing dev acceleration because of AI tooling, and how do you measure actual ROI internally when attribution is really difficult?

That's where I was testing this idea.

that I got from one of Jason Lemkin's posts.

And now actually, as I record this podcast, I'm having Replit code this feature within my app at softwaremetrics.ai.

So it can be a repeatable process that you can run it after you close the month.

On the topic of the top of Canva's funnel, this is something that Bronwyn wrote about as well, which was something that was brought up by the investors behind the 20VC podcast, which is very popular in the startup and VC ecosystem, and they were basically debating how much Canva is likely to actually be valued at right now.

Jason Lemkin threw out the evaluation of twelve billion dollars, so pretty low, and his view was essentially that in the agentic era, a lot of Canva's use cases are becoming obsolete.

I'm curious to know, what do you make of that assessment? Like, do you reckon that's really too low, or do you think that there's a point there?

Well, it comes back to, yeah, again, the public market multiples.

Just as Canva's $42 billion valuation is being openly questioned by influential investors abroad, major backer Blackbird and Airtree have marked down their holdings by 17%.

What Bronwyn's referring to is 20 VC, the last episode with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll.

They were looking at a range of companies, but it had just been after Canva had written down their growth forecast from 30 down to 20%.

And Jason threw out there that, you know, in the current market with that decelerating growth rate, it's not 42 billion anymore.

That was the highest price they obviously could have gotten.

And so Blackbird has written it down from $42 billion down to $34 billion, which is still, what, three times higher than the assessment on 20VC.

I think one of the key points that Jason Lemkin pointed out, and he did so in a follow-up post, is that they, you know, SASTR is like the leading edge of this AI agentic world.

And what he was pointing out is that not only have they cancelled their Canva subscriptions, which a lot of people are doing, all of their agents, not one of them has recommended using the Canva API for that work.